Discovering Risk: Social Research and Policy Making

By

Bessant, J., Hil, R., Watts, R., 2005,

Peter Lang, N.Y

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...............................vii

Introduction...................................1

Chapter OneThe Discovery of Risk and the Governmental

Project .........................7

Chapter TwoAt Risk of Unemployment ......................29

Chapter ThreeRisk and Homelessness: An Empirical Problem?..53

Chapter FourCrime and the Science of Risk.................70

Chapter FiveRisk and Crime Control: The British Experience95

Chapter SixGovernance of Social Problems and Problem Populations

...............................114

Conclusion...................................146

Bibliography.................................128

Index ....................................... 147

VI

Acknowledgments

We would especially like to thank Sharon Andrewsfor her support in getting the text ready forpublication. There are many other people withoutwhom this book could not have been writtenincluding our students upon whom we relied totest some of the ideas and formulations found inthis book. We also acknowledge the support ofcolleagues and friends who over the years haveargued with us and offered valuable feedback onour analysis of risk-based research, policy andthinking.

Although Australian universities are now notcurrently ideal places for the nurturing ofresearch, we are appreciative of theopportunities that are offered to supportscholarship and research. In that regard we thankthe Australian Catholic University in Melbournefor providing Judith Bessant with a semester’ssabbatical, and the School of Social Science andPlanning at the Royal Melbourne Institute ofTechnology University which helped Rob Watts withsix months of research leave in 2001. TheUniversity of Southern Cross likewise gaveinvaluable support to Richard Hil when he muchneeded it.

Introduction0

Introduction

In the 1980s, and extending into the firstdecade of the twenty-first century, two wordshave become, if not obligatory, then certainlywidely-used parts of the social sciencevocabulary. One word—‘globalisation’—is used inalmost magical fashion so that merely to invokeit, renders any social or economic problemimmediately explicable and obviates the need forany clarification. The other word, ‘risk’, isalso used to conjure up a sense that our eraseems to throw up all kinds of novel problemsfor individuals.

Australia, in common with many othercountries, is going through a painful process ofrestructuring. Much of the explanation for therestructuring process has been undertaken interms of ‘globalisation’.i For example onepolitician-commentator, Mark Latham (1998)claims ‘globalisation’ has re-fashioned thesocial, political and economic landscape.‘Globalisation’, he says (1998), has eroded thetraditional barriers and policy practices of thenation-state. and that politicians everywhereare ‘struggling to establish the new tools ofnational economic sovereignty’.ii Latham’saccount, like so much of this analysis, isdeterminist.iii Bob Catley epitomises this when hewrites, ‘I came to the conclusion that [these]kinds of structural changes…were inevitable’(1996: ix). The determinist logic of his (1998:4) argument is simple:

Globalisation looms large over the future prospectsof social democracy. Economic and socialrestructuring, not surprisingly has produced elementsof political restructuring.

Introduction

He reiterates the point:

The restructuring of the world economic order is an event rarein history, especially given the scale of globalisation inrecent decades. Economic restructuring inevitably gives rise tonew social and political tensions (1998: 9).

While many politicians conveniently blame anirresistible force deemed to be out of theircontrol, a case can be made that much of therestructuring process was a political processdriven by governments and policy communities whochose to pursue these kinds of policies (Watts2000). Governments, not globalisation, reducedtaxation, cut public expenditures andinfrastructure investment as they ‘privatised’,‘downsized’ and ‘out-sourced’ their activities.‘Globalisation’ has been linked to talk aboutrisk and the increasing evidence of socialpolarisation.

Risk talk works differently. Although it isfar from being an exclusive preoccupation, aconsiderable part of the anxiety about‘globalisation’ and increasing unemployment andpoverty is expressed in terms of a fear that‘crime’ or ‘serious crime’, violence or drug useis now at epidemic levels or is out of control.Both popular media discussion and most socialscientific research now accept that ‘poverty’and ‘social inequality’ are on the increase(Fincher & Nieuwenhuysen 1998). Opinion-makerstalk about the emergence of a ‘seventy/thirtysociety’ and the growth of an ‘underclass’, aclass of permanently unemployed, drug-abusing,homeless, sexually-promiscuous, criminally-inclined, anti-social populations in theblighted outer suburbs of our cities. This ideais closely linked to allegations from what might

2

Introduction

be called a ‘conservative’ perspective that the‘welfare state’ is creating a ‘welfare dependentculture’.

Though our sympathies lie with theprogressives in terms of our preference for moresocial investment by governments and better,more inclusive social programs, we are notinclined to simply assume that either themeaning or the veracity of these claims about‘homelessness’, ‘unemployment rates ‘ or ‘crimerates or the tendencies to create ghettoes ofthe poor or the dispossessed are self-evidentlytrue. That is, it is simply naive to think thatthese beliefs or fears simply reflect the‘facts’.iv Our concern here however is not toenter into debate about these issues. Rather ourinterest is in the way ‘risk talk’ has helped torevive older discourses about ‘deviance’ and

i

Notes? See eg., Robertson 1985; Bureau of Industry Economics 1989; Robertson 1992; Harris, 1993; Lloyd 1995, and Waters 1997.ii This leads in an unfortunate way to some hyperbolic claims like Mark Latham’s (1998) claim that ‘the dichotomy constructed last century between labour and capital has gradually lost its pertinence through…this century’, a claimbased on his technological-determinist views about the rise of the information age. iii See eg., Emy 1993; Castles, Gerritsen & Vowles 1996; Catley 1996, Latham 1998; and Tanner 1999.

3

Introduction

‘social pathology’ and how this sustainsgovernmental projects.

Talk about risk has been rendered ‘normal’ andpart of the contemporary common sense in socialscience disciplines including social work,sociology, the health sciences, psychology,criminology and youth work. Talk of risk hasalso percolated into the human serviceprofessions working directly with individuals,families and neighbourhoods. In these agenciesthe talk is of ‘risk indicators’, ‘riskreduction’ and ‘risk management’. Indeed, onewould find it difficult these days to find agovernment agency or community sectororganisation working in ‘human services’ thatdoes not accept the concept of risk in theirdaily operations. Nor is it surprising that arelatively difficult book by the German socialtheorist Ulrich Beck, called Risk Society (1992)should have become a best-seller.

How should we understand this idea of ‘risk’,or the idea that there are people or populationgroups who are ‘at risk’? Should risk beunderstood simply as a consequence of empiricaldiscovery made by social scientists trained in‘objective’ scientific methodology? How new isthis research and the discourses of risk itdepends upon? Should risk-based approaches, forexample with social policy or crime control, beviewed as ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’interventions in the policy/practice field? Whatare some of the consequences of this way ofthinking about social problems like unemploymentor crime?

In this book we argue that governments,policy-makers and the community at large need tothink more deeply about a range of problemswhich have been sitting on the horizon of public

4

Introduction

anxiety for some time, and which are nowthoroughly wrapped up in talk about risk. Due tothe dominant role played by an empiricistresearch program in social sciences (withsociology, criminology and economics) in both‘discovering’ problems and informing communitydebate, and with media reporting and policyresponses, we need to think with and againstsome of the conventional ways the socialsciences have constructed the kinds of problemswe wish to discuss. In doing this we relyheavily, though not uncritically, on some of thework developed by writers like Rose (1989) andDean and Hindess (1998) in a dialogue with theFrench writer Michel Foucault about the theme of‘government’.

In this book we examine how the concept of‘risk’ has informed some recent research andpolicy formulation regarding problems affectingyoung people. We use the idea of ‘government’ todo this and explore the ways the category ofrisk has been used to ‘redefine’ policyresponses to certain social problems in relationto the way various groups including socialscientists, politicians and policy-makers, andlaw enforcement agencies think aboutunemployment, crime and homelessness. To do thiswe consider closely a number of importantresearch projects including:

Australian research on youth unemployment; Australian and Canadian research on youthhomelessness Australian and British research on juvenilecrime and crime prevention;

The studies we examine here are importantexamples of the risk-based discourse thatunderpins contemporary thinking about

5

Introduction

preventative strategies related to youthproblems such as youth homelessness,unemployment and juvenile crime. Yet theemergence of a risk-based, developmentalapproach to social problems has not attractedthe kind of critical attention it deserves.

We argue that the discovery and research of‘at risk’ populations is part of a long-runningsocial science project of ‘government’ in whichexperts and agencies explore ways of identifyingand managing problem populations or even‘preventing’ certain ‘problem’ activity. Wesuggest that this governmental project has beenclosely linked to the evolution of a‘scientific’ body of criminological andsociological research and theory, which forsimplifying purposes we can refer to as‘conventional’ social science (re sociologistsand criminologists).v Focusing on governmentalityhelps to gently undo the powerful symmetry longestablished between the conventional empiricistand broad-church positivist social scienceresearch program and the no-less conventionalunderstandings of policy-making processes. (Thisunderstanding is expressed eg., in the‘rational’ (May & Wildavsky 1978) and the‘incremental’ (Lindblom 1959) models of policy,which complacently assume that policy-makingoccurs in response to the ‘discovery’ of ‘realproblems’).

Conventional social scientists are concernedwith ‘discovering’, and measuring the incidenceof given social problems like unemployment,crime or homelessness and then ‘explaining’ whysome people are at risk of falling into thesestates. This has been done by recourse to a widevariety of causal variables. Much conventionalsocial science assumes that ‘crime’, the ‘crime

6

Introduction

rate’, or ‘unemployment’ are objective facts,and these phenomena are types of behaviour orpatterned social activities determined by amixture of biological, psychological andsociological factors. Conventional socialscientists tend to assume that it is possibleusing models of proper ie., epistemologicallyguaranteed ‘scientific method’, to discover the‘causes’ of the ‘crime rate’ or the risk factorswhich predispose certain people to experiencecertain problems.

Much of the new discourse of risk builds onthe canons of conventional social scienceresearch methods, while taking advantage of therecent recruitment of economic liberal valuesand ideas which are signified by the return ofeconomic analysis and policy prescription inpublic policy-making. That is, while ‘risk’ hassupplanted older categories like ‘delinquency’,‘social pathology’, the ‘criminal personality’or ‘maladjustment’ ideas that were foundationalto criminology or to the sociology of deviance,the methodologies, assumptions and politics ofgovernance inherent in the older project ofgovernment remains the same.

In this way the evolution of risk talk simplyperpetuates established ideas about criminalitybeing the kind of behaviour in which the ‘thepoor’, ‘the unemployed and ‘the underclass’engage. The ‘science of risk’ to a large degree,continues the argument that crime is synonymouswith, or caused by, ‘working-class people’ orrogue elements of the ‘underclass’. Recent andpraised studies of Canadian ‘street kids’ likeHagan and McCarthy’s (1997) work and theAustralian work of Chamberlain and McKenzie(1998) stand in a long line of conventionalsociology.

7

Introduction

Although risk-based discourses have becomepopular among politicians and policy makers inrecent years, the assumptions, ideas,methodologies and politics underpinning them arefar from new. The assumptions underpinning themodern risk discourse originate in some of thevery earliest attempts by conventionalsociologists and criminologists to identify andmeasure the ‘causes’ of a range of socialproblems like unemployment, broken families‘illicit’ drug use and crime.

At another level however risk-based approachesare part of newer kinds of governmental policiesinvolving renewed attempts to control andregulate whole sections of the population,especially of young people who are potentiallyat risk of contributing to the ‘crime problem’and ‘the youth problem’.

In Chapter One we begin by discussing why adiscourse and a ‘science of risk’ have emergedrecently, before outlining how we propose to usethe category of government.

8

7

Chapter One: The Discovery ofRisk

and the Governmental Project

We must remember that, however much society may have changed forthe better, the lowest stratum of all has not changed, and thatlawlessness, cupidity and ruffianism are just as rife in it now as theywere in the days of Sir Robert Walpole…We see by what a very thin andprecarious partition after all we are divided from the elements ofviolence which underlie all civilised societies.

(Blackwood Magazine, 1893)

Talk about risk has become increasingly centralto much human service intervention and also toassociated social science disciplines, includingsociology, psychology, criminology, youth workand social work.vi Many social scientists nowspend their time measuring the levels of socialand personal risk which is indicated by poverty,disadvantage, unemployment, low income, poorhealth and housing, bad schooling, familydysfunction, personality deficit and so forth.It has also figured prominently in the policiesand practices of many education and training‘industries’.vii

In social science disciplines the idea of riskin relationship to issues like unemployment,homelessness or the ‘crime rate’ is coming closeto achieving commonsense status. That statusnotwithstanding, questions need to be asked. Howshould we think about this idea of ‘risk’? Howshould we think about the claim that there arepeople or population groups who are ‘at risk’?Should risk be understood simply as aconsequence of empirical discovery by socialscientists trained in ‘objective’ scientific

methodology? How new is this research and thediscourse of risk it depends upon? What are someof the consequences of this way of thinkingabout social problems like unemployment andcrime? How should we relate this idea of risk tostate-sponsored policy processes?

Firstly however we ask what is the risk talkabout and why did talk about risk begin tosurface in the 1980s and 1990s?

Risk

For centuries the idea of risk was thepreserve of gamblers. (The word ‘risk’ comesfrom the Renaissance Italian risicare, meaning ‘todare’). From the eighteenth to the twentiethcenturies, first actuaries associated with theinsurance industry, and more recently emergencyservices have made the concept of ‘risk’ centralto their professional calculations orinterventions. It has even entered into theupper echelons of social theory.

Quite recently what we call ‘Risk I’ (todistinguish it from ‘Risk II’) has become acentral metaphor used by contemporary socialtheorists to discuss the regulation of humanaffairs in ‘late modernity’ (Beck 1992;Bernstein 1996; Kelly 1998; Lupton 1999).

In effect, the talk about ‘risk’ islegitimated by the use of yet another idea ie.,‘Risk Society’ which sociologists andjournalists especially seem to takeexceptionally seriously. The fact that some ofthe leading social theorists of our time are nowpreoccupied with the category of ‘Risk I’, meantto define the leading quality of an entiresocial order, ie. ‘Risk Society’. ‘Risk II’ onthe other hand belongs to a set of expert

technologies designed to calculate the threat topersonal development, social adjustment orsocial order posed by specific risk factors.Since we are mostly interested in Risk II wewill not make much reference to the distinctionafter the next few pages.

‘Risk Society’

Given the extraordinary importance attached to‘social theory’—not least of all by itspractitioners—it is perhaps not surprising thatthe idea of risk has segued out onto a broaderintellectual and cultural stage. For this UlrichBeck has something to answer for.

Beck’s work (1992, 1998) contributes to one ofthe central themes of contemporary social theoryand builds on a persistent interest amongsociologists and theorists about how best tocharacterise societal development. Since AugustComte, social theorists have been curious abouthow to define and describe the evolution of‘modern society’ (ie, ‘modernity’, ‘capitalism’,‘industrial society’, etc). Beck coined the ideaof the ‘risk society’ and thereby made his markon this tradition. By ‘risk’, Beck (1992) meantsimply to suggest the kinds of anxiety oruncertainty posed by environmental catastrophe,the threat of nuclear war or epidemic diseaseslike AIDS. The notion of ‘risk society’ alsocontributed to longstanding debates entered intoby social theorists about how to identify theshift from ‘modernity (or ‘industrial society’or…) to a ‘post modern’ (or ‘post-industrialcondition’ or…).

Beck (1992, 1998) and others, like Giddens(1990), and (Beck, Giddens & Lash 1993) explainwhat is now happening by claiming it is part of

a transition from one type of society(‘classical’, ‘modern’ or ‘industrial’ society)to another (‘risk society’, or ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-modern’ society). Accordingto Beck, modern societies are in transition frombeing a ‘class society’ to a ‘risk society’.This he says means that modern societies are nowpassing from being ‘class-based’ and concernedto distribute ‘socially produced wealth andrelated conflicts’ (1992:20) to becoming ‘risk-producing societies’ where people have toaddress the consequences of excessive productionlike environmental hazards. This however is notall that can be said. The transition alsoinvolves, says Beck, (1998: 9) the claim that:‘Society has become a laboratory where there isnobody in charge’. (This might be news togovernments, the armed forces or somecorporations, but we should never hold up asocial theorist when they are in full flight bycalling attention to too much reality).

For Beck, a defining feature of our phase ofmodernity (what he calls ‘radicalisedmodernity’) is that our society now produces arange of hazards and risks for which no-one isactually responsible, and for which there arefrequently no apparent explanations.

Within industrial society risks were producedlocally and there were appropriate respondents(ie, the welfare state) which acceptedresponsibility for locally produced risks anddangers and which accepted collectiveresponsibility through statutory protection andcompensation for accidents, illness orunemployment. Although Beck (1998: 17) focuseson the manufacture of ecological hazards, heindicates that the same mechanisms that produceecological hazards are also producing ‘the

disintegration of nuclear families, stablelabour markets segregated gender roles, [and]social classes.

These he identifies as the spread of newtechnologies, globalisation and themarketisation of once public services. As heemphasises, these factors mean that nobody is incontrol, nobody is responsible. In other words,‘Risk becomes another word for ‘nobodyknows’(Beck 1998: 12). What is left isrecognition of the reality and the emotionsinvolved in dealing with the new forms of‘organised irresponsibility’ through the use ofthe old schemes. According to Beck (1998: 16):

…the modes of determining and perceiving risk,attributing causality and allocating compensationhave irreversibly broken down, throwing the functionof bureaucracies, states, economies and science intoquestion. Risks that were calculable underindustrial society become incalculable andunpredictable in risk society.

As Beck argues, we confront a basic problem inour time. This problem has to do with the factthat most people operate with the belief thatthey can indeed interpret and explain what ishappening by using traditional or ‘industrial’modes of understanding and categories whichassume some institutional or socialresponsibility, when these categories andexpectations have actually been renderedirrelevant.

The transition out of a modern industrialsociety involves the rise of an increasinglyindividualised society which can be seen in thedemise of old institutions and the loss of thetraditional institutions socialising power. AsBeck explains:

Risk society begins where tradition ends, when, inall spheres of life, we can no longer taketraditional certainties for granted. The less we canrely on traditional securities, the more risk wehave to negotiate …There is an important line ofargument which connects the theory of risk society,in this context to the processes ofindividualisation in spheres of work, family lifeand self-identity…(Beck 1998: 10)

According to Beck, the transition occurs inphases. In the first phase of the ‘risksociety’, Beck argues that society continuesmaking ‘decisions and acts on the pattern ofsimple modernity’ (Beck 1998: 17). For Beck,‘risk society’ is characterised by an increasingdependency on the individual along with a newsocial commitment to life-styles and marketmechanisms. Market competitive mechanisms ratherthan traditional ties are said to create greaterrisk as well as new modes of social integration.This shift in conditions of integration inconjunction with other changes like the collapseof the youth labour market and generalunemployment is of major significance to‘youth’. Amongst other things, this involveschanging modes of integration where thecompetitive mechanisms of the market areincreasingly determining the patterns and therules of social life rather than the traditionalties (like class, clan, family) (Beck 1992).

Ours is a time when some people question thepromises of Enlightenment. Many are preoccupiedwith what they see as the apparent‘irreversible’ and ‘unstoppable’ dynamics ofglobalisation. Beck appears to give aid andcomfort to this sense of fashionable pessimismthat is now associated by what some socialtheorists call ‘late modernity’. Beck’s (1992)

intervention bears hardly any connection to orwith the avalanche of empirical social researchwhich uses the idea of risk in an entirelydifferent way. But in at least in one way thereception accorded to his idea of ‘risk society’might suggest something of the larger context of‘elective affinities’ that are at work.

In a general way, Beck’s work might be linkedto the widespread loss of optimism and hopewhich Habermas pointed to, when discussing the‘exhaustion of utopian possibilities’ in the1980s following the collapse of Marxism as atheoretical project and the subsequent collapseof European communist states. Psychologists likeTversky (1990: 75) concur, suggesting that thephenomenology of risk is coloured by pessimism:when people now take a risky decision inbusiness or in other life-shaping decisions:

There are a few things that would make you feelbetter, but the number of things that would make youfeel worse is unbounded.

As Sennett (1999: 81) also notes now:

…risk taking is something other than the sunnyreckoning of the possibilities contained in thepresent. The mathematics of risk offers noassurances…

Risk now embodies an anxiety that social orderand personal well being alike are under threat.Van Swaaningen (1997: 174) for example arguesthat the rise of a ‘risk society’ discourseindicates:

…society [is] no longer oriented towards positiveideals but towards the negative ideal of limitingrisk. Solidarity is no longer based on a positive

feeling of connectedness but is expressed in anegative communality of fear.

We could ask when was ‘society’ ever orientedto ‘positive ideals—one where ‘solidarity restedon a positive feeling of connectedness’; VanSwaaningen’s is a fantasy which may belong moreto certain sociological discourses that identify‘society’ with a unitary ‘moral order’ than toany actually-existing historical society.Holloway and Jefferson (1997: 265) may be closerto the mark when they observe:

In an age of uncertainty, discourses that appear topromise a resolution to ambivalence by providingidentifiable victims and blameable villains, arelikely to figure prominently in the State’sconcerted attempts to impose social order.

We want to move on to consider the second wayrisk talk has come into prominence. This is the‘Risk II’ category which is used in anapparently ‘narrower’ and far more ‘empirical’way in applied social research on socialproblems, young people and policy making.

Risk factors and social problems What we call ‘Risk II’ talk is the sort of

talk which journalists like to use in headlines:‘Dramatic new evidence that divorce increasesthe risk of ‘teen suicide’. Framing the problemof ‘risk’ in this way produces the figure of‘youth at risk’. Talking in these ways leads toother talk about the ‘risk factors’. Riskfactors such as family status, heredity, socio-economic circumstance, psychologicaldisposition, are said to ‘cause’ the problemwhich might include conventionally defined risks

such as‘crime’, suicide, ‘delinquency’,unemployment, drug use, sexual activity,violence, school-based activities, gangmembership, computer hacking and graffiti and soon.

It is no exaggeration to say that this hasbecome a dominant way of thinking about andresearching contemporary social problems. Whenit is applied to young people, risk talk, hasdisplaced the older talk about ‘delinquency’.Peter Kelly (1998: 26) eg., reports that 2500articles and conference papers alone have beenwritten on the issue of ‘youth at risk’ in theUSA since 1989. Batten and Russell (1995) surveya parallel quantity of Australian risk research.Not surprisingly, this kind of talk has foundits way into various policy fields. For example,it underpinned much of the Finn Report (Tait1995), which examined the post-compulsoryeducation and training from the perspective ofemployability (See also (Bessant 1988; Marginson1997: 175). As Kelly (1998: 33) notes:

The discourse of youth-at-risk mobilises a form ofprobabilistic thinking, about certain preferred orideal Adult futures, and the present behaviours anddispositions of Youth. This sort of probabilisticthinking attempts to construct statistically valid,causal relationships between these differentconfigurations…

Although this is to anticipate our argument,we will argue that this talk about ‘risk’ andthe way it sanctions the use of numbers toconvey an impression of precision, objectivityand credibility, is at best highly ambiguous,and at worst highly problematic. Whatever ismeant by ‘risk’, it, like so many forms ofaction or emotion, does NOT have any obviousempirical qualities.

It is in fact very much a quality produced ormanufactured by calculation and measurement.(Whether the measurements or calculations areabout unambiguously ‘real things’ (like chairs,dogs or mountains) or metric entities conjuredup by the researcher by means of what is called‘operationalisation’ is another questionentirely. As Douglas (1974: 30) explains:

How much risk [there is] is a matter for theexperts, but it is taken for granted that the matteris ascertainable. Anyone who insists there is a highdegree of uncertainty is taken to be opting out ofaccountability.

As Douglas (1974: 42) observes, the concept ofrisk endeavours ‘to turn uncertainties intopossibilities’. The calibration of risktherefore becomes a professional activityconducted by accredited experts in the ‘waragainst chaos’ in the continuing ‘battle fororder’ (Bauman 1991: 11). Risk talk suggeststhat social problems have an objective, value-free status and encourages the no less naive yetseductive and dangerous idea that technicalfixes can be developed by experts to ‘treat’ anyhuman ailment or social condition.

‘Risk talk’ has arisen recently because thephenomena it refers to are ‘actually’ there.Contrary to this naive suggestion we wouldrather suggest that there are complex social andintellectual processes at work that enable someideas to fill up the discursive space available.

Risk and historical decline?

Historians like Pearson (1983) have shown howeach generation believes itself uniquelythreatened by the signs and symptoms of

degeneration often signified by concerns aboutcriminals, rising crime rates, and the threat of‘hooligans’. Should we see the present talk ofrisk and young people as simply the latestexpression of a long tradition of fear andanxiety, a tendency that is somehow wired intohistory? We do not believe this is aparticularly helpful approach.

For example, it could be argued that thecontemporary emphasis on risk indicates that ourlives, either personally or collectively, arenow either less secure or less oriented tohopeful outlooks than at any other point inhistory? It may be, however, difficult if notimpossible to establish a rational basis forevaluating this. (Historians like Herman (1997)point out that cultural pessimism is far frombeing a condition unique to western societies atthe end of the twentieth century; after allAthenians (in the sixth century BC) had theircomplex tales of decline from a Golden Age).There is little point trying to establish that arational basis for whether such a belief does ordoes not exist. As W. I. Thomas noted at the endof the 1920s, however real they are {or not},ideas are real in their consequences. There arenow sufficient numbers of people talking aboutrisk to make these ideas consequential.

We cannot however draw too many conclusionsfrom the fact that cultural pessimism has a longhistory. Pick (1993: 18) argues that insistingon the ways adults have groaned about youngpeople’s ‘wicked ways since Socrates complainedabout Athenian youth can produce a paradox:

On the one hand it alerts us to the relativity ofsuch absolute claims and discloses their place in amuch longer series of commentaries. On the otherhand it too easily suppresses historical difference

by petrifying discourses into apparently unchangingage-old mythologies-hooligans, bread and circuses,degeneration.

Pick (1993: 18) continues:

…when studied closely within historical limits,important and revealing differences do emerge in themeaning of seemingly homogenous and timelessconcepts.

There may be more than a coincidence operatingin the fact that the modern talk of risk hasemerged at a time when both Australian publicpolicy and ‘public culture’ (informed andsustained by the mass media), has beenpowerfully reshaped by a resurgence of liberalindividualism. Without reducing the emergence oftalk about risk to a simple expression ofresurgent liberalism it seems there are someelective affinities between the two. Resurgentliberalism takes its form variously in a near-hegemonic policy discourse grounded in neo-classical economics, preoccupied with individualchoices and freedoms and intent on re-workingactivities in the public sector via market-basedactivities and metaphors.

Promotion of a Third Way politics withinAustralian and British Labour parties (Latham1999; Scott 2000) also takes its cue fromattempts by Sen (1992) to rework a traditionalsocial-democratic interest in equality byemphasising individual ‘social capabilities’.The actuarial tendencies of economic liberalismwhich equate rationality with calculation areparalleled in social scientific research whichcalibrate risk factors and which claim topredict the degree to which a particular kind ofperson is ‘at risk’.

The risk discourse displays a powerful elective-affinity with:

the renewal of an entrepreneurial culturewhere risk-taking has many positiveassociations. Since the 1980s, businesstakeovers, the amassing of vast fortunes andthe rise of new business heroes in the BillGates mould have all received sustainedattention in the popular culture of westernsocieties. Equally yet paradoxically, therisk discourse is also sustained bypersistent public concern about‘globalisation’ and the social and economicconsequences of unrestrained market forces,where a discourse of ‘risk’ generates a newlexicon for representing old problems likepoverty, crime, unemployment andhomelessness.

The discourse of risk offers governments ingeneral, and the apparatus of criminaljustice administration in particular, theopportunity to revitalise older practices ofgovernment (in the Foucauldian sense) whichtake advantage of the resurgence of economicliberalism and its individualism to promotenew styles of policy.

Finally, and within this larger setting, riskdiscourse offers social sciences likemodernist criminology the opportunity torevitalise its longstanding commitment to an‘empiricist’ social research tradition.viii

This is achieved partly by identifying thevarious ‘causes of crime’ that render someindividuals and social groups as more ‘at risk’than others. The next step is to engage theexperts so that the differential risk factors

can be isolated and ameliorative measures put inplace. It is in this way that talk of risk istied to contemporary ‘governmental’ projects.

The idea of government

While the older sociology of deviance presumedthe existence of a stable social and moral ordercalled ‘society’, the science of risk assumesthe normality of restructuring, change and the‘death of the nation-state’ in the wake ofglobalisation. Framing a macro-sociology of‘late modernity’ poses challenges for those witha traditional interest in the government ofsocial problems like crime. Yet as Beck (1992)argues, at the least, a discourse of risk holdsout the prospect that within an era ofglobalisation, people or states can still try tomanage the multiplicity of risks they nowconfront (see also Beck 1999).

In this way as Mitchell Dean (1999: 131)insists, the idea of ‘risk’ is central to‘government’:

There is no such thing as risk in reality. Risk is away—or rather a set of different ways– of orderingreality, of rendering it into a calculable form. Itis a way of representing events so they might bemade governable…It is a component of diverse formsof calculative rationality for governing the conductof individuals, collectivities and populations.

While we think this is quite accurate as acharacterisation, Dean is open to the criticismof allowing us to form the impression that thekind of risk talk we are interested in has beenaround for along time, when this is not thecase. There is still the question of history:why have these particular kinds of ways of

talking about social problems emerged at thistime? The ‘sociology of risk’ becomes a new wayof framing old problems while reinvigorating oldprojects of governance. It is in this way that along-standing governmentality project has beenable to take on fresh life via the ‘science ofrisk’.

Since the late 1970s, the work of MichelFoucault (1991) has helped shape new ways ofthinking about the discovery of social problemsand the development of public policy. Ratherthan assuming that social problems like ‘crime’,‘homelessness’ or ‘unemployment’ have a self-evident facticity, or that their discovery issimply the automatic response of ‘society’ tothreats to ‘its’ social control functions, orthat their discovery represents the ideologicaleffect of some social-structural interest(exercised by the middle-class or by thepatriarchal power of men), Foucault suggeststhat we discover what kinds of experts areinvolved in the construction of problems and thepeople who are problems. In this way Foucaultsponsored an approach to research andscholarship around the ideas of ‘government’ and‘governmentality’.ix For our discussion though,what do these words mean?

Although there is a lot of animated discussionabout how best to characterise the idea of‘government’ people who do so, argue that in ourkind of society there is a longstanding andcontinuing attempt to regulate the conduct ofthe whole population (or parts of thepopulation) by some of the people who make upthat population (Rose 1994). The idea of‘government’ as developed by Foucault and thoseix See variously Hacking 1986; Rose 1989; Burchell Gordon and Miller 1991; Watts 1993/4; Dean & Hindess 1998.

influenced by his work is not just about what‘states’ or governments do. As Dean and Hindess(1998: 2-3) have also noted, the idea ofgovernment is not just about what the state doesor the political party institutions do. Whilethe idea of government can refer to what theBlair or the Howard governments do, it alsoaddresses every kind of attempt to govern theconduct of other people. ‘Government’ is theregulation by some people of other people’sbehaviour people. As Dean and Hindess (1998: 2-3) say, ‘government is the conduct of conduct’:

In its most general sense, government is the conductof conduct, where [this] refers to the manner inwhich individuals, groups and organisations managetheir own behaviour. The conduct to be governed maybe one’s own or that of others: of the members of ahousehold or of larger collectivities such as thepopulation of a local community or a state. Thegovernment of a state may be conducted by agenciesof the state…known collectively as the government…but it may also involve agencies of other kinds.

Some of this relates to what ‘the state’ or‘the government’ does through its laws, itsarmies, police, courts and judges. Much of itrelates to the daily work of parents, religiouspeople, social workers, teachers, doctors,advertising people, and journalists. Somegovernmentality is about ‘law and order’ andmuch of it relates to books, films, newspaperarticles, or professional advice offering avariety of information and ‘rules’ for doingeverything from dieting, exercising, having sex,building self-esteem or acquiring a vocationalskill, to choosing a holiday destination,raising children or grieving properly. Somegovernmentality targets special populations like‘the poor’, ‘young people’ or ‘the criminal

class’ and some of it is almost universal in itsscope.

Government, in short, refers to a looseamalgam of objectives (like crime control orcrime prevention), techniques of socialinvestigation (like empirical social scientificsurveys or census taking ), and an array ofpolicies, institutions and practices directed tothe constant care, control and ‘betterment’ ofproblem populations or of the entire population(like compulsory schooling or compulsory X-raysfor disease-control.

In a related way, the idea of‘governmentality’ can be used to refer to theknowledges and habits of thought that permitpeople to govern others or even themselves(Watts 1993/4). Minson (1993: 60) for exampleargues that governmentality:

…signifies a general form of organised reasoning,embracing practical ways of posing and addressingsocial and economic problems.

As Foucault argued, the social sciences anddisciplines like psychology, sociology,criminology and economics played a key role inhelping to inform a wide range of governmentalprojects.

This is especially pertinent given the kindsof tasks involved in the larger project ofgovernment. As Dean and Hindess (1998) pointout, government involves at least four kinds ofdistinctive activity oriented to the ‘conduct ofconduct’.

They include firstly the study ofproblematisations, which asks how the activityof governing establishes the attributes of thosewho govern and/or of those who are beinggoverned and the qualities of the problem being

identified. Secondly, the study of governmentasks questions about the social or institutionalsite of the problematisation process. Thirdly,the study of government does not assume thatproblems exist in themselves, but rather must beconstituted through particular forms ofreasoning. Finally, the study of modes ofgovernment identifies the formation and shapingof the identities, capacities and statuses ofmembers of the population—in this case of youngpeople. (We discuss these processes at length inChapter Four).

In the twentieth century, criminology, alongwith the other social sciences, played a centralrole in various governmental projects, includingthose emanating from modern state-basedagencies, as well as those coming from othersocial sectors like community organisations,business companies, churches, the media andadvertising industries and a range of humanservice professionals. The risk category andrisk analysis has become central to socialresearch, theory and policy making in Australiaand in many other ‘Western’ countries. ‘Youth atrisk’ appears to now enjoy a commonsense statusin the many western policy communities. Over thenext chapters we explore three instances inwhich the idea of risk has come to take on acentral significance. In the next chapter welook at the way modern social science approachesthe problem of unemployment and how it frames itin terms of ‘risk’

Government and risk: thinking about socialproblems

The interest in ‘governmentality’ and its rolein developing ‘policy’ is still new and under-

developed in Australia notwithstanding forexample the work of Hunter (1988), Slee & Knight(1992), Dean (1994) and Dean and Hindess (1998).Perhaps this is why the category of risk is yetto be properly appreciated or treated within thegovernmentality literature.

However, given that we are writing primarilyfor people who are more likely to be interestedin the question of crime, homelessness andunemployment and less likely to be interested inthe issues dealt with by the governmentalitytradition, we will not spend much time exploringit in the abstract. We will however use some ofthe key ideas associated with the idea thatsocial problems like homelessness, unemploymentand crime are connected to issues of‘government’ to develop our arguments about howwe should think about social problems andpolicies.

Establishing how the conduct of conduct ispossible is the central concern of a growingbody of research and theory that shelters underthe umbrella of ‘government studies’. Thoseengaged in this field of study do not seek tocontribute to the (naive) analysis of thereality of for example,‘youth crime’ which more‘empirically’ oriented researchers seek toundertake. In this chapter we critically reviewthe role played by ‘risk’ in recent modernistcriminological research projects oriented todeveloping new modes of governing juvenilecrime. The study of government addresses threeinterrelated processes (Dean & Hindess 1998: 8-13).

Firstly, there is the study of problematisations . Theconcept of ‘problematisation’—a truly ugly newword- refers to the ways the activity ofgoverning establishes the attributes of those

who are being governed and the attributes of theproblem being identified. For example, the 1996massacre at Port Arthur in Tasmania provoked avolume of discussion about the kind of personwho would do such a thing in terms of issuesabout the personality or the mental state of amass killer, as well as the other kinds ofpeople and institutions that allowed it tohappen, including the conduct of state andfederal governments (eg., in regard to gun-ownership laws). In both cases the discussiongoes to the concept of ‘government of conduct’.

In this case the emergent science of risk canbe considered as an example of one attempt,among many, to problematise the lifestyles ofselected populations or their disposition to besubject to unemployment, homelessness or toengage in misconduct. That is, the study ofmodes of government identifies the formation and shapingof the identities, capacities and statuses of members of thepopulation—in this case of young people. This isoften the prelude to attempts to shape orreshape the identities of those whose conduct isto be governed. As we will show here, thequestion of identity is muffled by exponents ofthe science of risk; equally in regard to youngpeople, they have long been a central target forpastoral care on the part of those withprofessional legal or vocational interests.

Secondly, the study of government raisesquestions about the social or institutional site of theproblematisation process and addresses for example,the difficulties facing an authority given a setof tasks rather than the application of a givenset of general principles. In this regard thescience of risk can be understood as one style,among many, of response to a variety of socialproblems.

There are many potential questions about thesocial or institutional site of the problematisation process. Theevolution of a science of risk in contemporarycriminology largely reflects a movement takingplace inside academic institutions and policyunits of the state.

What this means has been explained by DavidGarland (1994: 18) who also offers a fruitfulway of (re)writing the history of criminology.For Garland (1994) the trajectory of criminologyinvolves the co-evolution of ‘criminology’ interms of two logics of development that he hascalled a ‘governmental project’ and a ‘scienceof causes’, or what he calls the ‘Lombrosianproject’. Criminology, as a conventionalenterprise, equals the Governmental Project plusthe Lombrosian Science of Causes.

According to Garland, modern criminologycontinues to manifest aspects of both projects,revealing a continuing commitment to theEnlightenment faith in its Reason and in areliance on the collection of scientific data toinform the project of government. As Garland(1994:18) explains:

By a ‘governmental project’ I mean…the long seriesof empirical inquiries which since the eighteenthcentury have sought to enhance the efficient andequitable administration of justice by charting thepatterns of crime and monitoring the practice ofpolice and prisons.

This task which evolves for example, as acentral part of the state-istical movement in thenineteenth century saw the increasing use offact-gathering techniques designed to catch theessential features of a wide range of ‘problempopulations’ like the ‘criminal classes’). Thiscontinues to be a central characteristic of

modern criminology and of in-house police andcivil service research units and academicresearch centres that regularly producestatistics on crime and justice.

So too is ‘the Lombrosian tradition’ which is a:

…form of inquiry which aims to develop anaetiological, explanatory science based on thepremise that criminals can somehow be differentiatedfrom non-criminals (Garland 1994:18).

Garland here is referring to the work ofCesare Lombroso (1836-1909) who produced afamous positivist study called The Criminal in1876. Lombroso’s brand of ‘positivistscientism’, yoked to a crude racial and class-based schema provoked a flood-tide of parallelattempts to construct accounts of ‘the criminal’as well as a ‘science of causes’ of criminalconduct. By the 1890s Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904),while heavily critical of Lombroso’s thesis,established the modernist synthesis whichcombined a criminological ‘science of causes’ bydrawing on social sciences like sociology andpsychology while working often quitepragmatically in the service of a governmentalproject which worked with ‘commonsenseprejudices and political imperatives’.

The result is modern criminology, a tension-filled field of study, teaching and researchcaught between an ambitious ‘science of causes’and a more pragmatic, policy-orientedadministrative project seeking to use science inthe task of managing and controlling refractorypopulation groups.

Finally the study of government occurs becauseit does not assume that problems exist in

themselves and pays attention to the waysproblems must be constituted and therefore paysattention to particular styles of reasoning or what was oncecalled ‘rhetoric’. As Dean and Hindess (1998:9)note:

Problems become known through grids of evaluationand judgement about objects that are far from selfevident. The study of government thus entails thestudy of modes of reasoning.

In the emerging science of risk, there are

particular styles of cognition which ‘discover’problems in particular ways.

Our ‘data’ is a series of exemplary reportsand research projects which have begun toconstitute the science of risk as it is appliedto problems like unemployment, homelessness andjuvenile crime. Produced in the 1990s, thesereports provide a useful basis for assessing thediscursive emphasis on risk, especially with aview to identifying the critical silences andgaps in much contemporary criminologicaldiscourse. Our analysis suggests thatnotwithstanding the frequent affirmation by theauthors of these reports of their ‘progressive’orientation to social policy or to criminaljustice policy, their research and policyrecommendations sit comfortably within theconventional social science tradition.

We turn now to another possible explanationfor the rise of risk talk in our time.

Economic liberalism and risk

Ours is a period characterised by the near-hegemony in political and cultural terms ofeconomic liberalism. In such a period what kind

of theory of deviance can we expect to find? Oneanswer would be a ‘science of risk’.

The resurgence of economic liberalism, (or thetheory and practice of public policy informed byneo-classical economics since the mid-1970s),has not just been about the refashioning ofeconomic policy. It has also involved majorshifts in the framing of the boundaries between‘state’ and ‘civil society’ (Cerny 1991). It hasseen the reworking of traditional meaningsascribed to the dichotomies ‘Left’ and ‘Right’(Giddens 1995). This process of economic‘reconstruction’ has seen a fundamental re-design of Australian institutions and policies(Bell 1997). This includes ‘new’ discourses andpractices developed to subordinate a diversityof social value systems to economic needs whichstress characteristics like ‘tradeliberalization’, ‘privatization’ and labourmarket ‘flexibility’.

It has also helped re-constitute theconception of a ‘public’ and of the idea of‘society’ as a discursively constituted socialand moral order involving what Yeatman (1998:227-241) calls the renewal of liberalindividualism owing much to what she calls‘contractualism’. (As Yeatman argues, some ofthese processes conform to the worstexpectations of left critics of economicliberalism while others point to new kinds ofpost-patrimonial egalitarian politics).

In an era of resurgent economic liberalism,talk of risk is combined with the language ofcompetition, business and the market, along witha variety of doctrines espousing ‘mutualresponsibility’ and ‘self determination’. Theseare used variously to define the ethics and thetype of relationship a young person should have

with themself, their family and community. Themorality of entrepreneurship for example isaimed at the subjectivity of the young person,thus we see within discourses about risk anemphasis on self reliance, personalresponsibility, and autonomy.

We can see these effects operating in the riseof science of ‘risk’. Much of this science ofrisk depends on the central figure in liberaltheory, the individual.

The mainstream of classical liberal theory andsub-sets of that theory like neo-classicaleconomics, depend on the following claims(Arblaster 1984: 1-48). The first is theontological claim that individuals are the onlyentities in the social world that matter andthat they are ontologically prior to ‘society’.In other words, only individuals can havepreferences, choices, or values or takedecisions and engage in actions. In the 1980sBritish Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gavevoice to this view when she opined: ‘There is nosuch thing as society’. The second main claim inclassical liberal theory is epistemological. Itis argued that only theories grounded in‘methodological individualism’ can accuratelychart the activities of individuals and the waysindividual choices constitute collectivities,institutions or society itself.

According to this new version of neo-classicaleconomic liberal world-view:

1. ‘Individuals’ have market attributes. Theyeither have ‘enterprise’, (energy, skillsand human/intellectual or economic capital)or they have deficits (a lack of skills, lowintelligence or inadequate capital).Individuals take their enterprise or

deficits to ‘the market’ where theycalculate in a rational and strategic waywhat actions will best promote theirhappiness in competition with other likeindividuals (See Elster (1986) for anextremely sophisticated discussion of therational action model).

2. ‘Social institutions’ are entities groundedin the activities of the individuals whoconstitute them. All institutions especiallythose connected to ‘the state’ are seen tobe rigid. Moreover they allegedly inhibitand obstruct individual choice, and this isdamaging to the proper running of the marketplace. Social institutions do this becausethey are inefficient, costly, cumbersome andbureaucratic and they therefore distort therational and happiness-oriented marketinteractions of individuals.

3. ‘Markets’ provide the social framework inwhich individual energy, rationality,initiative, skill and risk-taking enterprisecan flourish. This however can only happenif they are kept free of institutional andstate rigidities that obstruct therationality of the market.

Metaphors like ‘markets’, ‘enterprise’,‘competition’ ‘flexibility’ and ‘individual’provide the primary categories which haveinformed the re-making of political talk andpublic policy in Australia and most Westerncountries since the early 1980s.

This neo-liberal world view and accompanying‘reform agenda’ has been accompanied by agrowing ‘public’ anxiety about crime (Rose1994). As David Garland (1996) notes, the UnitedKingdom has, since the early 1980s, seen the

elevation of an ‘ever-increasing crime rate’ asa basic ‘social fact’. This has been accompaniedby a rise in ‘victimology’ and a growingdisenchantment with the ability of the police tomanage ‘law and order problems’. In America, theUnited Kingdom and Australia, an attack on thealleged ‘culture of welfare dependency’ createdby ‘Big Government’ and specifically the‘welfare state’ has generated considerablediscussion about the threat posed by ‘theunemployed’, ‘the underclass’ and the collapseof the ‘traditional family’ and ‘traditional’social values (Abbott & Wallace 1988, Bessant1995, Hil 1998).

Castells (1996-98) has little doubt that thesesocieties are moving towards a ‘post-industrial’society. This shift can be characterised interms of a decline within these societies of thetraditional manufacturing industries and therise of information and service industries. Thisshift has been accompanied by permanent massunemployment and a heavy increase in unsecuredemployment. Governments have played an activerole in what has been called the ‘globalisation’process by deregulating the labour market,freeing up controls on the finance sector andintroducing more targeted and conditionalwelfare benefits. Courtesy of the discourse ofmarkets and privatisation measures, governmentsat all levels have contributed to a process ofdis-investment in jobs (Boreham, Dow & Leet1999).

It is not surprising, given that ‘economicliberalism’ rests on a version of‘methodological individualism’, that there hasbeen a resurrection of older models ofidentifying and treating social problems asexpressions of individual deficiency or

pathology. In Australia for example, officialacceptance (Cass 1988) of the OECD’s ‘activesociety’ model since the late 1980s has resultedin the complete reform of the social securitysystem (Gass 1988; OECD 1988). (Among itseffects has been the increasing use of casemanagement in employment services and labourmarket programs directed at remedying what aresaid to be the individual deficiencies in skill,motivation or aptitude that ‘explain’ why somepeople are unemployed).

In the contemporary evolution of a science ofrisk we see two quite traditional intellectualmovements frequently seen operating in thehistory both of liberal social theory and ofsocial scientific research. On the one handthere is a movement to relocate the idea of riskaway from the risk-taking individual (the‘entrepreneur’) and towards the idea that‘social order’ or ‘society’ is at risk. Whilepreserving some of the underlying individualistelements of liberalism there is movement from apositive evaluation where risk (taking) is acentral dynamic factor in capitalist economicgrowth, to the negative evaluation that risk (asin risky behaviour) threatens society itself.Needless to say, most of the risk research isnot about risk-taking behaviours on the part ofindividuals; it is about identifying and diagnosing the risk tosocial order posed by particular sub-sets of the population. Aswe demonstrate later, some risk-based researchis the ‘natural’ expression of a methodologicalindividualism that locates the causes of ‘socialproblems’ like ‘unemployment’, ‘poverty’ or‘homelessness’ fairly and squarely with theindividual and the largely psychologically-dominated body of developmental and life-cycleresearch.

In an affirmation of the continuing potency ofliberal individualism, the identification of therisk factors enables researchers to locate thesource of these problems in the biological orpsychological dispositions of the individual as‘delinquent’ or ‘criminal’. This is not to denythat risk research also allows for the play of‘social factors’ like ‘family’, neighbourhood’or ‘the community’, but invariably these socialentities are represented as ‘dysfunctional’ or‘anti-social’ or deficient. This has the effectof seeming to confirm that this research haspaid its proper obeisance to sociologicalexplanations, while actually diminishinginterest in the social processes that produce‘crime’ and its representations.

This happens by encouraging the unreflectiveidea that ‘crime’ is an objective correlate ofpersonal, biological or social dysfunction. Astress on the alleged objectivity for example,of crime data means that crime is not understoodeither as the representations that constitutethe ‘crime problem’ or as the large range ofcriminal activity of which only that part doneby ‘poor’, black or ‘working-class’ is definedas ‘crime’.x

One unintended effect of the mainstream socialresearch process is to deflect attention awayfrom the social processes of governance,processes which includes the discovery of socialproblems like crime and the identification ofits perpetrators. The logic of risk-basedresearch establishes a way of understanding ‘theproblem’ that excludes the roles and responsibilities of themore powerful groups involved in the government of crime andinstead frames ‘the problem’ as one identified at the level ofindividual analysis, or as one involving individual

responsibility albeit only ever amongst acertain part of the population.

Chapter Two: At Risk ofUnemployment

74.6% of Sociology is Bunk.(The Economist : 1995)

In 1998 the Howard Liberal-National CoalitionGovernment introduced changes to Australia’sincome support for young people in a unified andmeans-tested system known as the Common YouthAllowance. The justification for this ‘reform’was to better meet the needs of ‘at risk’ youngpeople. The evolution of the ‘youth at risk’category -and more recently the addition of the‘youth potentially at risk’ category- followedmounting popular anxiety about youthunemployment.

It is plain that we are experiencing thedemise of institutions like Wage-Work, once seenas critical integrative mechanisms. If thisassessment is accurate, it raises major questionsabout the future of social cohesion and how wecan ensure young people can have access togenerally accepted values and modes of socialpractice like paid employment.

According to one dominant account ofemployment and adolescent adjustment, waged workprovides an important medium for regulating youngpeople, for structuring their time and identity.Young people without work were problematicbecause they lacked an occupation to organisetheir daily lives and more generally, theirlives. This work also depends on specific meta-narratives about the life-cycle. Notions of

39

transition, integration, adjustment (to the‘adult role’) and the very concept of‘adolescence’ are integral to the work of manyintellectually trained concerned ‘youth at riskof unemployment’. Historically paid employmenthas been seen as functional in terms of providingthe basis for social integration and a securetransition along that ‘precarious road’ from thechild-like adolescence to’ the responsibilities’of adulthood.

The increase in youth unemployment since the1970s has been disruptive to older processeswhich secured a transition to adulthood. Ifemployment brings order, stability and security,then unemployment delivers disorder andinsecurity. Throughout the twentieth century,full-time waged work structured the lives of manyyoung Australians, while joblessness was widelyrecognised as disruptive to the predictablepatterns and transitionary phases young peoplewere expected to pass through on the path toadulthood. With the concept of full-time wagedwork this transition to adulthood has been seenas relatively secure and fixed. Without paidemployment and financial independence, thevarious ‘stages’ and events that mark out one’sprogress in becoming adult (like marriage, socialautonomy) are seen as having been suspended anddisrupted.

From the mid-1970s when evidence of theeffects of youth unemployment began to gather,young people began to be represented as ‘victims’of unemployment and restructuring; by the mid-1990s it had become fashionable to blameglobalisation’. This victim status heightenedpopular concern about ‘rising’ rates of juvenilecrime, suicide, homelessness, and substanceabuse. As well as being ‘casualties of change’

(Eckersley 1988; 1993) researchers andcommentators have promoted the idea that youngunemployed people are graffiti artists,delinquents, gang members or young offenders andas such are a menace to social order. Thecombination of unemployment and criminality hassustained the use of the metaphor of the‘juvenile underclass’ (White 1994a; 1994b cf.Bessant 1995).

While the ‘at-risk’ category can be treated asa consequence of large-scale socialtransformations, it mostly functions as an indexof deficit usually located in the ‘individualdeemed to be ‘at risk’. For commentators likeEckersley ‘youth at risk’ are the ‘miner’scanaries’ of our society in crisis, highlyvulnerable to the ‘hazards of our time’. The ‘atrisk’ category signifies the ‘crisis’ andapparently novel hazards and problems thatcharacterise our era as dangerous, difficult andcrisis-ridden. According to Eckersley (1992: 18)these include:

…pressures of increasing urbanisation,industrialisation, centralisation, mechanisation,individualisation, of growing populations,increasing global economic competition andaccelerating change, of a strengthening material andeconomic domination of our lives and a weakeningspiritual and moral influence…(Eckersley, 1992: 18).

As Kelly (1998: 22) points out, these featuresmirror Giddens’ (1990) ‘risk profile ofmodernity’. The restructuring of the labormarket and economy coincided with the collapseof the full-time youth labor market that beganin the 1980s (Wooden 1998: 35; Dryfoos, 1990;Bell 1997; Langmore & Quiggin 1994; Quiggin1996). The restructuring process has given riseto a range of specific anxieties about youth

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homelessness, youth suicide, juveniledelinquency drug use and addiction. Therestructuring process has meant that ‘youth’encounter ‘new morbidities’ that present majorobstacles to becoming adults. Batten andRussell’s (1995: 1) position is typical:

The term ‘at risk’…is used to describe or identifyyoung people who, beset by particular difficultiesand disadvantages, are thought likely to fail toachieve the development in their adolescent yearsthat would provide a sound basis for a satisfyingand fulfilling adult life.

In the context of our observations about theframework of government we will use the issue ofyouth unemployment as a guide to the study ofproblematisations. That is we ask how the activity ofgoverning establishes the attributes of those whogovern and/or of those who are being governed andthe qualities of the problem being identified.

Youth at risk

Much of this at-risk literature depends on‘popular’ and ‘social scientific’ discoursesabout adolescence as a period in the life-cyclethat:

1.is inherently agonistic and 2.is concerned with making a transition from

childhood to adulthood which is in itselfsaid to be a risk-ridden project.

Framing the problem of ‘risk’ in this wayproduces the figure of ‘youth at risk’ (Bessant2000, 2001). It is an approach that is especiallyprevalent in the education/training industry,especially in relation to secondary students

threatening not to complete Year 12 or itsequivalent (see Australian Education CouncilReview Committee 1991; Coopers, LybrandConsultants & Ashden Milligan 1992; AustralianCurriculum Studies 1992; DEET 1992; Batten,Withers, Thomas & McCurry 1991; Bradley 1992;Constable & Burton 1993; Batten & Russell 1995;Ward et al 1998). For most of the period ofeconomic crisis since 1975, an ‘incompleteeducation’ has been defined as the key factorthat places the young person ‘at risk’ ofunemployment (Ainley, Batten & Miller 1984;Dryfoos 1990, 1994, 1996; Bradley & Stock 1993;Dwyer 1997). For Meredith Edwards (1998: 25) theenormity of the problem of ‘youth at risk’ bytheir opting out of education is apparent:

A group of 20, perhaps 25 percent of young peopleare at risk, if you include those who might be inpart-time education or part-time employment as wellas those who are unemployed or out of the labourmarket.

An unfinished education is said to also placethe young person ‘at risk’ of other social illslike psychological depression, juvenile crime,suicide, homelessness, drug abuse, etc. Those ‘atrisk’ of unemployment are students who eitherleave the education system ‘too early’, or whoshow signs of leaving in the foreseeable future.From Freeland’s (1996) perspective for example,unemployment relies on an analysis of ABS LabourForce statistics which he argues can distinguishbetween those who are ‘gravely at risk’ and thesimply ‘at risk’ young person. His analysis isbased on various factors like whether or not theyoung person is in full-time schooling, or not,whether they are unemployed, in part timeemployment or not. The idea that young people

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ought to remain within the education system hasbecome so normative to the extent that thecategory of ‘youth at risk unemployment’ hasachieved near commonsense status in the sector.Preventing young people from becoming unemployedhas affected in significant ways the verycharacter of our education institutions, so muchso that the primary objectives of mostinstitutions’ ‘learning outcomes’ appear to bedirected towards the demand of the labour market(Marginson 1997).

Most of the at-risk literature depends on‘popular’ and ‘social scientific’ discoursesabout adolescence as an inherently difficult timein the life-cycle. That is, adolescence involvesmaking a transition from ‘childhood’ to‘adulthood’ which is a risky project. Given thisbasic assumption it is not surprising to findthat the empirical and social scientific work onrisk factors appears to set loose the potentialfor an almost limitless field of discovery ofrisk factors. As Batten and Withers (1995:1)indicate ‘modern scientific understandings’ ofthe adolescent stage in the life-cycle means thatthe psychological, biological, economic and sociocultural factors are such that ‘all youths are in somesense at risk’ (my stress). Batten and Russellunderscore the reach of the category:

…there is not a ‘typical’ at risk student, but awide variety of young people of different needs andcapacities, each of them exposed to differentcombinations of risk factors (Batten and Russell1996: vii).

As a cursory survey of the risk literatureindicates, the risk factors are almost unlimited.The factors that allegedly constitute ‘at riskyouth’ extends from indicators of specific

disadvantage (like gender, aboriginality orphysical disability) to indicators that appear tobe common to all 14-25 year olds. Casting a netfar enough to include all young people makes acorrective response not only a ‘necessity’, butalso a responsible solution; it sanctions anyinterventions as long as that response isjustified in terms of ‘reducing’ the riskfactors.

Explaining unemployment

There are some questions that now need toposed; how good is the ‘youth-at-risk’ researchliterature about problems like unemployment? Howdo those explanations help answer the questionwhy as to why so many young people are nowfacing unemployment?

The persistence of unemployment within thecontext of the unequal distribution of paid work,involving overwork, underemployment andunemployment, since the 1970s has generally beenexplained either by pointing to a set ofstructural constraints and dynamics which appearto be out of anyone’s control or else by pointingto alleged characteristics of the unemployed.

The shift from ‘industrial’ to ‘post-industrial’ society, which includes the spreadof new technologies like IT, is often used tosuggest that what we are experiencing isstructurally necessary and part of anirreversible process of ‘modernisation’ or‘globalisation’ and that unemployment is one ofthe prices ‘we’ all must pay for being presentat a time of great change (eg., Jones 1982;Catley 1994).

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Equally among policy-makers and many expertsin countries like Australia, the temptation toexplain the persistence of unemployment in termof deficiencies found among the unemployed hasproven irresistible. Certainly most of the ‘at-risk’ literature depends on a deficit model.

Deficits of the unemployed?

Numerous researchers have offered explanationsof youth unemployment which speak about the‘deficits of the unemployed’ in terms of skill,motivation, morality, character, level ofeducation or vocational training. Explanations ofyouth unemployment which claim that the youngunemployed either ‘lack’ certain qualities orelse display certain ‘risk factors’, has reliedon the continuous use of a deficit model, whichidentifies lack of skills, job readiness ormotivation as the essential problem. (One reasonfrequently offered, especially in the 1980s, wasthat they had this deficit because of the failureof schools and universities to adequately prepareyoung people for the demands of waged work in themodern era (eg., Bulletin, 10 February 1981: 28;Messel, Australian, 17 February 1978; Chipman,Australian, 3 February 1998; Manne & James &;Clarke 1998). On the basis of this ‘diagnosis’the ‘obvious’ corrective step is to provide moreeducation, more vocational training and moretargeted labour market programs.

Research supporting these descriptions of theyouth unemployment problem has been extensivelyencouraged by governments. Defining the problemas a ‘problem of the unemployed’ has beensuccessfully represented since the mid 1970s, as

an answer to the unemployment problem; it hasunderpinned the defence of various labour marketprograms, and of the vocational educationalpolicies. It has also been useful for dealingwith difficult questions confronting mainstreameconomic theory. This is also the least usefuland quite often the most damaging heuristicframework. Its use seems predominantly‘ideological’. In other words, it is used todeflect criticism or to move attention from moreappropriate factors.

Neo-classical economists have constituted boththe problem of unemployment and the nationaleconomic policy established to address it.Representative economists (and even‘progressive’ economists like Gregory 1997: 53-74) have explained Australia’s experience ofunemployment in terms of:

excessive domestic wages or wage increases; rigidities in the labour market reinforced byunions and/or an ‘inflexible’ industrialrelations system; business cycle downturns; international trade and price pressures.

According to advocates of mainstream economictheory, high levels of economic growth (measuredby increases in GDP) must produce increasedemployment and therefore a solve the problem ofunemployment. Yet Australia, along with otherOECD countries, has seen the co-existence ofhigh unemployment and high levels of economicgrowth. As Table 2.1 below, indicates, suchclaims are unsustainable: as company profitsincrease, rates of unemployment have notdeclined.

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Table 2.1: Relationship between CorporateGross Surplus

and Unemployment 1990-97

Corporate gross operating surplus Unemploymentrate

Annual average (%) Annualaverage (%)

_______________________________________________________

1990-91 14.68.3

1991-92 14.810.3

1992-93 15.710.9

1993-94 16.510.5

1994-95 16.38.9

1995-96 16.88.4

1996-97 16.38.3

(Source, ABS, Australian Economic Indicators, 1350.0September 1998: 27 & 86)

Despite this situation many economists supportthe proposition that it is a lack of vocationalor personal skills on the part of theunemployed, or of those ‘at risk ofunemployment’, which best explains thepersistence of high rates of unemployment. ThusDEET (1995, p. 6) argued that the:

…erosion of skills of the unemployed and loss ofmotivation reducing their attractiveness toemployers’ best explain this problem. Governmentshave taken comfort from this ‘finding’.

Governments have also used public concernabout ‘dole bludgers’ mobilised throughout themedia to enlist the support of some sections ofthe welfare industry and the communitygenerally, which have been long accustomed to‘victim-blaming’ discourses (Ryan 1976). Theconstitution of an Australian unemploymentpolicy has taken the form of a preoccupationwith making policy for the unemployed. This hasrelied on a deficit model account of the‘unemployed’ which identifies ‘their’ lack ofskills, job readiness, flexibility or motivationas the essential problems for which labourmarket programs are the most appropriateresponse. In this way they have drawn on themethodological individualism of conventional orneo-classical economics.

The neo-classical tradition (and itsparticular expression in ‘labour market theory’),produces an insistent preoccupation with thealleged individual capacities, dispositions anddeficits of the job seeker (or of ‘theunemployed’). This preoccupation is an organicexpression of the methodological and ontological‘individualism’ of the neo-classical tradition.This has meant that representative neo-classicaleconomists (and even ‘progressive’ economistslike Gregory 1997: 223-4) frequently concludetheir analysis of the unemployment problem byconverting it into a problem of the unemployed.

The neo-classical tradition has always assumedthe centrality of the market. Neo-classicaleconomists have long been accustomed to analysing

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the market as if it were simply the sum ofindividual decisions taken by ‘rational economicactors’ (as well as a small number of the factorssaid to influence the job seeker or employee’scapacity to get a job). In the neo-classicaltradition, markets are made up of individuals whoare driven by individual desires, who exercisetheir rationality and deploy individualendowments all the while exchanging commoditiesand services so as to maximise their own‘utility’ (or ‘happiness’ or ‘welfare’). Theantisocial prejudices of this tradition are writlarge in the primacy it accords to ahistoricalindividual consumer choices and in the way itprivileges a theoretical narrative about exchangerelations between ‘individual’ owners ofresources (like labour or capital). Simons’classic account of ‘income’ is defined eg., asthe:

…algebraic sum of (i) the market value of rights exercised inconsumption and (ii) the change in the value of thestore of property rights between the beginning andend of the period…(Simons 1938: 50) (Our stress).

The entire edifice and the credibility of neo-classical economics depends on an asocial modelof ‘rational economic man’. In one stunningvindication of the continuing reliance of suchanalyses on the model of the rational, utility-maximising individual, Debelle and Vickery (1998:249) assert that:

The labour supply or participation rate equation canbe derived from an aggregate version of theindividual’s labour/leisure choice in which laboursupply is determined by the wage, the prices ofgoods in an individual’s consumption basket and non-wage income. An individual will supply labour,

provided that the pay-off from accepting employmentexceeds their reservation wage.

As Prychitko observes:

…neo-classical economics provides a formal theory ofrational choice, which assumes away questions ofignorance and uncertainty (at best, agents aremodelled under conditions of ‘risk’ which collapsesinto a certainty equivalent), time (time is treatedas a parameter rather than a flow of consciousness)and social-institutional change (at best economistsengage in comparative statics, studying the movementfrom one equilibrium to another) (Prychitko 1995:1).

Neo-classical economics rests its theoreticalcredibility on a version of methodologicalindividualism -which Prychitko refers to as a‘naive individualism’. Each agent is an ‘isolate’with their preferences and constraints simplygiven. As EPAC (1995: 27) points out:

A great part of economic, social and politicalanalysis focuses on the role, responsibilities andrights of individuals…this makes sense as oursociety and economy are based on rights ofindividuals, and it is their behaviour which isimportant for how the economy and our societyoperates.

Personal relationships between economic agentsare presumed not to exist, for if they did thesystem would possibly fail to achieve its optimalstate; in this version, the individual merelyreacts to the given state of the world; themeaning of the individual’s acts for the actor isignored or obliterated. Yet the individualism ofthe tradition can become alarmingly abstracted.When pressed, key figures have been prepared toditch the actual ontologically and socially

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grounded person. Pareto puts it like this when hesays that ‘the individual can disappear, providedhe leaves us this photograph of his tastes’(1971/1927: 120) Hahn more recently is even moreexemplary;

Traditional equilibrium theory does best when theindividual is of no importance—he is of measurezero. My theory also does best when all the giventheoretical problems arising from the individualsmattering do not have to be taken into account (Hahn1973: 330).

Individual dispositions, their desires andattributes take on special significance given thecentrality of the exchange relationship and thechoices individuals make:

…about the type of occupation they wish to pursue,whether they wish to pursue high incomes or jobsatisfaction or status…and between the amount ofwork and leisure they undertake. They are also ableto exercise choices related to their timepreferences …(EPAC 1995: 23)

In the neo-classical tradition there is nospace for a theory of social classes, a theory ofunequal power or the actuality of socialinequality.xi There is also no interest in theactual plurality of social relationships ordiverse logics of social action experienced byreal people; the only ‘object of desire’ is thestrategic, egoistic, utility-maximisingcompetitive individual. Individual outcomes anddispositions alone matter.

Those who work in this paradigm arediscursively incapable of asking questions aboutthe role and dispositions of those with the powerof decision-making in terms of investment and jobcreation either in the corporate business sector

or in the public sector. This refusal isaccompanied by an inability or an unwillingnessto think carefully about the interconnectionswithin any complex society that might shed adifferent light on certain commonsense ‘economic’claims.

It is not surprising then to findcontemporary economists explaining persistentunemployment in individualistic terms. Economistsfor example have found it useful to argue thatthe:

…erosion of skills of the unemployed and loss ofmotivation reducing their attractiveness toemployers may explain the persistence ofunemployment (DEET 1995: 6).

That this may say more about the need on thepart of economists to resolve the cognitivedissonance confronting economists and their‘theory’ posed by the co-existence of highunemployment and high levels of economic growthcannot be disallowed. Whatever the reason,governments have been comforted by this‘finding’; they have also not been slow to usepublic concern about ‘dole bludgers’ mobilised byever-vigilant media personalities into recurrent‘moral panics’ or conversely, to enlist thebacking of the welfare industry long-wedded to‘victim-blaming’ discourses (Ryan 1976). Labourmarket programs have been the primary meanswhereby successive governments have reconstitutedthe problem represented by the persistent growthin the numbers of the unemployed. Redefining theproblem as the problem of the unemployed has beensuccessfully represented for the past decade ormore, as an answer to the unemployment problem(eg., Dean 1997).

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Unemployment risk factors

In 1999 Anh Le and Paul Miller (1999), twoAustralian econometricians, produced amethodologically sophisticated report for theAustralian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Le andMiller positioned themselves within aconsiderable body of empirical work which aimedto quantify the causal links between a variety ofpersonal attributes of factors like age,education attainment, language skills,birthplace, or region of residence, andemployment outcomes. Their research project wasdesigned to identify an ‘index of risk factors’associated with unemployment.

Le and Miller are not the first, nor are theythe only, researchers, inclined to develop a riskindex for unemployment, nor are they the onlyones to talk in term of risk factors andjoblessness. In 1987, Miller and Volker produceda risk index that could be used to assess theprobability of an individual’s unemployment. Inthis project the population was categorised intotwo groups: those at risk of unemployment andthose not at risk. People with a personal historyof unemployment, those with dependent familymembers and early school leavers were said to beclearly at risk. This research also had policyimplications; it meant that it could be used totarget those specific groups (Miller & Volker1987; see also Seth-Purdie 2001). As Le andMiller (1999) note, the research in this area,almost all of it the work of labour marketeconomists working within the neo-classicalframework, has focussed either:

1.on those variables that affect labour marketproductivity outcomes,

2.on those factors that affectemployment/unemployment outcomes and/or on,

3. the role played by previous labour marketexperience that affects unemployment.

Le and Miller clearly intend to categorisepeople according to their ‘risk of unemployment’as a prelude to informing policy-making. The setout to ascertain the level of risk across fourlevels ie., ‘very high risk’, ‘high risk’,‘medium risk ‘ and ‘low risk’. To do this theydrew on a longitudinal research project, theSurvey of Employment and Unemployment Patterns(or SEUP) which collected data in two waves overthree years (1995-97) from samples of people aged15-59 put together from three groups (ie.,Jobseekers (N= 5488), Labour Market Programrecipients (N=1019) and a Population Referencegroup (N=2311) producing a total samplepopulation of 8,818 persons.xii Le and Millerproduce a new set of estimates of the‘determinants’ that give the probability thatsomeone will be unemployed. The data is used toproduce sets of cross-tabulations that are thenused for an examination of the relationshipsbetween labour market outcomes and a number ofkey characteristics like age or gender.

To do this, Le and Miller applied many of themost impressive elements of contemporary socialscience statistical techniques, complete with anequation for unemployment. The first equationwhich reads as follows: U* + X…

j j jis equation A.

Le and Miller note for example that U*j is thepropensity of an individual to become unemployedwhile the other letters refer to the causal

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variables smoothed statistically. To equation Aare then added equation B which is a logit model,and equation C which uses ‘associated estimatedcoefficients’ which are understood asapproximations only. Each of the variables arethen defined as ‘mutually dichotomous variables’.

As a result of their analysis of the SEUPdata (1995-97) and their formal analysis of thecausal determinants of unemployment, Le andMiller construct a ‘risk of unemployment index’.This is based on their assessment that there is a‘remarkable consistency’ of labour marketoutcomes over time, which is correlated with thevariables. The authors argue that the model ofprobability of unemployment shows that age,educational attainment, English proficiency,disability and marital status are importantdeterminants of the probability of beingunemployed. Each of these identity markers aregiven a rating on a scale of employability. Witheducation, for example, those with a tertiary orlate-exit secondary school qualification are saidto have an unemployment rate of between 6 and 10percent points less than those without suchattributes. The age factor on the probabilityscale is said to be ‘relatively weak (Le & Miller1999: ix).

Estimates from the model of unemployment canthen be used to categorise individuals accordingto their risk (‘very high’, ‘high risk’, ‘mediumrisk’ and ‘low risk’). This categorisation isbased on two types of risk index. The firstpredicts the risk of unemployment using all thecoefficients from the logit model. The second isan approximation of the first. Points are thengiven to ‘individual characteristics’ in the sameway the immigration system works (ibid: ix).

Their findings show that those at highest riskof unemployment are the low skilled, those withminimal English proficiency, people withdisabilities and the young. To demonstrate theaccuracy of their model, the authors use thesecond wave of data collection (1995-96). Theyargue that:

Those suggested as being at risk of unemployment in1995 are shown to have inferior labour marketperformance during the second wave. They spent, onaverage, more time looking for work, they were alsoabsent from the labour market for greater periods.Those results suggest that the risk index has merit.Moreover, examination of the performance of a riskindex computed using a point system shows that thisis a useable approach (ibid: x).

‘Causal factors’ are identified and linked to‘predicted errors’ to improve the forecastingcapability of their model. They ‘found’ eg., thata person is more likely to be without work iftheir family members are jobless. This revisedmodel is said to show a ‘positive relationship’between the number of days a person looked forwork in the year prior to the survey and theiremployment status.

‘The relationship’ between looking for workand current unemployment status produces what isnoted as a ‘scar effect’ or ‘inertia in labourmarket outcomes’. The notion of a ‘scar effect’is a highly effective use of metaphor. It helpseg., to explain to their audience the problem ofunemployment and cumulative disadvantage as if itwere the product of an injury, or as a defectcaused by the person’s previous inability tosecure waged work (ibid xi). This means, say Leand Miller that disadvantaged workers can beidentified with a high degree of success, whichfrom a policy point of view means, as they say,

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that the ‘targeting of skill enhancementassistance can be carried out if this isconsidered desirable’.

A critique

Although Le and Miller are working at anabstracted and highly sophisticated level, theirfindings in one sense should be neithercontroversial nor surprising to Australiansalready familiar with the broad outlines of theunemployment problem. Is it surprising forexample to be told that young people are athigher than average risk of unemploymentespecially if they are also early school leavers,as are non-English speaking people, older ageworkers, or people with low levels of educationalattainment? Given this, why then would we want tocriticise this work? There are several grounds—some minor reasons and some more substantivereasons—for our concern.

Firstly, there is the minor but surprisingfault with some features of their populationreference group which they themselves acknowledgeto be somewhat odd. They pass surprisinglyquickly over the embarrassment that their‘representative’ Population Reference groupsample is a peculiar representative sample. Ithas a mean age of 36, whilst two thirds of itsmembers are married, whilst one in five has adisability! The reader may also wonder on othergrounds about the value of the findings inrelation to the immense effort expended here.Why, for example, would Le and Miller conclude(1999: 34) that ‘regional unemployment effectsneed further study’ when decades’ worth of ABSunemployment data have made it plain thatregional and rural Australia have long supported

the consistently highest aggregate levels ofunemployment Throughout 2000 for example, the bigcapital cities had an aggregate rate ofunemployment around 7%, regional and ruralAustralia on the east coast for example, hadrates in excess of 10.5%. However, theseobservations become mere quibbles when setagainst their embarrassing, even alarming, self-admission that their risk index is not actuallyvery good for anything.

We need to recall firstly the conclusion-presented in their Synopsis, and presumably thepart of the report Ministers and their adviserswill find time to read, about the viability oftheir risk index. Quantifying the relationshipsbetween various factors and the incidence ofunemployment they have claimed has practicalpolicy implications. Le and Miller suggest forexample that an inverse relationship betweeneducation and unemployment ought to mean thatadditional education is the way to reduce theprobability of job success (ibid: 1). Theirfindings, they argue ,can also be used for casemanagement. For example if the research findingsdemonstrate that those who leave school early andwho have poor English skills have high rates ofunemployment then those with such a combinationof characteristics or other combinations known tobe associated with high levels of unemployment,should be case-managed (ibid: 1). Quoting fromthe earlier work of Miller and Volker, Le andMiller argue that:

Many of the groups distinguished under the riskindex approach, therefore, are characterised bywell-defined intervening factors. This implies that the risk index approach, and theassociated study of unit-record data, have directpolicy implications (ibid: 2).

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All of this however is subverted in the bodyof their report (see p.39) when they explainthat:

…the risk index is…a rather blunt instrument. Itresults in the categorisation of individuals at risk of beingunemployed who in fact spend 70% of the following year working.Moreover it would also result in a pool of at riskpersons in the population of approximately 700,000.Such a pool does not appear to be an appropriate size on which totarget policy.

If we wished to be bland we would say thatthis is a surprising admission. It actuallyannuls the point of their report. To put itmildly, all the display of methodologicalsophistication, and formal demonstrationsnotwithstanding, the central point of theexercise is entirely undone if it turns out thatthe risk index does not actually predict thebehaviour you say it does. However they claimthat they have an escape hatch at hand when theysuggest they can preserve the value of constructing their riskindex by focussing only on that part of the sample comprising the1-2% of ‘very high risk persons’ or those with an‘exceptionally high likelihood of beingunemployed’. Again this claim merely compoundstheir problem. When it transpires that you canonly use a tiny fragment of the population judgedby the risk criteria to constitute the highestrisk group as a basis for informing policy,program or service delivery then you really haveto wonder about the value of the entire exercise.

Then there is the problem, which is not uniqueto this research, of the way the authors rely ona variety of rhetorical techniques especiallythose of a mathematical kind. Presumably designedto persuade the reader the mathematical and

statistical techniques on display are in manycases actually all too likely to confuse anaveragely-intelligent, even well-read reader.

From the outset, it is plain that the authorsare out to construct a force-field around theirwork which deploys the usual rhetorical devicesopen to econometricians, one that will deflectthe ordinary intelligent reader from eitherunderstanding, let alone challenging, theassumptions or methods used. The rhetoricaleffect achieved in this kind of research isindeed on the surface formidable. All is smooth,calm and confident yet largely unintelligiblegiven the usual tests of inspection and literaryaccessibility deployed by the average intelligentreader. Even in the synopsis, this effect is atwork when they (1999:ix) declare that:

The categorisation of individuals…is undertakenusing two types of risk index. The first of theseuses all the estimated coefficients from the logitmodel to predict the risk of unemployment.

As is common among econometricians, there is arelentless use of mathematical presentation whichLe and Miller use to secure the authority andcredibility of their claims and to persuadeothers. As Davis and Hersh (1987: 53) have noted:

…mathematical certainty’ is a byword for a level ofcertainty to which other subjects can only aspire …the level of advancement of a science has come to bejudged by the extent to which it is mathematical.

As is the case in many other manifestations ofthis kind of formal presentation it may also bepointless or misleading. Irrespective of thecleverness of the mathematical presentation, thefact is, as Le and Miller point out, their riskindex is not a very good predictor of anything

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given that most of the people surveyed whogenerate their risk index are working within ayear. When in doubt, reach for a mathematicalformula,drawing on the magic of numbers toimpress readers with the objective analyticrigour and systematic quality of their claims. AsLe and Miller explain, their model ofunemployment can be expressed symbolically as:

U*j = XjB = Ej (equation A).

In plain English this translates as a claimthat the risk of being unemployed is a result ofall the alleged variables like age or education-level smoothed by taking into account thesampling error. Le and Miller say by way of‘clarification’:

…where U*j is a latent variable that captures thepropensity towards unemployment of individual j, Xis a vector of observed factors (ie., educationalattainment, age, birthplace etc), B is a vector ofcoefficients to be estimated and E is a stochasticerror term. In the first place the explanatoryvariables are restricted to those which have beenused on a regular basis in previous research…Thisprovides an appropriate basis for comparison acrossstudies, Hence the probability that a person will beunemployed is related to educational attainment (sixdummy variables), age (quadratic function), sex (adummy variable), marital status (three dummyvariables), section of State (three dummyvariables), birthplace…etc (Le & Miller, 1999: 26-27).

This technique for securing their claims toknowledge continues unabated. The insistence onusing these pseudo-scientific frameworks ofauthority, scientific terminology and symbolicrepresentation to convince their audienceproduces a convoluted and unnecessarily complex

text that obfuscates, muddles, but hopefullyimpresses the reader. It includes a long list ofterms and claims like ‘binary indicators’, ‘logitmodels’, algorithms, ‘probit models’, ‘naturallogarithms of the odds of the probability ofunemployment (U) to the probability of employment(1-U), log [U ], [1-U] is expressed as a linearcombination of the explanatory variables (ibid27-18).

In terms of outlining the ‘logit model’ Le andMiller explain that:

Two outcomes are derived from U* with reference toan arbitrary threshold of zero. Thus, the individualis held to be unemployed (U=1) where U* exceedszero, and is employed (U=0) otherwise (Le & Miller,1999: 27).We take it that means that you are either

employed or you are unemployed, which in onesense is a logical banality. In another sense itis a nonsense. It implies a clear-cut distinctionbetween ‘work’ and ‘non-work’ to which amathematical value can be given for purposes ofmaking the equation work. Yet it fails to cognisethe actual complexity of the often dramaticexperience many people with marginal attachmentto the labour market,-who may for instance, haveno skills, or very high grade skills, have ofworking for short periods of time in full orpart-time work with intermittent unemployment.This simple binary logic also rather nicelyignores the problem of underemployment

The authors of this style of mathematicalpresentation may feel they have established asatisfactory degree of expert distance betweenthemselves and readers. However the contradictoryand illogical quality of the substantive researchstrategy and findings which characterise much ofthis research—and which are features that come to

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the fore in Le & Miller (1999) is so wellcamouflaged by the rhetoric of statisticalpresentation so that it goes unchallenged, simplybecause too many readers have been put off fromreading the text critically.

Davis and Hersh (1987: 57) have argued thatfour substantive considerations need to be keptin mind when reading and judging this kind offormal mathematical presentation.

Does the depth of the real world problem justify the complexityof the mathematical model?

We would say no, especially given that any orall attempts to locate the cause of modernunemployment in the deficits of a person ignoresthe more salient point that if there are no jobsavailable, the question of personal deficits orrisk factors is simply irrelevant

Are any genuine mathematical reasonings or non-trivialcalculations carried out which require the resources of themathematical model being proposed?

Again we say no. The equations being used areill-fitting attempts to restate in a mystifyingway the proposition readily to be advanced ineasy-to-read, plain English which says that thepersonal or social deficits are more important inexplaining the unemployment of this or thatperson than the supply of jobs by employers andemploying organisations.

Are the coefficients or parameters in the equations capable ofbeing determined in a meaningful and reasonably accurate way?

Again we say no. A good case in point is theway the Le and Miller assign a numerical value to

only two states ‘unemployment’ or ‘employment’They say for example that:

Two outcomes are derived from U* with reference toan arbitrary threshold of zero. Thus, the individualis held to be unemployed (U=1) where U* exceedszero, and is employed (U=0) otherwise (Le & Miller,1999: 27).

In the real world there are not simply twostates and two numerical values as prescribed inthis equation. There exists a whole spectrum ofstates of unemployment and employment in whichtime is of the essence. This refers both to (i)the extent to which someone is fully excludedfrom the labour market and for what length oftime as well as (ii) to the gradations involvedin being fully unemployed through to the statesof marginal employment. This goes to the questionof how many hours of paid employment someoneworks set against their need or inclination towork longer hours but being unable to do so. Theassumptions Le and Miller make pay no attentionto these very real issues.

Are the conclusions capable of being tested against real worlddata? Do any non-obvious practical conclusions follow from theanalysis?

In the first instance the conclusions arecapable of being tested and on this occasion theclaim that they have developed a viable index ofrisk is not warranted by the actual socialbehaviours of 70 % of their sample.

A democratic culture depends on the capacityof producers/researchers and readers/consumers toconverse, and conversation depends on a commonlanguage. Le & Miller have smothered somevariously highly-suspect techniques and

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‘findings’ in a dense and indigestiblemathematical representation. They have not made auseful contribution to well informed discussionabout one of the most serious social problems ofthe past 25 years.

Even if the rhetoric of mathematics was ofreal scientific value in identifying risk factorsfor unemployment, another basic problem remains.The idea that it is sensible and useful tocollect a lot of aggregate data about largenumbers of people, then develop risk factors andsearch for those risk factors in real individualpersons is substantively an exercise in blightedlogic.

One essential problem is how it is evenpossible to move from the collection andstatistical analysis of large-scale data aboutthe characteristics of populations to thenidentify and risk factors at the individual levelto ascribe to real people. It is neither wise,nor is it possible, to use data representingcharacteristics found at a collective group levelto make claims about particular real persons whomanifest the features found at the aggregatelevel. In order to believe that this is wise anduseful it is necessary to ignore the problem ofthe fallacy of composition. The folly of thisprocedure is apparent in the fact that manygraduates with Ph.Ds who are white, middle-class,who live in leafy suburbs and who are in theirlate twenties ie., all denoting the markers ofvery low-risk-unemployment, have been found everyyear since the mid-1990s in Graduate survey datato be unaccountably unemployed and ifurthermore,in considerable numbers. This data suggests thatgraduates from some discipline areas like thenatural sciences actually sustain quite highlevels of unemployment for some time after

acquiring a tertiary qualification, whileanecdotally it seems clear that many graduateswhen they do get a job end up working inindustries or jobs with little, if any,relationship to their area of training; this isnever treated as disconfirming human capitaltheory.

On the other hand, the assumption thatunemployment is an individual experience andproblem that is best identified in terms ofindividual risk factors, -and not somethingarising for example from the supply of certainjobs, is embedded in Le and Miller’s report.There are major problems present in any exercisein methodological individualism, as in thisproject. The clear role played by themethodological and ontological assumptionsassociated with individualism (Arblaster 1989)and which is central to liberal economic theoryincluding most notably neo-classical models, isin evidence here.

The constitutive and metaphorical assumptionoperating here is that unemployment is aconsequence of what occurs when individualsbearing a range of skills or human capital, andother attributes like age or good looks oraccident of birth (as with the country one isborn in) enter as job-seekers into labour marketswhich they anticipate make them attractive toemployers—or not. Missing from this research is aconsideration of the role of decisions andjudgements made by employers and corporateentities (or firms) about their need for labouras a determinant of how many jobs will be madeavailable to job seekers in a given period oftime.

They apply all this methodological prancing toan exercise almost perversely designed to miss

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the point. That point was made decades ago by C.Wright Mills when he observed that if in a cityof 100,000 people one person was unemployed thatthat was a ‘personal tragedy’, but if in thatsame city 10,000 people were unemployed that thatwas a ‘social problem’. There is something oddabout pursuing a research project designed toestablish what role the personal qualities orattributes of a person play in producing a majorsocial structural problem in a society withsubstantial long-term persistent unemploymentaffecting in 2001 on a quite unrealistic-cum-conservative estimate seven percent of the workage population. Such commonsense understandinghowever must not be allowed to impede the marchof social scientific research. In regard to thetechnical basis of this exercise our concern isnot about the intrinsic merits or demerits of thescientific technology and methodology beingrelied upon per se. Our concern is about theuse/misuse of a technology which in a givenproblem context may well be useful, but on thisoccasion is not.

Conclusion

Paid employment has traditionally played animportant role in giving young people a placewithin their communities as financiallyautonomous adults. Paid work provided not only anincome and a relative economic autonomy, but alsoassisted in ushering ‘the adolescent’ into ‘theadult world’. Waged work provided an innerstability; as Beck explains: ‘the occupation…guarantees fundamental social experiences’ (Beck1993: 140). Paid employment, however, is in manycases no longer likely to be as available toyoung people. Beck (1993: 140) argues that paid

employment will provide a basic form or means ofsecurity that it is said to have provided in thepast:

Just like the family…the occupation has lost many ofits former assurances and protective functions.Along with their occupations, people lose an innerbackbone of life that originated in the industrialepoch.…Even outside of work, industrial society is awage labor society through and through…in its joysand sorrows, in its concept of achievement, in itsjustification of inequality, in its social welfarelaws, in its balance of power and in its politicsand culture.

A significant part of the problem of ‘youth atrisk’ and more generally the youth problem sincethe mid-1970s has been framed in terms of theabsence of that reliable means of integration.The reality is however, it is highly unlikelythat we will see a return to the kind of ‘full(male) employment’ that we enjoyed after 1945.The full-time youth labour market will not re-appear, nor under current conditions are welikely to see a return to full adult employment.It is likely that we will continue to see a shiftto re-invent old forms of domestic service as a‘filler’ activity for young people-as-full-timestudents, offering low paid, menial work to theyoung workers.

Despite the disjunction taking place, andwhatever we may think about the worth of the‘work ethic’, many young people still want afull-time job and consider this very important tothem. As Foucault observed, the priority given towaged work and the morality of work is much moreabout virtue than it is about the need forsustenance. Historically, waged work has been

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important to young people for many reasons. AsWilson and Wyn show employment meant:

…the opportunity to demonstrate competence and makea contribution; not simply for an employment ortraining opportunity…, but to meet people anddevelop friendships…(Wilson & Wyn 1987: 12).

This returns us to the point Beck made inrelation to work and its role in providing thosefundamental experiences. Perhaps we need to thinkharder about: how, given the disappearance offull-time waged labour, can we provide thoseopportunities and ‘fundamental experiences’ foryoung people?

Perhaps part of the solution in terms oflivelihood is to separate income from labour.There is a clear role for major changes in incomesecurity policy involving the introduction of aBasic Income Scheme (van Parijs 1993; Watts 1992;Frankel 1987; Tomlinson 1998). The more difficultquestion is how do we provide experiences thatpresent opportunities for young people regardingcitizenship, for full involvement in importantsocial experiences and relationships, to beeffective, autonomous and competent in oursocial, political and economic worlds? On whatbasis are young people going to develop ‘futurepathways’ in relation to developing social andother relationships previously provided at sitesof wage labour? Constraint, moral concern, andincreased governance, mobilised throughcategories like ‘youth at risk’, and policiesdirected towards retaining all or most under 25year olds in education, provide a lasting basisfor hope.

xiNotes? This explains the inability of welfare economics to produce explanations of why income inequality exists since there is no theory of income inequality apart from differential pricing of resources and goods (Hollander 1987:93-7).xii The survey collected information on Jobseekers, Labour Market Programme Participants, and a Population Reference Group for three years—1995, 1996 and 1997. Analysis for the ‘Risk Index’ used the Population Reference Group which consists of a random sample of the population, and the firsttwo data sets (1995 and 1996).

Risk and Homelessness: An Empirical Problem?72

Chapter Three: Risk andHomelessness: An Empirical

Problem?

The methodological intemperance that characterises sociology andthat spreads to the other ‘human sciences’ stems…from this twofoldcontradictory movement: a deliberate and forceful distancing from anyfamiliarity with what is real in order to achieve the distance and heightof Science, and a no less deliberate and forceful effort to recover thatfamiliarity.

(Pierre Manent, 1998: 55)

In this chapter we explore some of the ways theelements of a ‘science of risk’ are developedaround the theme of youth homelessness. Youthhomelessness first became an important, even ahigh profile issue for public discussion anddebate in the late 1980s. UNICEF in 1989estimated that globally there may be as many as100 million children and young people who werehomeless. Brian Burdekin’s report on thesituation in Australia in the late 1980s likewiseput the problem firmly onto the local publicagenda.

In Australia, like many other Westerncountries, we have seen the development andimplementation of projects directed towardsidentifying those at risk (and even those‘potentially at risk’) of homelessness (Neil &Fopp 1992; Hagan and McCarthy 1997; Cordray &Pion 1997; Chamberlain & Mackenzie 1998). Theprimary purpose of such projects is to provide abasis for effective intervention by policymakers, governments and the community sector, orwhat we call ‘government’.

In the emerging ‘science of risk’ there areparticular styles of cognition which ‘discover’problems in particular ways. Here we focus on theissues set loose by claims that both measuringthe extent of youth homelessness and the riskfactors involved, are essentially ‘empiricalproblems’ best addressed by the use ofconventional social science research techniques.In Australia one research project (Chamberlain &Mackenzie 1998) offers a useful basis forassessing the value of the ‘empirical researchpractice’ that underpins most risk research. Wewill analyse this in conjunction with a Canadianstudy of homeless young people in Toronto andVancouver (Hagan and McCarthy 1997) (Bessant2001).

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In effect, we want to show how research intohomelessness reveals how the problem, in thiscase of homelessness, comes to be constituted throughparticular styles of reasoning. As Dean and Hindess(1998: 9) note:

Problems become known through grids of evaluationand judgement about objects that are far from selfevident. The study of government thus entails thestudy of modes of reasoning.

We argue that there are good reasons not toaccept the proposition that the ‘empirical’research said to characterise the identificationof homelessness or the risk factors involved iscredible because it ostensibly reports in an‘objective’ fashion what is actually there.

Homeless young people

From the start, in each project we are invitedinto the authoritative and verifiable world ofthe modern social sciences. Chamberlain andMacKenzie’s first sentence informs us that: ‘Thisbook is the result of a research journey whichhas taken eight years’ (1998: vii). Based on asurvey that elicited responses from 99 percent ofsecondary schools, Chamberlain & Mackenzie (1998:ix) implemented a survey of 42,000 young peopleto identify those at ‘at risk’ of becominghomeless so as ‘to identify policies andpractices that enable early intervention’ toprevent youth homelessness. The assured voice ofmodern social science is present in theirconclusion that:

On the basis of these findings, it is possible tomake generalisations about the ‘at risk’ populationin most communities. In a typical city school with

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1000 students there will probably be about 100 to140 young people (10 to 14 per cent) who arepossibly at risk at any point in time, and this willinclude 40 to 60 students (four to six per cent) whoare seriously at risk. The latter group are likelyto be experiencing major problems in familyrelations. Most will not be happy at home, many willfeel unsafe, and some will be running away (1998:98).

Evident also is a scattering of tablesthroughout the Chamberlain and MacKenzie book,conveying a considerable amount of numericalinformation. Thus the reader is assured that theproduct of this research will provide a crediblebasis for identifying ‘youth at risk’. Thereader’s confidence is justified because bothprojects rely on legitimate social scientificmethods ie., empirical surveys of young people‘at risk’ of homelessness.

Chamberlain and Mackenzie: problems ofobjectivity

and the ‘magic kiss’

When social scientists acknowledge there isconsiderable controversy about the meaning of aconcept we cannot and should not expect thisproblem will be solved by an empirical exerciselike describing or measuring something thatexists (like the number of marbles in a bag).Social experiences like poverty, homelessness andunemployment do not have the kind of objectiveexistence that for example might characterise abag of marbles or a room full of chairs. Instead,these kinds of social issues depend on socialdefinitions about which there may be little or noconsensus. For example, it is not much good sayingthat unemployment is defined when people do nothave a job. This would include a vast number of

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people, beginning with babies, children and youngpeople. Lacking a simple objective status alsoimplies that it is no easy matter to go aroundcounting the numbers of people said to beunemployed or homeless. Accepting this seems tojar the confidence of some social scientists,creating an uncertainty about aspects of theirresearch program, and Chamberlain and Mackenzie(1998) appear to be no exception to this unease.

The critical retreat for social scientists whoadhere to ‘the principle’ of objectivity is theproposition that scientific method in some wayauthorises all the claims made by scientists.‘Scientific method’ legitimizes certain styles ofunderstanding above others. It depends onmeasurement, replicability, experimentalprocedures designed to isolate causalrelationships, and the generation of explanatory,predictive statements are recognized as thehallmarks of ‘scientific method’. In terms of‘scientific practice’ principles such asnaturalism, objectivism and operationalismoperate as authorized directives for goodresearch practice. Danziger calls this frameworkthe ‘Sleeping Beauty’ model (1990: 2).

According to this model, the objects thatscience operates with or seeks to ‘know’ alreadyexist, and only await the magic awakening kiss ofthe scientific researcher to animate them andbring them into the province of Knowledge.Durkheim’s account of the nature of socialscientific research is a good example ofDanziger’s point. Durkheim (Giddens 1994: 352)defending the ‘thing-like’ status of ‘socialfacts’ says:

What it demands is that the sociologist put himselfin the same state of mind as the physicists,

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chemists or physiologists when they enquire into ahitherto unexplored region of the scientific domainWhen he penetrates the social world, he must beaware that he is penetrating the unknown.

Practitioners of this model believe that the‘social facts’ already exist even if they have tobe uncovered. Because social facts are orderlyand actual entities means they can be measured,tested and described accurately, then subjectedto experimental (repeatable) procedures, for thepurpose of establishing invariant relationshipsof causality and/or probability. However, forentities that do not have these qualities, (like‘at riskness’) the processes of operationalizingthem mean that as abstract entities or as non-tangible phenomenon they can nonetheless berendered amenable to measurement, testing,description or experiment for the purpose ofestablishing relations of co-variance/invariance,etc.

This may explain why Chamberlain and MacKenzieoperate with such a high level of conceptualconfusion. This is revealed early when theyacknowledge (1998: 16-21) seriatim that:

there are many different definitions of‘homelessness’;

that some writers have argued there are nocorrect definitions and that the concept isarbitrary, not very helpful and/or shouldbe abandoned;

that certain definitions of homelessnesswhich depend on the ‘perceptions’ of youngpeople constitute an ‘extreme form ofrelativism’;

that this ‘relativism’ can

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…be overcome theoretically once it is recognized that‘homelessness’ and ‘inadequate housing’ are sociallyconstructed, cultural concepts that only make sensein a particular community at a given historicalperiod…it is a cultural construct, but this does notmean that ‘homelessness’ is just a matter ofopinion, or that all definitions are ‘arbitrary’(1998: 19) (authors’ stress).

Chamberlain and Mackenzie are eager to drape

themselves in the security of objectivity. Yetconfronted with considerable differences aboutwhat ‘homelessness’ or what ‘adequate housing’might mean, they resolve the puzzle in a‘classic’ way. Mackenzie and Chamberlain maintainthat an ‘objective’ ‘community standard’ existswhich reflects the standards of a particularculture or society regarding ‘homelessness’. Thusthey claim that:

…community standards are usually embedded in thehousing practices of a society. These identify theconventions and cultural expectations of a communityin an objective sense…(1998: 19).

This assumption enables the social scientistto empirically gather data to demonstrate what‘objectively’ that homelessness is, and this isachieved by identifying anything which fallsbelow ‘the standard’. This is actually highlyproblematic because it depends on claims aboutthe existence of a common, but not particularlyuseful, idea such as:

1. The notion a consensus exists in a‘society’ based on ‘shared communitystandards’ ‘according to [which] theconventions and expectations of aparticular culture’ can be specified aboutwhat in this case constitutes ‘adequate

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housing’ or ‘homelessness’ (Chamberlain andMacKenzie, 1998).

2. This claim depends on a prejudice shared bymany sociologists about the concept of aconsensual and singular ‘social system’called ‘society’ or ‘culture’.

This prejudice flies in the face of theproblem that societies like ours are marked byextreme inequalities in the distribution ofeconomic resources like income and wealth, orcapital, producing a very wide distribution inpeople’s capacity to consume goods and servicesor to sustain their life-styles. This is to saynothing about the no-less marked array ofculturally-grounded variations in social andeconomic aspiration. Thus any claim that there iseither a convening or a consensus about somethinglike ‘adequate housing’ is inherentlyproblematic. Chamberlain and Mackenzie do not tryto construct an index of homelessness; theysimply (1998: 20) assert that there is a‘benchmark’ or a ‘minimum community standard’, anassertion that is not actually demonstrated.

For social scientists like Chamberlain andMackenzie, their faith in the potency of‘research methodology’ offers some protectionfrom any danger to which the dreaded vapours of‘conceptual relativism’ might expose them.Central to that faith in social science researchmethodology which comprises the ‘naturalattitude’ are core assumptions such asphenomenalism (ie., that the concepts, entitiesor objects that a discipline seeks to ‘know’ areactually there’; this is the Durkeimian (Giddens1994: 351) postulate that ‘social facts’ musthave a ‘thingness’ to them, without which theycannot become an object of scientific knowledge.

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(By this Durkheim means that they should have no‘mental component’). ‘Social things’ must also beamenable to measurement and the phenomena shoulddisplay an innate orderliness and predicability.

The ‘natural attitude’ entertained byempiricists (and positivists) maintains that‘Reality’ or ‘Nature’ are simply there awaiting‘the magic kiss’ of the scientist-as-Prince-Charming (Danziger 1990). We say that all of thesciences work with constructive schemes whichmandate and regulate certain assumptions andpractices about what is to count as ‘real’ andabout what practices will produce credibleknowledge. Though empiricists hate to admit it,this also means that there is a range of‘scientific practices’ which are set up toovercome the problem that some things do notexist in any way that makes a problem amenable toempirical study.

Operationalising the category or model

These assumptions underpin the commitment topractices such as operationalisation,representation, measurement and repetition ofthose practices found in much social scientificresearch. Whatever social scientists who arecommitted to the ‘natural attitude’ say aboutthese practices they are ultimately discursiveand social in nature:

The sentences in textbooks, the tables and figuresin research reports, the patterned activities inresearch laboratories are first of all products ofhuman construction whatever else they may be as well(Danziger 1990: 2).

Operationalism involves using a category forwhich there is no actual empirical referent (like

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‘homelessness’ or ‘at riskness’). It involvesestablishing criteria that allows the researchprocess to develop and define the phenomenon tobe ‘discovered’ and then ‘measured’. AsChamberlain & Mackenzie (1998) explain, thecategory of ‘at risk’, helps to grasp theotherwise ‘elusive concept of ‘at risk’. Thereader also learn that any ‘at risk’ index needsto be identified numerically ‘because it isnecessary to make a quantitative assessment ofthe at risk population…’(1998: 89).

Evident here is the enactment of a standardinconsistency by empiricist researchers who areconcerned with ‘objectivity’ and the need todemonstrate that their work is ‘empirical’.

This is despite the reality that the categoryof ‘at risk’ is not empirical. Yet, this seems tobe a relatively minor problem given that records,tables, indexes and a variety of measurementprocesses are there to convince the laityotherwise. How did they do this?

They explain:

Our task was to design a survey to be filled out bysecondary students in a classroom situation, whichcould identify young people who might be at risk.In order to do this it was necessary tooperationalize the concept of ‘at risk’ in a simpleway, and to develop questions that would be easilycomprehensible to students from Years 7 to 12(1998: 91).

Perhaps it can be said in Chamberlain andMackenzie’s’ favour that unlike their NorthAmerican counterparts, they did at leastdemonstrate an awareness of the need, accordingto their own intellectual framework, to

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articulate the categories they were examining.Then again Chamberlain and MacKenzie needed to dothis because their research is so much moreabstracted than the work of Hagan and McCarthywho were actually spending time with, and talkingto, the young people they were trying to find outabout.

All this raises the question about how suchresearchers establish the ‘risk factors’ and thusthe substance of the questions? Chamberlain andMacKenzie do not say how explicitly, but it seemsthey used the ‘judgments’ of certain welfareteachers at schools about what they saw as riskfactors. They refer to this when explaining that‘our operational definition of ‘at risk’ isgrounded in ‘the first order experience of theseworkers’ (1998: 90). These ‘judgments’ are saidto be far better than the ‘perceptions’ of theyoung people they criticize as being so‘relativistic’.

Most of these ‘risk factors’ allegedly relatedto ‘the family situation’. Using the ‘riskfactors’ identified and with access to ‘a complexbody of qualitative information’, and using thefact that many months, if not years, of datacollection and analysis have been invested inChamberlain and MacKenzie’s project, the socialscientists are well situated to construct asurvey instrument using five questions scoredfrom zero (no risk) to two (at risk) which askedthings like ‘Have you run away from home in thepast twelve months’? or ‘Do you feel safe athome? (Chamberlain and Mackenzie, 1998).

Even if the most simple criteria are used,namely that there has been an attempt toarticulate what the links are between the alleged‘at risk’ factors ‘known to be associated withhealth related [or social] condition[s]

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considered important to prevent’, Chamberlain andMackenzie (1998) have not been successful. Theydo not establish any links that could supporttheir claim that they identified a population of‘at risk’ young people.

It is worth noting that Chamberlain andMackenzie appear to be offering a kind of riskassessment based on epidemiological research.xiii

Typically, epidemiological research attempts toidentify the ‘risk factors’ for a wide rangeof social or health problems as well asuncovering any underlying aetiology of life-styleillnesses or epidemic infections. Rigorousepidemiological research involves establishingthat:

…an aspect of personal behaviour or lifestyle, anenvironmental exposure, or an inborn or inheritedcharacteristic…on the basis of epidemiologicalevidence is known to be associated with healthrelated [or social] condition[s] consideredimportant to prevent (Last 1988: 115-6).

xiii

Notes? Different types of research operate within the epidemiological research program. They include: 1. ‘case studies’ researching people who have a particular problem, 2. ‘correlation studies’ which survey the entire population for correlations between factors a, b, & c and the problem;3. ‘cross sectional surveys’ which sample surveys a completepopulation; or 4. a ‘cohort study ‘ which selects a part of a population byage or ethnicity etc

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Unfortunately, the research performed byChamberlain and Mackenzie does not attempt tomeet, let alone, pass this test. They have triedto advance the proposition that they can useaggregate data about large numbers of people andthen apply that data or any findings from it to aparticular person arguing that the individual is‘at risk’. This is a completely unwarrantedprocedure. The reasoning used in this exerciseinvolves taking from the epidemiological researchwhich may show certain average values ordeviations from the norm (based on investigationsof large numbers of individual cases) and thenturning to an actual single individual and sayingto that person ‘ Because you exhibit factors a, band c you are at risk of X’. Such an assessmentmeans moving from measures of central tendencylike averages to particular cases. As Gouldargues, it relies on a peculiar jump in logic. Asa statistician, Gould reminds us that:

…reality is composed of varying individuals inpopulations and that variation itself is irreducible(1996: 3).

As Gould explains, ‘Central tendency is anabstraction, variation on the reality’ (1996: 48-9). In other words, moving from a claim that X istrue of the whole group to the claim that X isalso true for each single member of the groupcannot be done. Yet even these useful preliminarywarnings do not fully prepare us for whatChamberlain and Mackenzie offer (1998). ForChamberlain and MacKenzie, the risk factors areto be made known by asking questions like ‘…whether the young person has…run away from homein the past twelve months?’ (1998: 91). (Running

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away they argue is ‘usually a sign of seriousproblems at home’). The researchers simply assertthat:

In most cases where a young person is at risk thereis a serious problem in family relations (1998: 91).

This statement is made without anyjustification or evidence, nor is there anindication given about whether or not those youngpeople who reported these circumstances didactually leave home. What any of this actuallyrefers to, or why it should be regarded asconvincing is not made clear. They have, in oneact of omission, ignored the central requirementinvolved: (Last 1988: 115-6)—identifying a ‘riskfactor’ involves establishing that some aspect ofpersonal behaviour or lifestyle or environmentalexposure, or an inborn or inheritedcharacteristic, which on the basis ofepidemiological evidence can be associated withhealth related [or social] conditions in factexists.

The next step in securing objectivity (ie.measurement) is to assign a particular riskfactor a numerical weight so that the overalldegree of ‘at riskness’ can be ‘accuratelydetermined’. As Chamberlain and Mackenzieexplain:

A young person who had run away scored two, andthose who had not scored zero. The second questionasked…whether they felt ‘safe at home’. Everyone whodid not feel safe scored two (Chamberlain &Mackenzie 1998: 91).

Other questions to be asked include whetherthey ‘get into a lot of conflict’ with parentsand would they like to move out soon, or whetherthey ‘feel happy at home’ or not.

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Scores are kept from nought, one or twodepending on the answer (Chamberlain andMacKenzie, 1989: 91). ‘Taken together, (thereader is told) these five questions provide anindicator of current family circumstances’ andthus the level of risk of homelessness the youngperson faces (Chamberlain and Mackenzie, 1998:91).

In their analysis, Mackenzie and Chamberlainsub-divided the youth cohort into countryregions, major regional city areas, middle class,traditional working class, and a ‘new workingclass’ (located in the corridor outskirts of thecity), Non-English-Speaking Background families,Anglo-Australians and Australian Aboriginals(1998: 92-97). This means the proportion of thosemost at risk can be developed and the riskfactors of children from specific backgroundsmore readily identified by reference to theirethnic or socio-economic status. If, for example,you are seen as belonging to the ‘new’ or‘traditional’ working class, then you aremeasured as being at a far higher risk of beinghomeless than a young person from a ‘middleclass’ background (1998: 95).

Not only are there problems with many of theassumptions underlying the questions asked, butthere are also difficulties with the assumptionsunderlying the categories used. For categorieslike ‘middle class’, or ‘traditional workingclass’ to be operationalized assumes theexistence of actually homogenous groups whoseexperiences can be isolated from othergroups/classes and whose members actually doshare characteristics. Inherent in suchcategories is an assumption about the existenceof a homogeneity, or general essence or traitshared by all members of the specified group.

Risk and Homelessness: An Empirical Problem?

While it is true that many groups of peopleshare some specific experiences, there is aquestion whether we can extend those quitespecific commonalities to talk about a ‘middleclass’ or ‘traditional working class’ or ‘rural’young people.

Hagan and McCarthy on Canadian homelessnessyouth

In Canada in the late 1980s two researchers,John Hagan and Bill McCarthy (1997) initiated aresearch program taking the lives andexperiences of young homeless people in Torontoand Vancouver as their principal focus. Haganand McCarthy are primarily interested indeveloping a ‘criminological research project’that takes seriously the experiences of youngpeople who are homeless. There are many salutarydifferences between their work and that ofChamberlain and Mackenzie -and some worryingsimilarities.

Hagan and McCarthy argue that ‘…street youthare not a significant focus for contemporarycriminology.’ They are interested in ‘peering’into the ‘black box’ of street crime to point topossible ‘indicators of criminal opportunities’and promisingly they say they want to documentthe experiences of the young people. In this oneregard, Hagan and McCarthy mark an importantmove beyond the tired and largely-irrelevantwork of researchers who work on captiveresearch-targets in schools to construct theirindex of ‘at riskness’ about youth issues. (Thisremark applies to Chamberlain and Mackenzie’swork in which they use ‘self-reports’ from youngpeople somewhat, and the reports of experts inthe schooling system much more, to tell us about

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the risk of homelessness). Hagan and McCarthy ‘sbook is an argument for returning to the street-scene and for renewing attention to itsimplications for understanding crime’ (Hagan andMcCarthy, 1997: 21). This at least seems to beheading in the right sort of direction

The best parts of the book are those partswhere they step back and let the young peoplespeak for themselves. This act of self-denial onthe part of an academic cohort long-wedded tosocial ventriloquism is very hard for socialscientists to practice-though the wisdom ofless-talking and-more-listening has recentlyreceived the imprimatur of no less a sociologistthan Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu et al 1999: 607-27).xiv Even so ,Hagan and McCarthy (1997: 24)insist on weaving their own categories(‘incompatability with family and step familymembers, disrupted and dysfunctional families,neglectful parents, coercive and abusiveparents, parental rejection…‘) into the vividstories told by the young people ‘contained inthe respondent’s own descriptions of theirexperiences’.

Yet there are worrying signs aplenty, evidentespecially in Hagan and McCarthy’s proposal todrop a complex web of ‘scientific’ statisticaland comparative analyses over that experience soas to draw out the ‘causal variable’ that canenable them to better identify the ‘socialforces’ both ‘ontogenetic’ and ‘sociogenic’,that impell the young people onto the streets.The possibility that the young people’s storiessay plainly that they found themselves in agiven situation and chose what seemed to themthe best or only course of action is far lessscientific a finding than Hagan and McCarthy’scomplex references to ‘bivariate coefficients’.

Risk and Homelessness: An Empirical Problem?

It is not for nothing that in the foreword totheir book, Short observes that theirs is an‘all-too rare combination of rigoroustheoretical and empirical enquiry applied to asignificant research problem’. De-coded, Shortmeans to say that the book offers a thick pasteof criminological and sociological myths(‘rigorous theoretical inquiry’) heavily relianton an endless stream of metaphors presented andoperationalised as if the metaphors actuallydenominate the thick textures of reality(‘rigorous empirical inquiry’).

As Hagan and McCarthy (1997: 4) indicate inthat complacent way modern social scientistshave about them ‘…attention to sampling,measurement and sophisticated multivariateanalysis has increasingly dominatedcriminological research.’ Such variables, theyargue have a sizeable and direct effect on alltypes of criminal activity and will thereforeenable them to ‘intervene between our foregroundmeasure of situational adversity (ie., nights onthe streets) and crime’ (Hagan and McCarthy,1997: 135). What they are actually doing issetting loose a powerful and unresolved tensionbetween the research which we think makes theirwork genuinely valuable (ie., the insights intolived experience) and the flight from theempirical where they posit measurementtechnologies (represented for example, byrelentless operationalising and measurement ofvariables and categories) which constitute theirkind of empirical research. Equally, thehighfalutin talk about using theoreticalconstructs like social class or theoreticalmodels like control and strain theories,represents no gain in terms of assisting us topay attention to people’s lives, but offers

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these social scientists another excuse to fleethose people’s lives and the actual socialsetting in which homelessness becomes a part ofcontemporary social experience.

Hagan and McCarthy (1997: 11) engage in theusual exercises in conceptual clarification thatmark out the abstracted nature of much socialscientific research which is based on thepractice of operationalisation. They note thatthe term ‘youth’ applies to people ‘roughlybetween the ages of fifteen and twenty four’(1998: 11). On homelessness, the usualequivocations are present but they areruthlessly suppressed. Noting that there aredifferences between young people who are ‘on’the street ie., who work on the streets but whoreturn at night or on weekends to their familyand those who are ‘of’ the streets ie., who haveno family to return to, Hagan and McCarthydecide to banish any reference to the reasonswhy young people are not living at home and theyadopt the simple and inclusive criterion ‘doesnot have a permanent address’ as the mark of thehomeless young person.

To say that they are dependent on an utterlyconventional account of ‘crime’ is hardlysufficient to distinguish them from thethousands of other conventional criminologists.So once again we are invited to take a ‘walk onthe wild side’ and observe and ‘tut-tut’ at ‘thelow life’ as they engage in minor and serioustheft, assault, prostitution and drug-use. AsHagan and McCarthy observe, mustering an awfullot of moral seriousness:

We find that 46 percent of the homeless respondentsmade drug sales, 49 percent stole goods valued up to$50 and 27 percent broke into homes and businesses.

Risk and Homelessness: An Empirical Problem?

Ultimately however, they cannot resist theurge to measure and compare, and the result is aprofligacy of categories, operationalised andmeasured, in which their own social prejudices -largely unacknowledged by the researchers assuch, co-mingle with the lived experiences ofthe young people. Given that Hagan and McCarthyare interested in young people already on thestreet to determine the likelihood of themengaging in criminal activities, we see adifferent set of indicators emerge, (ie.,employment status of parent, whether the familyis ‘intact’, ‘erratic parenting’, ‘explosiveparenting’, school involvement and involvementin theft) (ibid: 63-64).

They use a class matrix derived from Erik OlinWright’s (1985) class model, comprising the‘surplus population’ (identified by anunemployed head of family), workers, petty-bourgeois, managers and employers. There areseveral unhappy features about their classmodel.

Firstly, they find no trouble in agreeing withWright (1985: 137) when he writes that:

All things being equal, all units within a givenclass should be more like each other than like unitsin other classes with respect to whatever it is that class is meantto explain.

This prime piece of gobbledygook entirelyblanks out any recognition (found eg., in thework of E. P. Thompson) that class is arelational category in which real people produceand reproduce real social practices infigurations. Instead their model licences a kindof determinist heuristic which first constructsthen ‘explains’ categories like ‘crime’,

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‘delinquency’ or ‘anti-social behaviours’ as ifthese are objective behavioural correlates whichjust are. There is no reflexive understanding ofhow these categories are produced as categoriesby particular agents or their social practicesin a given class setting. That is, there is,again, no reflexive treatment of the categoriesbeing used and manipulated; an act ofextraordinary amnesia given the tradition ofsocial critique associated with the symbolicinteractionist tradition about the production ofsocial categories involved in statisticalenumeration as with Ciccourel (1968) .

Secondly, and undeterred by any of theseconsiderations, Hagan and McCarthy march boldlyon to announce their commitment to themeasurement of class categories, and thecorrelation of class, with their own model ofstrain and control theories:

For example we categorise a family in which oneparent is a supervisor and the other a worker, asbelonging to the supervisor class regardless of thegender of the person working as a supervisor…

Why this should be a useful way of approachingclass, let alone why they embrace the conceitinvolved in ‘measuring’ ‘class’, is neverexplained: presumably, this is all too self-evident to warrant any explication.

We do not doubt that ‘class’, which as acategory has almost disappeared from the modernsocial sciences, is an important idea whendeployed in ways that recognise the principlesof interconnection and the effects of aradically unequal distribution of economic,political and intellectual resources and thereliance on practical and symbolic violence

Risk and Homelessness: An Empirical Problem?

involved in maintaining a class order. That is,there is a strong case for developing a fullysocial account of class as a relational categorywhich requires researchers to pay attention tothe inter-relations between economic, politicaland intellectual practices and the distributionof access to these resources.

This is not what Hagan and McCarthy offer. Forthem ‘class’ is a category deployed so as toreplicate once more, what William Ryan (1975)indicted as the strategy of ‘blaming thevictim’. ‘Class’ for Hagan and McCarthy is aboutthe idea that some classes, especially thesurplus population, produce antisocialbehaviours, beginning with bad parenting thatthen generate ‘onto-genetically’ and ‘socio-genically’, youth homelessness and then crime.

Like so much of this dismal tradition, theyoffer a simple set of identities betweenpoverty, belonging to the ‘surplus population’and the anti-social dispositions that membershipin that class group seems to entail. Hagan andMcCarthy’s use of the category ‘surpluspopulation’ is profoundly shaming to socialscience and needs to be apologised for: We needto recollect the use made in other societies ofcategories like ‘life unworthy of living’ or‘the asocials’ to feel that here is any evidenceof ethical sensitivity or social responsibilityin their use of language. For Hagan andMcCarthy, class positions exist only to becorrelated with measures for an ‘intact family’,understood in terms of two biological parents,and a range of measures designed to establishthe presence of factors like ‘erraticparenting’, ‘explosive violence’ and ‘levels ofschool involvement and commitment’.

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This leads to what for them is the inescapableconclusion that ‘harsh class backgroundexperiences cause crime…that youth from surpluspopulations are more likely to take to thestreets and that the experience of street lifeitself increases serious theft’ (1997:77)

What again the particular discursivetechniques and practices of empiricist socialscience reproduce in their work is a ‘black box’explanation typically found in what used to becalled the ‘culture of class/poverty’ tradition.Like other and earlier exponents of thattradition, Hagan and McCarthy offer upexplanations couched in terms of thedeficiencies and deficits of the families andclass groups from which the homeless youngpeople are drawn. All of the problems which areused to ‘explain’ why some young people becomehomeless are located in the specific anddeficient patterns of class, family andschooling life. In effect, as when Hagan andMcCarthy (1997: 56) suggest that ‘parentaleconomic problems can lead to the mistreatmentof children and youths’ we rely on them findinga ‘positive association between parentalunemployment and parental violence to children’,also that ‘poverty increases the risk of harshinconsistent punishment’ or that ‘family incomeloss and instability are linked to neglectfuland volatile parenting’ we are invited tocontemplate the ‘otherness’ of the surpluspopulation and their engrained antisocialtendencies.

Hagan and McCarthy are simply unable tosatisfactorily locate these experiences in afully and comprehensively developed account of asocial setting in which for example., the actsof commission and omission on the part of

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governments, police forces, the mass media,welfare agencies, schools, or corporations playany role in producing the social experience ofhomelessness. If, with Richard Rorty, we stopasking ‘is it true?’ (as a prelude to one moreattempt to secure some epistemic certainty bymethodological means) and ask ‘what is it goodfor?’ then the answer has to be: ‘not much’.Ultimately, like so much social science of thisilk, Hagan and McCarthy are more interested inshowing off their command of the whizzbangery oftheir ‘explanatory variables’ and theirundoubted skill at deploying ‘logistics’ and‘probit estimates’ (1997: 91-101) to an audienceof other social scientists than in offering thewider community insight and understanding towhat is undoubtedly a major social problem.

Conclusion

In the nineteenth century Thomas Carlylereferred to economics as the ‘dismal science’.Without doubting the continuing salience of thatanimadversion, we would add that in the twentiethcentury ‘empirical sociology’ can make a late bidto be included in that characterisation. ThePolish writer, Tadeusz Borowski once suggestedthat the prime task facing him was to ‘develop alanguage capable of expressing human experiencein verifiable language’. The preoccupation with‘scientific methodology’ as we have tried to showhere does not necessarily deliver that capacity.As Lepenies (1988) has shown, there has long beena debate within the social sciences between theclaims of a hermeneutic and literary traditionand the claims of a science of society whichsought to ape the proper sciences of nature. Theapplication of those scientific methods in regard

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Risk and Homelessness: An Empirical Problem?96

to the determination of ‘at riskness’ haslicensed a profligate, unreflective and carelessproliferation of social research categories whichdo not aid insight nor do they aid the practicaldetermination of policies capable of generatinganything more than ‘bright ideas’ when what isneeded are ‘good ideas’.

Chapter Four: Crime and the Science of Risk

Have you read any criminology texts? They are staggering. And I saythis out of astonishment, not aggressiveness, because I fail tocomprehend how the discourse of criminology has been able to go onat this level. One has the impression that it is of such utility, is needed…for the working of the system that it does not even need to seek atheoretical justification for itself.

(Michel Foucault, 1980: 47-8)

Contemporary debates about crime have beeninformed by the idea that liberal-democraticsocieties are now confronted either by the ‘fact’of significant levels of ‘crime’ or an increasing‘crime rate’ (Garland 1996). The so-called ‘crimeproblem’ is said to be pervasive, all-consumingand a grave risk to all Australians (Hogg & Brown1998). We argue that there is little evidence tojustify the popular anxiety about crime and ideathat we confront an ‘epidemic of crime’ or acrime rate that is ‘out of control’. The factthat there is little evidence to justify suchanxiety has had little if any effect ongovernments in Australia: governments have foundit convenient to ‘get tough’ on crime byintroducing a range of punitive ‘law and order’measures like mandatory sentencing.

Juvenile crime has come in for particularattention, with many state and territorygovernments in Australia promoting draconianpolicies that too often breach internationalconventions on human rights (Sidoti 1998).Governments also talk about getting tough on the

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‘causes of crime’, leading to the introduction ofvisible and repressive forms of governance in theshape of punitive laws and highly visible formsof crime prevention. It is in such a setting thatrisk has become a central category in much of ourcontemporary social science research and inpolicy-making.

In this chapter we look at the first of twocase studies, the first Australian, the second,English, which is discussed in Chapter Five, toanalyse how the idea of risk has been used incriminological studies about crime and its likelycauses and strategies for prevention.

The Australian experience

Most Australian criminologists (and those workingin cognate disciplines like sociology andpsychology) who research ‘delinquency’ orjuvenile crime believe they are doing ‘empiricalresearch’. Much of this research is designed toshed light on why some young people do ‘it’, andis done in the hope that it might assistgovernments, police or welfare agencies todevelop possible responses to, or even ‘prevent’the problem. Our view is that most of this‘empirical’ research does not actually engagewith young people and the kinds of ‘action’ and‘experience’ which constitute the activity beingscrutinised Rather, much of this research either(i) seeks to generate ‘objective’ data as apreliminary to generating the analysis of co-variance or else (ii) to analyze or otherwisemanipulate the data produced by state police

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agencies or the Australian Bureau of Statistics.In either case, the operating assumptionsunderpinning these research interventions are, aswe have been arguing, the work of a conventionalmodel of social science.

Conventional criminologists, psychologists andsociologists assume inter alia that (a) ‘crime’ andthe ‘crime rate’ are objective and stable ‘socialfacts’ and (b), that actors are constrained toact in ways which structural variables likesocio-economic status, education level, sub-cultural contexts, biological factors or familystatus) impel them to do. In effect as PierreManent (1998: 54) indicates, all such attempts to‘know’ reality are underwritten by the‘sociological viewpoint’ which they rely on andwhich:

…adopts the viewpoint of the spectator. Theviewpoint of the spectator is all the more pure andscientific in that it accords no real initiativewhatever to the agent or agents, but considers theiractions or their works as the necessary effect ofnecessary causes.

We think it would be better if social researcherspaid more attention to a social phenomenology of‘action’, feeling and ‘experience’ (Katz 1988)situated in real figurations (Elias 1987) whichcould provide the core conceptual and ‘empirical’focus for a reconstituted and revivedsociological enterprise.

As Flyvbjerg (2000) argues, such a

reconstituted social science would be lesspreoccupied with aping the physical sciences, or

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be fussed about securing its epistemologicalguarantees of truth or objectivity and

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be more preoccupied with recognising anddeveloping the capacity for ‘practicaljudgement’. However, our intention here is not tomount an argument about how to do this or why itwould be worth doing. Rather, we want here toshow in what ways the emerging science of risksits within the contemporary government project.Investigations of the government project call for

the study of problematisations; analysis of the social or institutional siteof the problematisation process; analysis of particular styles of reasoning. We do this by focussing on three recentexemplary research reports including: the Criminal Justice Commission (1992) reportYouth, Crime and Justice in Queensland the Commonwealth Government’s National CrimePrevention project (1999) report, Pathways toPrevention. the Juvenile Justice Program (1999) of theQueensland Department of Family, Youth andChildren Issues Paper, Causes of Juvenile Delinquency.

The study of problematisations: The crimeproblem

If we begin with the study of problematisations weshould ask how the qualities of the problem arebeing identified and established, and what issaid about the attributes of those who are beinggoverned?

In 1992 the Criminal Justice Commission (1992)released a report Youth, Crime and Justice in Queensland.xvThe Criminal Justice Commission report (1992) isabout the ‘practical-administrative’ aspects ofcrime control. That is, it is concerned withdeveloping specific programs to deal with the

‘small section of the population’ who are‘disproportionately represented in the criminalpopulation’ (O’Connor 1992: 63). The knowledgegained through the research is designed tosupport a ‘targeted approach’ to work withoffenders and their families. With the data inhand, the task for policy makers andpractitioners is then to draw on that materialwhen planning systems of intervention thataddress the specific ‘needs’ of those under theformal supervision of governmental agencies.

In terms of characterising their own approachto the ‘crime problem’ the Criminal JusticeCommission identifies the risk category with apolitically ‘progressive’ approach to crimecontrol. They identify as ‘progressive’ suchthings as the development of crime preventionprograms and the pursuit of communityalternatives to custody which are seen asoffering a less-harmful approach to juvenilejustice than more punitive and retributiveapproaches.

As to the nature of the problem they areaddressing, the Criminal Justice Commission notesthat there are numerous competing explanations ofjuvenile crime and that theories of juvenilecrime deriving from such epistemological anchorshave tended to inform policy and practice in theadministration of juvenile justice over recentdecades (Queensland Criminal Justice Commission1992: 49-53). In seeking ways of dealing withjuvenile crime the authors of the report cite thework of Potas, Vining and Wilson (1990) whooutline a range of programs specifically designedfor ‘at risk’ offenders. (It also cites theFrench government’s (now defunct) Bonnemaisoncrime prevention program and other initiatives inthe areas of pre-school and employment training

(for instance, the Perry pre-school and the ‘JobCorp’ programs) as ‘non-coercive and integrated’approaches to crime management (O’Connor 1992:55). Such projects, although apparently‘successful’ in reducing crime rates (albeit forlimited periods and under certain conditions) arenonetheless discussed in terms of theirusefulness as prevention projects for at riskyoung people. In other words, it is the controlof crime and the preservation of social orderthat takes precedence over all other matters.

Along the way the Criminal Justice Commission(1992) ignores several well-understood problems.They slide over the socially constructed natureof the ‘crime problem’. The ‘crime problem’ isdiscussed as if official government statisticsprovide an unequivocally objective ‘picture’ ofthe problem. The Criminal Justice Commission alsoassumes that the ‘population’ in question isdiscrete, readily identifiable and suitable forappropriate state intervention, even though thereport fails to identify which population it hasin mind.

At the centre of such considerations aretaken-for-granted categories of ‘crime andcriminality. The crimes of the urban poor havealways been defined as more consistent and a moreserious threat to social order than for examplethe crimes of state or corporate officials.‘Street crime’ is regarded as more visible,immediate and potent in terms of underminingsocial order. The very definition of whatconstitutes ‘crime’ continues to reflect thedisparities, ambiguities and relativistic natureof such conceptions in the liberal state. (Thisapplies particularly in the arena of corporatecrime where breaches of the law are dealt with bycivil courts or commissions of inquiry rather

than in the criminal courts). The problematicnature of such statistics regarding theconstruction of the ‘juvenile crime problem’ isglossed over. Inevitably, this avoids questionsrelating to the way in which systems of crimecontrol are assembled to manage crimes of theurban and rural poor (Hudson 1993, Carrington1992, Bessant 1998). It overlooks too, evidenceof the pervasive nature of crime across allsections of the population. In this way theReport adds weight to the technicist approach tojuvenile crime control in which calculations ofrisk are seen as central to the design ofpreventive programs in supposedly ‘crime-prone’neighbourhoods and communities.

With such matters in mind, the phenomenologistAlfred Schutz (1986) launched (in 1940) acritique of the ‘nihilism of modernism’. Inasking where social researchers got theircategories from, Schutz posed a central questionabout the politics of discourse of which mostempiricists appear unable to answer or even torecognise the point.

Constituting the crime problem

Seven years on and not much will have changed.In March 1999, the Commonwealth Government’sNational Crime Prevention (1999) project teamreleased its report, Pathways to Prevention. Again thecentral organising concept in the document is‘risk’, identified in a host of individual,familial, community and social factors.xvi

Again in characterising the nature of theproblem (‘juvenile crime’) and their approach toit, the authors of the report embrace aprogressive crime prevention framework informedby an ‘enlightened social scientific’ research

project committed to social inclusion andcitizenship (National Crime Prevention 1999: 5).Equally firmly they reject what they call aconservative ‘law and order’ diagnosis based on‘single-cause’ explanations like bad genes ordysfunctional parenting. They also reject simplepunitive responses like increased police powersand mandatory sentencing.

The report is grounded in the very modern andpopular discourse of risk. Accordingly they arguethat:

…the roots of criminal offending are complex andcumulative…embedded in social as well as personalhistories. To uncover significant risk factors thatare the facilitating conditions for entry into acriminal career requires a life course perspectivethat views each young offender as someone who isdeveloping over the life course and in specificsocial settings.

On this basis, the report (1999: 5) develops acase for ‘crime control’ strategies based on thepromise to reveal:

…scientifically persuasive evidence…thatinterventions early in life can have long termimpacts on crime and other social problems such assubstance abuse.xvii

In constructing the problem of juvenile‘crime’, the authors of the 1999 report, liketheir many predecessors, take for granted thefundamental categories like ‘crime’ and ‘youth’.

Crime has long been constituted byconventional criminologists largely as conductassociated with ‘the poor’ the ‘urban workingclass’ and/or ‘young people’. All that remainsfor the criminologist is to record, catalogue,classify and report on the nature and extent of

the ‘crime problem’ (Garland 1997). This approachto the study of crime characterised not only theindividualistic focus of neo-classicalcriminology at the end of the nineteenth centurybut also the early sociological forays into‘street corner’ crime and delinquency associatedwith the Chicago school of the 1920s (Taylor,Walton & Young 1973: 91-138). In the late 1990swhen the ‘crime problem’ is thought about, andwhen official statistics are drawn on to informaccounts of ‘increasing crime’, the idea of crimeis associated with the ‘traditional’ offences ofthe urban poor: robbery, theft, burglary, assaultor drunkenness and so forth along with moremodern crimes like drug abuse (Garland 1996).

The 1999 Report struggles ineffectuallyagainst this conventional bias. On the one handit argues that the conservative law ‘n’ ordertradition is:

… exclusionary, presupposing a core of ‘decentpeople’ distinct from a criminal element that mustbe contained if it cannot be excluded…

This is a problem because as ‘progressives’ theyknow that the:

…developmental perspective is inclusive, embeddingpotential young offenders in their families andembedding their families in the wider society(National Crime Prevention 1999: 5).

Yet this insight is quickly forgotten. TheReport soon makes it plain that the kinds ofcrime, and the kind of population in which theyare interested, are in essence the crimes of theurban poor. In coded language for the‘underclass’, the Report makes it clear whichpopulation should be the targets of intervention.This is evident when it is noted eg., that:

…a number of conditions are strongly related tojuvenile participation in crime, poverty, soleparent families and crowded dwellings-takentogether- account for 56% of the variance…in a pathanalysis, poverty, sole parent families and crowdeddwellings emerge as influencing juvenileparticipation in crime…(National Crime Prevention1999: 40).

The population under study is thus identifiedin terms of criminogenic (‘at risk’) life styles.State officials direct their attentions towardsthis population, irrespective of whether suchintervention is desired or warranted -or not. Noeffort is made in the Report to theorise theconnection between policing (in its broadestsense) and criminalisation, or to examine thediscursive practices that have led to such anintense scrutiny of those living in poverty inurban areas. Rather,a technical approach to riskmanagement is proposed to fix the crime problemas identified by the Report. Questions ofgovernmental mismanagement and the failure of‘social responsibility’ in catering for theravages of the restructuring process or thefailure of governments to invest in social andphysical infrastructure are glossed overentirely. Instead, the state directs itsdisciplinary gaze at the most powerless sectionsof our society under the pretext of ‘crimeprevention’.

The formation and shaping of identity

The study of modes of government also attemptsto identify the formation and shaping of the identities, capacitiesand statuses of members of the population, in this case ofyoung people. In the new science of risk,identifying the problem represented by young

people begins by pointing to the number of ‘atrisk’ types of young person (DFYCC 1998: 1).

The foundational assumptions of modernistcriminology are writ large in the way thepathways to ‘delinquency’ and ‘criminality’ areidentified by the authors of the Pathways toPrevention Report. In a fashion long-rendered‘normal’ by modernist social science survey-basedresearch, as well as by questionnaires carried inpopular magazines, the paper identifies different‘types’ of ‘offender’:

the ‘non-offender’, the ‘child who falls in with the wrong crowd’, the ‘mischief child’ the ‘mild offender’ (ie. at risk)’, the ‘serious offender’.

The ‘non-offender’ has few if any law-breakingfriends, participates far more in, and enjoysschool activities, is well disposed to the policeand law, has a mild temper and is optimisticabout the future. The non-offender is also‘materially advantaged’ and ‘likely to have apositive attitude to upholding conventionalnorms’.

The ‘mild offender’ is ‘at risk’ of becoming a‘serious offender’. This ‘type’ of young personis one who falls in with the ‘wrong crowd’ orthey are simply a ‘mischief child’. He/she hassome of the characteristics of the seriousoffender, although in a less developed andhardened form. The ‘mischief child’ operates moreindependently and spontaneously than other youngpeople and they are like to engage in ‘foolishand impulsive…and rarely repeated’ nuisancebehaviours. He/she has a high level ofconcentration, is prone to thrill seeking, gets

angry easily and is occasionally ‘uncontrollable’(DFYCC 1998: 3-5). The ‘thrill-seeking’ and‘high-temper’ characteristics of potentialoffenders are apparently reinforced by loyalassociations with law-breaking friends and‘negative attitudes to the police and law’ (DFYCC1998: 3).

Finally there is the ‘serious offender’. Theidentikit of this ‘type’ is constructed in termsof such personal characteristics as

a disposition to ‘thrill-seeking’ and ‘high-temper’ ‘non-participation in conventional schoolactivities’, lack of adherence to ‘conventional norms’ difficulties in or reluctance to participatein ‘conventional activities’.

The ‘serious offender’ eg., is described aslikely to ‘have friends who break the law’. He orshe has ‘a negative attitude to the police andthe law’, enjoys ‘thrill seeking’, ‘finds it hardto trust and depend on others, tends to worryabout people getting to know them too well,believe that they should not bother people withtheir problems’, has a ‘short temper’, ispessimistic about the future, is ‘materiallydisadvantaged’ and has already been in contactwith the juvenile justice system.

There are at least two fundamental problemswith this account of the identities of the youngpeople being characterised in terms of ‘types’.

There is the sweeping nature of the typologieswhich suggests an inability to appreciate thegenuine complexity of human experience. The veryattempt to slot the answers given by the researchsubject’s responses into preconceived categories

works against any in-depth understanding of thedimensions of lived experience. It is doubtfulwhether a self-administered (and excessively longand intrusive) questionnaire like that used inthe Sibling Study can draw out the complexmeanings and experiences of young people. Thismitigates against any appreciation of theattitudes and values on the part of real youngpeople, let alone the basis of their attitudes,for example to the police.

Is it possible if one probes a little deeper,that most young people entertain complex sets ofideas about the police, and that many youngpeople might support police intervention in someinstances and oppose it in others? It is alsolikely that some young people’s experiences ofthe police—perhaps as a result of being ‘movedon’, harassed or abused or treated unfairly bythem—may have some bearing on the way policeofficers are perceived by some young people(White 1994). This is different from the starkalternatives set up by the ‘attitudes’ inventoryin the Sibling Study where the choice is betweena ‘positive’ or a ‘negative’ view of police.Identifying attitudes (eg., to police, parents,school, is given the weight it is presumablybecause of the assumption that the attitude leadsdirectly to an action; this is a most imprudentassumption. Worse, much of this kind of researchdenies young people any capacity for agency.Rather, they become ‘cultural dopes’ constrainedto act in limited ways both by their own‘psychological’ dispositions and/or by certain‘social structural factors’ to do with gender,ethnicity, socio-economic background and soforth.

Moreover, this kind of research neitheridentifies nor defends its assumption that the

clustering of attributes according to certain‘types’ of offenders depends on:

the claim that each member of the assumedgroup actually shares a uniform set of‘tendencies’ and that the population falls neatly into such aset of sub-groups.

Is the differentiation between the ‘normal’child as against the inherently ‘anti-social’,‘serious’, and ‘at risk’ offender anything morethan a grotesque exercise in stereotyping? Inshort the typologies articulated here are crudecaricatures more reminiscent of ‘popular’stereotypes found in pop-psychology than thecomplex result of considered empirical research.One of the early ‘empirical’ researchers AlfredKinsey reminded his readers in the 1940s that hisresearch into sexual behaviour confirmed hissense that nature abhorred pigeon holes.

The mapping of risk factors in the context ofstrictly ‘developmental’ concerns tends to avoidthe deep and penetrating questions associatedwith policing in late capitalist economies andneo-liberal states. As is well known, suchpolicing is typified by its ‘differential’nature. That is, some individuals and groups comein for more police attention than others. ‘Theurban poor’, young people, ‘working-classfamilies’, people on public housing estates, andAboriginal communities are the major targets ofstate-sponsored intervention (Carrington 1983).The strategic targeting of these ‘problempopulations’ for purposes of crime prevention isreflective more of the processes of governance inlate modernity than of any simple attempt to doaway with ‘social problems’. This point is

ignored in the problem-fixing approach of thePathways to Prevention Report. What constitutes crimeand how the forces of law and order aremarshalled to deal with the ‘crime problem’ arerendered irrelevant to the imperatives oftechnical analysis and problem fixing.

This central conceptual failure is covered upin a welter of technical and sophisticateddeliberations about the measurement of riskfactors. The identification of risk factors as ameans of informing various early interventionprograms reflects a technical approach to thequestion of crime control. ‘Technical’ in thesense that the primary intention is to providepolicy makers and program managers with the rawmaterial (data, risk factors etc.) to pursuetheir ameliorative and interventionist ambitions.Questions about what ‘crime’, ‘criminality’ and‘crime prevention’ might mean in the politicaland discursive contexts of our time are avoided.What remains is an ‘empirical’ endeavourdedicated to the task of eradicating an under-theorised, unclear, but seemingly major ‘threatto social order’.

By constantly avoiding such issues thePathways Report secures a renewed emphasis onidentifying the risk factors—like geneticdispositions, family ‘disorganisation’, drug andalcohol use or sexual promiscuity—that turn somefamilies and individuals into ‘criminal’. Thesecrimes are associated most closely with the‘underclass’, or ‘criminal sub-cultures’. Indeed,it is worth noting that the subjects researchedin The Pathways Report consist primarily of theurban poor, indigenous people, single mothers andthe unemployed—the very people who have beenconstituted as part of an ‘underclass’. This

reveals the preoccupations in many criminologicalquarters.

With the new millennium it seems that thecriminological gaze has returned once more with avengeance to the crimes of the urban poor and theyoung. Rarely is crime equated in thecriminological imagination with companies thatengage in systematic and deadly pollution, withillegal corporate criminal activity or with thecrimes of the state and its officials. It is asif the cloak of respectability, readily claimedby the elites who manage the corporate world, andas though the state apparatus has beensuccessfully applied, to deflect the sustainedcritical attentions of criminologists and others.The value of investigating ‘criminal sub-cultures’ among senior businessmen, politicalelites or leading financiers rarely seems tooccur to modern criminologists. (When it does itis usually because there is evidence of socompelling a kind that not even criminologistscan avoid it). In this way the normal tendenciesof criminology work to maintain an utterlyconventional view of the kind of governance thatis socially legitimate and therefore deeplymisguided.

One important effect of this should be noted.In the drive towards risk-based and customisedinterventions proposed by the Pathways to PreventionReport there is a tendency to render invisiblethose who are subject to intervention. The voicesof children, young people and their families -their lived experiences, lived realities, motivesand meanings- are buried under the dead-weight ofstatistical data and multi-factorial analysis.The taken-for-granted character of the ‘crimeproblem’ compounds the hackneyed and presumptuousview that crime is only what working class,

young, poor people and members of the‘underclass’ do. Yet no effort is madephenomenologically (or in any other way) togenerate insight into or to understand the point-of-view of those caught in the shifts, changesand realignments of social change. Rather thosewho are ‘at risk’ are transformed into docile,even silent subjects distinguished only by theirpotential for disorder.

Styles of reasoning

As we have noted, the study of government doesnot assume that problems exist in themselves, butrather that they must be constituted through particularstyles of reasoning. What this means can be establishedwhen we look closely at the rhetoric invoked inthe evolution of a science of risk.

We have suggested that modern criminology is atension-filled field of study, teaching andresearch, caught between an ambitious ‘science ofcauses’ epitomised by John Braithwaite’s (1989)continued espousal of the value of searching fora ‘general theory of crime’ and a more pragmatic,policy-oriented administrative project seeking touse science in the service of management andcontrol. This synthesis is exemplified in anotherQueensland-based social scientific researchproject, referred to until its demise as ‘theSibling Study’.

In 1992, when discussing future directions forjuvenile justice in Queensland, the CJC Reportcalls for ‘a longitudinal study of juveniles toidentify factors associated with participation in and desistencefrom crime; recidivism studies; and, evaluation ofcrime prevention programs’ (1992: 63 ouremphasis). Why such research is required giventhe already existing large quantity of

longitudinal research (albeit often highlyinconclusive) found in numerous internationalresearch projects (Farrington 1994, West 1982) isnot made clear.

The success of such longitudinal studies issaid to require the collection of substantial andongoing bio-psycho-social and demographicinformation on each young person included in thatresearch. One way such a project could beundertaken is to collect information throughschools, health authorities and other governmentdepartments on a sample of young people. Toensure the confidentiality of the data, it isargued that such research should be undertaken byiv As we suggest later there is no valid reason to accept the proposition that ‘empirical’ research about things like ‘crime rates’ is credible because it reports in an ‘objective’ fashion what is said to be actually ‘there’ (Holloway & Jefferson 1997: 258). In short there are questions about how people or whole communities come to ‘know’ there is a ‘social problem’.v In constructing this account we are NOT saying that all sociologists or criminologists are ‘conventional’ practitioners of their discipline. These disciplines have always contained ‘oppositional’ tendencies. viNotes? See for example, White 1989, 1994a, 1994b, 1995; Homel et al; Potas, Vining & Wildon 1990, Eckersley 1988, 1992, 1993;Allat & Yeandle 1992; Chamberlain & Mackenzie 1998. vii See eg., Abbott-Chapman & Patterson 1990; Ainley, Batten & Miller 1984; Anderson 1979; Australian Curriculum Studies Association 1996; Australian Education Council Review Committee 1991; Batten & Russell 1996; Batten, Withers, Thomas & McCurry 1991; Bradley 1992; Constable & Burton 1993; Patterson & Abbott-Chapman 1992; Sweet 1998; Wooden 1998; Hawkins, Arthur & Catalano 1995; Chamberlain & Mackenzie (1998); and Hawkins, Herrenkohl, Farrington, Brewer, Catalano, & Harachi (1998).

a body independent of criminal justice agenciesand the state (O’Connor 1992: 64). The point isreiterated that:

…in the medium and long term, longitudinal researchoffers the most powerful strategy in identifyingfactors associated with participation in anddesistance from crime (1992: 63).

What all this means is suggested in thearchitecture of the ‘Sibling Study’.xviii

The Sibling Study project aimed to uncover the‘psycho-social and ecological determinants ofdelinquent behaviour’ (Kennedy 1997: 1). Thescientific part of the project was exemplified inthe intention to analyse hundreds of variablesfrom a sample of 1,125 young people aged 12-18years. This sample was drawn from various‘cohorts’ of young people in school, under thesupervision of the ‘Family Services Department’,and in ‘the community’ (ie., on ‘the street’, inthe ‘community’ and/or through ‘personalcontact’) taking account of mixed sibling pairs

viii The new ‘science of risk’ may play some part in enhancing the career prospects of those social scientists eager to demonstrate their ‘practicality’ and ‘relevance’ tothe project of governance in a higher education setting where chasing research grants and demonstrating relevance have become important parts of the new managerial university. Equally there is nothing especially new about the linking of personal careers and particular discursive fashions. x Crimes by governments which far outweigh ordinary crime inthe twentieth century is almost a conceptual impossibility within criminology; ‘white collar crime’ is not a common object of criminological concern if the amount of research literature devoted to it is any indication while environmental crimes by corporates for example, are usually re-defined as ‘accidents’.

(spanning no more than three years in age) fromdiverse ‘advantaged’ and ‘disadvantaged’backgrounds. The governmental aspect of theproject is suggested when the study’s ProjectManager notes that all of this science isdesigned to ‘provide a plethora of data regardingyoung people, their experience of family life,school and the justice system, their attitudesand behaviour’ (Kennedy 1997: 2).

A second observation about the risk researchprojects in terms of the problematisation process isthe way it depends on a relatively narrow band ofinsights and assumptions found amongdevelopmental psychologists.

This is suggested eg., in the way theCommonwealth government’s 1999 Pathways to Preventionreport focused on a quite narrow band of ‘crimeprevention’ program options which were heavilyreliant on research informed by the‘developmental’ perspective.xix This psycho-pathological emphasis is eg., clearly revealed inan extensive, yet highly ‘selective’bibliography.xx

The absences in this literature review are asstriking as is the privileging of developmentalpsychology. Significantly, there was very little

xvi In focusing on the crime control risk discourse identified earlier it is important to note that while the projects in question may appear distinct and separate (concentrating on particular sets of policy and practice applications, or on cross-institutional research into juvenile crime), they nonetheless constitute an ensemble of cross-institutional practices, procedures, reflections, calculations and strategies that allow the exercise of specific forms of power. Each project is connected at numerous points, deriving their approach to the problem of juvenile crime from the same paradigmatic source; namely that of positivism.

sociological literature in the review, which issurprising given the nature of the project andthe presence of two sociologists on the team.Entirely absent is any critical social theory.Just as striking is the wholesale omission of anyhistorical texts dealing with questions of crimeand crime control, or any of those importantcontributions by the likes of Stan Cohen andothers who (especially during the 1970s and1980s) drew attention to the majorepistemological shortcomings of the types of

The institutional connections and interdependence are evident in the language used, the cross fertilisation of ideas and in the cross-over of personnel associated with each project. For example, we find that the Criminal JusticeCommission Report of 1992 had a direct bearing on the creation of ‘the Sibling Study’ insofar as recommendations in the report were ultimately translated into a longitudinalresearch project. This in turn led to a policy statements emanating from the QDFYCC such as a discussion paper entitled ‘The Causes of Juvenile Delinquency’ (1998). As we will show, the latter paper is significant in that it draws on the sibling study data to develop a typology of at risk young people. Further, Ross Homel, perhaps the leading exponent of crime prevention in Australia, had a direct and important lead role in the Pathways to Prevention project, the Sibling Study and the Queensland state government crime prevention policy. Two of his colleagues in the Sibling study also figure in the team that produced the Pathways to prevention report. These sorts of relationships suggest a close collaborative involvement in a range of important research and policy initiatives. at both the state and national levels. Such collaboration is significant in so faras it suggests not simply a close cross-institutional working alliance between academics and others but also (and more importantly) a collective commitment to the production of certain bodies of knowledge (Silby 1996). Indeed, the knowledge base in all the projects discussed has a clear epistemological direction: namely that derived from the

research favoured by the Pathways Report. Theliterature review in the Report is not simply‘selective’, it is breathtaking in its avoidanceof any reference to a body of work that hascontested the very foundations of developmentalresearch. These absences play their part in thesubstantive report which offers a truncated andpartial understanding of ‘crime’ and its‘causes’.

The research design of the Sibling Studylikewise relies on numerous epistemological and

individualism inherent in developmental psychology. The point here is that this ‘meeting of minds’ (albeit from different disciplinary backgrounds) reflects the way in which bodies of knowledge are produced and reproduced through certain professional alliance and systems of institutional support. The ‘ascendancy’ or ‘hegemony’ of modes of thought are in part a reflection of this interweaving process where powerful figures (professors and senior policy makers) articulate bodies of knowledge that become the conventional wisdoms of the day. This is clearly the case in contemporary juvenile crime discourse where the notion of risk, evident in major governmental projects, is central to the policy and practice in this area. It is perhaps here that we see most incisively the means by which discourses legitimate particular disciplinary practices. xvii According to Ross Homel, a contributor to the report anda noted advocate of ‘risk criminology’, the entire ‘crime prevention’ project hinges on the identification of those ‘at risk’ factors that predispose some juveniles (rather than others) to crime. For Homel ‘early intervention’ involves a ‘womb to classroom’ process aimed at those sections of the ‘urban poor’ who suffer most from a lack of ‘parenting skills’ and family support, along with a range ofother criminogenic ‘risk factors’ (The Australian, 7 December 1998).xviii While we are yet to see the final results of this mammoth study, some hint of what the Sibling Study will produce is contained in an Issues Paper prepared by the

methodological assumptions about what constitutesa proper research design representing best socialscientific practice.xxi In spite of persistentcriticism of the epistemic and ontologicalprejudices and assumptions upon which ‘scientificmethod’ rests they are presented without anydefence or justification. These assumptionsinclude the ‘need’ to employ repeatable forms ofdata collection and rely on methods thatfacilitate ‘objective’ measurement.

The project uses a plethora of psycho-metricresearch instruments drawn from a diverse rangeof attitudinal, behavioural and self-assessmentrating scales. These include:

the Delinquency Disposition Scale the Parental Bonding Instrument the Rigby Attitude to Authority Scale the Attitude to Self and Others Scale

Juvenile Justice Program of the Department of Family, Youth and Children, entitled ‘Causes of Juvenile Delinquency’ and based on data drawn from the Sibling Study. xiv As Bourdieu (Bourdieu et al 1999: 608) puts it The positivist dream of an epistemological state of perfect innocence papers over the fact that the crucial difference is not between a science that effects a construction and onethat does not , but between a science that does this withoutknowing it and one that, being aware of the work of construction, strives to discover and master as completely as possible the nature of its inevitable acts of construction, and the equally inevitable effects those acts produce……in the interview process…we have done everything in our power to control the effects of the symbolic violence exerted through that relationship. We have tried to set up arelationship of active and methodical listening, as far removed from the pure laissez-faire of the non-directive interview as from the interventionism of the questionnaire.

the Impulsivity and Monotony Avoidance Scale the Sensation Seeking Scale the Sex Role Attitudes Scale the McGoffog Body Image Scale the Australian Self-Report Delinquency Scale.

The mere listing of these scientificinstruments alone may convince most readers thatthis is authentically scientific research indeed.As noted in an appendix to the Study Code book(Kennedy 1997: 445), the sources of these scalesare largely psychological, biological and medicalxix David Farrington, the Cambridge based doyen of developmental and longitudinal research, is cited nineteen times alongside other luminaries in the field of delinquencyresearch like John McCord (who receives a mere five mentions). Articles by Farrington with titles like ‘Early developmental prevention of juvenile delinquency’ and ‘Earlypredictors of adolescent aggression and adult violence’ fit well into the explanatory frameworks adopted by the Pathwaysto Prevention report. xx A total of 210 references are noted, with the vast majority being drawn from psychologically-oriented journals and books. The literature covers a range of developmental concerns ranging from early childhood development issues (from ‘aggression’ to signs of ‘anti social behaviour’), child abuse and neglect, life-course research, intervention outcomes (mainly in relation to therapeutic and family basedinitiatives), substance abuse and other forms of ‘conduct disorder’.xvNotes? It was written by Ian O’Connor from the Department of Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Queensland. Although the report refers to ‘risk’ (the inverted commas perhaps suggesting some concern with the concept), there is no detailed critical analysis of the category nor is there any inquiry into the likely effects ofits use in shaping intervention strategies.

texts. The Parental Bonding instrument, forexample, is drawn from an article in the BritishJournal of Medical Psychology, while the Impulsivityand Monotony Avoidance Scale is drawn from anedited text entitled, Biological Bases of SensationSeeking, Impulsivity and Anxiety. By grounding theirapproach in a paradigm that emphasises psycho-medical and biological explanations, theresearchers of the study lay the foundation for abody of authoritative empirical knowledge. As istypical of modernist social science and itspreference for treating social data as‘observables’ amenable to objective study, thestudy also offers no reflexive critique of thesescales.xxii The study actually draws on avocabulary of images and categories about‘adolescents’ and ‘delinquency’ which socialscience experts and researchers have developedthroughout the twentieth century. The studyinherits the legacy of an extensivecriminological socio-biological tradition inwhich subjects are empirically measured andsurveyed in an effort to ‘discover’ the factorswhich predispose them to crime.

The detail of the research questionnaireserves to reassure anyone anxious about theobjectivity or scientific precision of theproject that they need not worry. The data linkedto the scales is derived from a self-administered

xxi The Australian Research Council-funded ‘Sibling Study project has the support of ‘industry partners’ including theQueensland Criminal Justice Commission, the Queensland Department of Justice and the Queensland Corrective ServicesCommission. Funded for three years, the Sibling Study replicates many of the previous longitudinal studies conducted by criminologists in England, Canada, New Zealand and the United States (see Utting et al 1993; Farrington 1994).

questionnaire of staggering proportions. In acode book which summarises the interim results ofresponses to over 400 questions, each response isdivided according to value, frequency, percent,valid percent and cumulative percent. Thequestions cover almost every conceivable facet ofan individual’s being: from their family,household and neighbourhood characteristics tothe degree and kind of parental supervision anddiscipline, affection and cohesion, to school andemployment situation, moral development, bodyimage and even sexual experiences.xxiii Theresearch also manifests an interest in biologicalmatters. The young person eg., is asked: ‘Howtall are you without shoes?’ ‘How much do youweigh without clothes and shoes?’ ‘How satisfiedare you with the following things about yourbody?’(your present weight, the shape of yourbody, your clothes size, your generalappearance?’).

Why would these researchers be concerned abouta young person’s physical features (like theirheight or weight), and what is the relevance ofinformation about the young person’s perceptionsof their body? How are these factors related toidentifying the causes of offensive behaviour?Are short people more likely to be criminal, orare short people who are dissatisfied with theirsmall stature, more at risk than tall people orthose who are happy with their body? Thesignificance of these and other similar questionsis not articulated clearly in terms theirperceived relations to ‘crime’ or ‘delinquency’.Indeed, the study is reminiscent of a lot of theresearch conducted during the immediate post-1945period in Britain and America when social andeconomic variables sat uncomfortably alongside a

range of oblique psychological and biologicalfactors (Cohen 1974, 1988).

These scales are designed to capture what aresaid to be individual dispositions such as aperson’s values, their psychological or emotionalfunctioning or actual behaviours. These areinvariably measured against some ‘norm’ where theconfusion between the statistical meaning of thisis invariably confused with its moral meaning.One of the key forms of abstraction in theemergent bio-politics of population managementinitiated in the late nineteenth century has beena kind of statistics which defines thecharacteristics of the population against astatistical norm. It means that what we come tosee as a norm is an artefact of a methodology ortechnique; a curve on a graph which quicklybecomes widely incorporated into our beliefsabout what is normal, or what is risky behaviourincorporating such things as adolescentdevelopment, behaviour and educationalattainment. Variation on what is defined as thenorm becomes an aberration requiring treatment.

There is a general failure in the SiblingStudy to acknowledge the well-known cross-cultural difficulties associated withindividualised scales of measurement (Rose,Lewontin and Kamin, 1987:31). This problembecomes particularly acute in a multiculturalsociety such as Australia in which attempts tomeasure characteristics along uniform scales makelittle or no practical or cultural sense. Thestudy’s preference for privileging theseindividualistic rating scales also indicates aworrying absence of a properly conceivedsensitivity to sociological considerations whichis somewhat surprising since a sociologist is oneof the project directors. Indeed, the scales may

serve to gloss-over the complex questionsassociated with cultural diversity and maygenerate concerns similar to those aroused overthe now much discredited Intelligence Quotient(IQ) scales. While the use of these scales may beserving a rhetorical function ie., they embodythe authority of properly objective quantitativedata and methodologies, they may do little,however, to further our understanding of thecomplex processes associated with juvenile crimein Australia.

Risk factors

Like the Sibling Study, the ‘risk factors’identified by the authors of the ‘Pathways toPrevention’ study (National Crime Prevention1999: 11) are derived from numerous longitudinalstudies and include ‘genetic and biologicalcharacteristics of the child, familycharacteristics of the child, familycharacteristics, stressful life events andcommunity or cultural factors’. They are alsoheavily yet silently dependent on longstandingviews about the essential nature of adolescence.

Much of the at-risk literature depends on‘popular’ and ‘social scientific’ discoursesabout adolescence as a period in the life-cyclethat is inherently agonistic and concerned withmaking a transition from childhood to adulthoodwhich is itself said to be a risk-ridden project.As Kelly (1998: 33) notes, discourses of youth-at-risk mobilise a form of probabilistic thinkingabout certain preferred or ideal Adult futures,and the present behaviours of young people. ForKelly, this kind of calculative reasoningattempts to construct statistically valid, causal

relationships between these differentconfigurations (ibid).

Yet, contrary to commonsense and the twentiethcentury literature on life-cycles, as ChristineGriffin (1995) points out, there is no biologicalbasis for the ways in which thecategories:‘childhood’, ‘adolescence’ and ‘youth’have been either constituted or understood. Sincethe work of Phillipe Aries, it has beenincreasingly accepted that the idea of the life-cycle needs to be represented as an historicaland cultural artefact.xxiv Within the life-cycleidea can be found so-called phases of the life-cycle like ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ whichalso, possess their own discrete history whichlocates its relationship to specific socialactors and institutions. There is a historyaround the constitution of a discourse about‘childhood’ which would examine the period fromthe late seventeenth into the twentieth centuryand an equivalent history of ‘adolescence’ whichwould focus largely on the twentieth century; thepublication of G. Stanley-Hall’s book onadolescence in 1904 is a conventional beginningpoint) (Griffin 1995). In both histories we wouldnote the ‘double hermeneutic’ at work as‘prescription’ increasingly merges with‘description’.

In their table of risk and protective factorsthe authors identify a long list of psycho-bio-medical antecedents under the heading ‘Child

xxiv The obvious biological aspects of infancy or of adolescence cannot be denied. However, this does not allow us to ignore the primarily social and cultural means wherebythese periods of life have been made symbolically meaningful. The ways in which elaborate discourses about howboth of these phases, childhood and adolescence, have been developed over the past two centuries cannot be overlooked.

Factors’. These include: prematurity, low birthweight, disability, low intelligence, difficulttemperament, insecure attachment, poor socialskills, lack of empathy, hyperactivity/disruptiveand impulsivity. Under ‘Family Factors’, ‘LifeEvents’ and ‘Community and Cultural Factors’there are an assortment of indicators reflectingthe multiplicity of risk indicators. Along withaspects of family form, structure andfunctioning, the authors refer to significantevents associated with family life (likeseparation, divorce, and bereavement) and thenature of school experience (‘deviant peergroup’, ‘poor attachment to school’, inadequatebehaviour management, etc). Under ‘Community andCultural Factors’ the authors cite a number ofstructural considerations (socio-economicdisadvantage, neighbourhood violence and crimeetc.) and cultural matters such as maleportrayals of violence and other cultural formsof violent expression.

The longstanding commitment to empirico-positivist techniques of research for example,co-variance sits easily in the background of thisreport on other research. Drawing on longitudinalstudies, the authors acknowledge that riskfactors cannot be easily clustered for predictivepurposes because they ‘tend to co-occur and beinterrelated’, ‘operate cumulatively’ and arecombined and interactive (National CrimePrevention 1999: 15). It is therefore notpossible to calibrate a precise mix or cluster ofvariables that lead to crime. Rather, anypredispositional state relates to thedevelopmental stage and particular set ofcumulative circumstances surrounding theindividual. Thus, according to the authors: ‘…thecritical factors may be the total number and the

spacing of cumulative risk factors’ (NationalCrime Prevention 1999: 30). Given theextraordinary set of causal factors identified inthe Report, it would of course be foolhardy tosuggest the possibility of an accurateforecasting of criminal behaviour. Yet this posesa problem for the researchers in that the veryrationale of a ‘pathways’ project is thatcausative signposts can and should be identified.

A way out of this impasse, according to theReport, is ‘to package risk and protectivefactors in terms of their impact on a smaller setof underlying processes or mediators’ (NationalCrime Prevention 1999: 15). The explanatorypackage, therefore, may thus include reference todelayed ‘social maturity’ of an individual,‘modelling’ of deviant lifestyles and the ‘socialreinforcement’ of adult centred activities(National Crime Prevention 1999: 16). Suchmediating processes, say the authors, need to beseen in their periodic and dynamic contexts (eventhough these are never clearly articulated).Given the authors’ own cautionary tone aboutidentifying the particular range of factors thatmay (or may not) contribute to the onset ofcriminality, the careful reader may nonethelessbe left with an overwhelming feeling ofuncertainty about what constitutes the ‘causalanalysis’ the authors claim to be offering. Thereis a distinct sense here of ‘factorial overload’present in the listing of spectacular arrays ofrisk factors which, despite their location invague ‘mediating’ contexts, leaves the observerin a state of transfixion.

The Report spares no effort in seeking toreveal the vast number of factors that place somepeople ‘at risk’. Yet the very scale of themultiple and imbricated risk factors supposedly

involved in offending is a weakness rather than astrength. The lists of at risk factors, conceivedin narrow developmental terms, are so wideranging as to render any attempt at predictionextremely difficult, if not impossible—a pointtacitly acknowledged by the Report (1999: 138-9).The key lists (under the headings of individual,community) are like giant nets which captureentire populations of children, young people andtheir families who may now be considered apotential risk to social order. They thus becometargets for intervention, ripe for thedisciplinary attentions of officials and experts.

Three problems

There are three basic problems with this styleof reasoning. The first is the simple problemthat the persistent search for the predictivefactors that ‘cause’ crime either in a direct ora stochastic fashion has been largely fruitless.Katz (1988: 5) summarises this point:

Whatever the validity of the hereditary,psychological, and social-ecological conditions ofcrime, many of those in the identified causalcategories do not commit crime. Many people who docommit crime do not fit the causal categories. Manywho do fit the background categories and latercommitted crime, go for long periods withoutcommitting or attempting to commit the crime towhich the theory directs them.

This critique has not and will not stop thecriminological industry in its pursuit of causalexplanation. Notwithstanding the fact that someof the things the Report calls for, like betterfunding for public health and educationalservices, are desirable in themselves, littleattempt is made to appreciate the broad,

underlying forces that shape the ‘order ofthings’ in the late modern state. Theidentification of ‘social problems’ and ways offixing them squares with liberal agendas that areconcerned more with the maintenance of a certainkind of ‘social order’ than with fundamentalsystemic change.

Moreover, the cataloguing of risk factorsdepends on a vast literature produced since the1940s on delinquent and criminal children andadolescents, much of which is committed toidentifying the emotional, psychological,cultural and social deficits both of theoffenders and their families. There appears to bea high degree of insensitivity to basic issues ofclass, gender, age and ethnicity in the selectionof populations for research, evident in therefusal of mainstream criminologists tosystematically research the families and thelives of elite or middle-class white people, aframework which all too accurately mirrors thepolicing and regulatory activities directedagainst subaltern populations.

In a closely related fashion, there is arefusal in certain exercises in the way theyoverlook the researcher’s own moral and politicalvalues. The fact that their values are reinsertedinto the categories being measured, and that theyare central to the research discourse, isignored. As Caspi et al (1995) point out,categories like ‘inadequate parentalsupervision’, ‘impulsivity’, ‘sluggishness’ orthe all consuming ‘at risk’ category, tend toreveal more about the ethno-centric and class-centric views and prejudices of the researchersthan they do about the world to which they areapplied.

Finally the reductionism that underwrites mostempiricist research has the effect of blankingout the actual social world in which the researchis being done, a world which—minimally—includesboth the researcher and the research population.Positivist researchers like to reduce theiranalyses to single or ‘cluster’ explanations ofcomplex social phenomena. Thus, in locating theonset of delinquency in the ‘family dynamics’ ofpoor or working-class families, the researchersabstract such behaviour from its wider social andeconomic contexts, simultaneously seeming toignore their own cultural norms while silentlyusing them to locate deficiencies in the lives ofthe [subordinated] research populations. Thefrequent emphasis given to the ‘internaldynamics’ of ‘the family’ or the ‘community’ (asin the case of the Pathways Report) means thatany of these larger social contexts are locatedin the vague hinterlands of the ‘environment’.Thus ‘factors’ (even if related to ‘structural’conditions) become abstracted artefactsappropriate only for purposes of measurementrather than for any sort of reflexive ortheoretical exercise.

Conclusion

In this chapter we investigated the ‘scienceof risk’ and claims about its capacity to informus about young people and the risks they presentto themselves and others. To critically reviewthe application of at risk concepts to youngpeople two representative case studies are drawnon, with attention given to the ways they areinformed by functionalist sociology. Thediscovery of the youth at risk category haslargely supplanted older categories such as

‘delinquency’ and ‘maladjustment’ that werefoundational to the sociology of deviance. Yetthe methodologies, epistemological assumptionsand politics of governance inherent in the olderprojects remain the same.

Too much risk-based research relies onnormative assumptions about social and economicdependence of young people, which when givenexpression and legitimacy through the researchfindings reinforce the authority of discourses of‘youth’ as dependent. Much of the youth at riskresearch tend to make assumptions about thecategory of youth as dependent and in need ofclose supervision. Risk-based research authorisesresearchers as expert speakers about homelessyouth at the same time as it de-legitimates youngpeople as speakers and active subjects capable offraming the problems in different ways.

Some sociologists may have wondered what hashappened to the ‘sociology of deviance’ whichloomed large as one of mainstays of an older‘mainstream sociology’. Some sociologists(Sumner, 1994) have even gone as far as to writean obituary for the sociology of deviance.Reports about the death of the ‘sociology ofdeviance’ may however be premature. They shouldlook no further than the ‘new’ ‘science of risk’.

The faith placed in ‘scientific method’,coupled with the failure to think the connectionsbetween class, power, policing and deviancy, arethemselves indicative of a philosophical andepistemological nihilism. This nihilism allowsempiricists to claim they are simply researchingthe ‘observable’ while actually sanctioning themto invent the categories (ie., various types ofrisk) they can operationalise. One result is aproliferation of empirical categories which, solong as they pass the basic tests of

operationalisability, replicability, etc., assumean ontological status—that is, these ‘abstract’categories then become ‘real’ and ‘purposeful’for the purpose of producing objective knowledge.

These research practices result from a largelyatheoretical approach to research where theprimary business is apparently to ‘identify’ and‘predict’ the particular range of factors thatcan be identified and correlated, in this casewith delinquency. The Pathways to PreventionReport makes no attempt to theorise its findingsor to deal with awkward methodological issuessuch as the inherent ‘constitutive abstraction’involved in all social research. That is, thereis a process where most social scientificresearch categories are taken from the life-worldof people, reworked by researchers and theoristsbefore being taken back and imposed on the lifeworld of ordinary people. Otherwise they areinvented by the researchers-theorists beforebeing imposed on the life worlds of ordinarypeople.

The attempt to reduce risk to produce ‘pro-social’ behaviour is of course hardly unique tothe Pathways report. Indeed, risk reductionprojects are now central to crime control agendasin the liberal state (Muncie 1999). We might takea standard example of research (Schweinhart et al1993) which ‘operationalised’ ‘pro-socialbehaviour’ in terms of nine key criteriaincluding:

making and expressing choices, plans anddecisions solving problems taking care of one’s ownneeds expressing feelings in words participating in group routines

being sensitive to the needs, feelings andinterests of others building relationships with children andadults creating and experiencing collaborative effort dealing with social conflict.

Given that much of empirical researchconcludes that ‘broken’, poor and ‘criminogenic’families do not exhibit these qualities (anabsence which then becomes a prima facie basis for‘explaining’ their descent into crime), it wouldbe an interesting exercise were a researcher toattempt to identify these ‘pro-social’characteristics in the life and work settings ofelite, white males in business or politics,academia or various professional settings.Indeed, it is worth asking repeatedly why so muchpersistent attention has been applied toparticular sections of the population? Or why thedisciplinary gaze has been so selective andtailored to the imperatives of crime prevention?

Chapter Five: Risk and CrimeControl: The British

Experience

In a time when politicians are unwilling to concentrate on robust socialand economic intervention to counter social problems, and eager todemonstrate that they are equally ‘tough’ on both crime and the‘family’ any policy which identifies poor child-rearing practices andweak parental control as the fundamental problem is a politicalgodsend

(Pitts, 2000:15).

Like Australia and the United States, Britain hasrecently made the category of risk central todiscourses underpinning the control andregulation of crime (Muncie 1999). This has beenmost graphically displayed in the attemptedprevention and reduction of youth crime throughthe 1990s. Indeed, crime committed by youngpeople has preoccupied politicians and socialpolicy makers to the extent that this issue hasbecome ostensibly one of the most alarming andpressing ‘social problems’ currently facingEngland (Pitts 1998).

Not surprisingly, public concern over ‘youthcrime’ has led to the introduction of a raft ofgovernmental ‘solutions’ aimed largely atminimizing the apparent threat posed by ‘thegrowing ranks’ of ‘marginalised’, ‘disaffected’and ‘excluded’ young people. Inner city ‘riots’and concerns over the emergence of ‘anti-social’

behaviours have further heightened popularconcerns over the perceived threat posed bycertain sections of the youth population. Thereis now a well entrenched belief – at least insome quarters—that youth crime is reaching‘epidemic’ proportions (Muncie 1999; Garland2001). Numerous media accounts of troublesome anddisruptive school pupils, ‘adolescent’ drug-takers, ‘youth gangs’ and stories of ‘teenageviolence’ have strengthened the many negativetypifications associated with young people. ‘Fearof crime’ surveys, inflammatory speeches by ‘gettough’ politicians, pronouncements by media‘shock-jocks’ and reports by campaigning news journalists have added to a prevailingpublic sense of ‘ontological insecurity’ aboutyouth crime in the United Kingdom (Young 1999).

And yet, as Muncie (1999: 249-50) points out,governmental responses in Britain and elsewhereto ‘problem youth’ and ‘juvenile crime waves’have produced a range of competing and oftencontradictory discourses:

Social policy for young people is generallyconstructed around three competing discourses: youngpeople as either the producers of trouble for othersor as vulnerable and in need of protection or asdeficient and in need of supervision and training.

Such accounts often overlap and vary accordingthe particularities of public sentiment andgovernmental interest. Over recent years it hasbecome increasingly apparent that a popularassumption exists that certain sections of theyouth population require intervention if thethreats and dangers they apparently pose are tobe addressed effectively (Muncie 1999: 250).

As in other western countries, a range ofgovernment programs and regulatory projects has

characterised the response to ‘youth problems’ ingeneral and to youth crime in particular.‘Targeting’ those most ‘troublesome’ or‘vulnerable youth’, such measures are directedtoward regulating and controlling the behavioursof young people and to ensuring their compliancewith various legal codes and moral strictures. Arange of experts have overseen the implementationof programs, schemes and various ‘community-based’ initiatives.

In England as elsewhere, what distinguishesthese new interventions from the ‘welfarism’ ofthe 1960s and 1970s is the emphasis on thecategory of ‘risk’. Nowhere has this concept beenapplied more systematically than in relation toyoung people regarded as a threat to the socialorder. As we have detailed in previous chapters,its elevation into operational categories (usedto calibrate levels of potential criminalityamong specific youth populations) bear all thehallmarks of research methodologies which taketheir foundationalist cues from the naturalsciences.

Though this is hardly a novelty peculiar toour own time, the transposition of this ‘forensicconcept’ from the natural sciences to humanaffairs, signals a shift from humanist-liberaldiscourses associated with ‘welfarism’ to the‘techno-scientific’ articulations of risk,promoted most avidly in the domain of crimecontrol by academic psychologists (Bessant, Hil,Watts & Weber 1998). As Lupton (1999:5) pointsout: this techno-scientific project involves thesearch for various ‘predispositional’ riskfactors across a wide range of areas ranging fromhealth, and housing to education and crime:

The focus of research in these fields is theidentification of risks, mapping their causal

factors, building predictive models of riskrelations and people’s responses to various types ofrisk and proposing ways of limiting the effects ofrisk. These inquires are undertaken adopting arationalist approach which assumes that expertscientific measurement and calculation is the mostappropriate standpoint from which to proceed. Suchresearchers may be described, therefore, as adoptinga realist approach to risk.

In Britain, the introduction of techno-scientific accounts of ‘youth at risk of crime’into routine operational practices of youth crimeprevention has occurred in a context informedincreasingly by individualized approaches tocriminal justice.

Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government has apparentlygiven its blessing to the ascendancy of risk-based crime prevention. This appears to be theonly way to make sense of the introduction of theCrime and Disorder Act 1998. This legislativeintrevention was based on recommendations of theYouth Justice Task Force established by PrimeMinister Tony Blair in 1997. The aims of the Actincluded speeding up the processes of juvenilejustice, encouraging a greater sense of awarenessand responsibility among offenders, integratingthe idea of reparation into the criminal justicesystem and heightening parental responsibility.It was also hoped that government might betteraddress youth problems associated with drug useand literacy. The category of risk proved pivotalto many of these measures, designed not only tostreamline the processing of youth offendersthrough the criminal justice system, but also toset in train a new interdepartmental andcentrally-monitored approach to ‘targeted’intervention.

Given the dynamics set loose in the electioncampaign, the new Blair government was very keen

to appear ‘tough’ on law and order and toactively counter the ad hoc nature of interventionassociated with the ‘welfarism’ of earlierdecades. As Pitts (2000: 16) argues:

Toughness’ for New Labour may mean the extension ofcustodial confinement and the community supervisionof a broader range of young offenders andtroublesome children, but its stated purpose is toprovide a forum in which ‘evidenced-based’ programscan be administered in a setting bounded byadministrative protections against violations ofchildren’s rights.Unlike the deterministic explanatory

frameworks espoused under ‘welfarism’, Blair’sreformed system of juvenile justice would, atleast in its legislative form, be designed tofocus largely on ‘toughening up’ on youth crimeby holding offenders directly responsible fortheir actions. Additionally, the Act ushered in arange of measures designed to regulate thebehaviours of young people, including longersentences for certain categories of crime, morecommunity supervision orders, curfews, andelectronic tagging for those aged ten years andover. As Pitts observes (2000: 15), thesemeasures represented a ‘repudiation’ of earlierapproaches to youth justice which sought toattribute offending to ‘social conditions’,restrict involvement of offenders in the criminaljustice system and/or to keep them out of thesystem altogether. The New Labour governmentregarded these as:

…soft options which failed to confront the moraldimension of youth crime and disregarded the ‘right’of victims. However, the strategy diverged fromdevelopments in the USA, in its unwillingness toadopt explicitly ‘cued’ measures such as the ‘BootCamps’, House of Pain’ regimes and ‘Chain Gangs’

which have re-emerged in several US youth justicesystems in recent time…‘(Pitts 2000: 16).

The impetus to create a co-ordinated juvenilejustice system which was ‘tough but fair’gathered pace in the wake of the killing in 1993of toddler James Bulger by two ten year old boys.Many commentators have argued that this eventfinally ‘dealt with the problem of the softapproach’ said to have been associated withwelfarism. Indeed, since the Bulger case:

…there has been a steady movement away fromstrategies of informalism and nominalisation and theabandonment of attempts to divert less serious youngoffenders from prosecution and custody…This has beenaccompanied by a steady growth of custodialdisposals for 15-18 year olds, and the introductionof new typed of secure and custodial penalties andinstitutions for youngsters aged between 12 and 14(Pitts 2000: 20).

While the prevailing emphasis of New Labour’sapproach to youth justice has been a reliance ontough new sentencing provisions, the governmenthas also sought to address those factors whichpurportedly led some young people to offend.Indeed, it is in the domain of New Labour’sjuvenile crime prevention policies, that we see avery clear articulation of risk as an operationalconcept used to legitimate a range ofinterventionist polices and practices. Yet thequestion of which factors or individuals andfamilies were to be targeted rested squarely onthe particular explanatory narratives which NewLabour had at its disposal.

Laying the epistemological foundations: the caseof ‘misspent youth’

A number of official reports published between1993-7 provided much of the the ‘knowledge base’underpinning New Labor’s approach to juvenilejustice. What emerges from these reports is aconsensus about the supposed ‘causes of crime’.Crime and the Family, by New Labour policy advisersat the Social Policy Research Institute (Utting,Bright and Hendrickson 1993), the Home Office’sconsultative document, Tackling the Causes of Crime(1996), Misspent Youth: Young People and Crime by theAudit Commission (1996), and last, but certainlynot least, New Labor’s White Paper, No More Excuses(1997), all pointed to the same conclusion: thatyouth crime could be attributed directly to whatwent on in the family. Crime and the Family speltthis assertion out in no uncertain terms: ‘…thetangled roots of delinquency, lie to aconsiderable extent, inside the family’.

Perhaps the most sophisticated articulation ofthe ‘root’ causes of crime emerged in the AuditCommission’s report, Misspent Youth. The report,published in 1996, established the foundations onwhich New Labour’ was to launch its approach toyouth crime prevention. The report echoedpoliticians’ concerns about the‘disproportionate’ number of young people from‘deprived areas’ involved in (mainly property)crime and the cost (estimated at over 1 billionpounds) of dealing with this problem. It alsohighlighted a range of other ‘anti-social’behaviours which had aroused ‘great publicconcern’. Thus ‘nuisance’ behaviours such as‘shouting and swearing, ‘hanging about andfooling around in groups, sometimes outside ofother people’s homes…’ were all defined asmanifestations of anti-social behaviour (AuditCommission 1996: 13). However unacceptable suchbehaviours were, the Report conceded that they

were beyond the reach of the criminal justicesystem. The report also pointed to thesignificant problem posed by those young people‘at risk’ of engaging in crime. The reportidentified key groups of young offenders:‘persistent offenders’, young offenders ‘who haveyet to develop an entrenched pattern ofoffending’, ‘first time offenders’ and, finally,‘youth at risk’ who ‘must be discouraged fromgetting involved in offending in the first place’(Audit Commission 1999: 13).

Risk identification was thus identified as anattempt to reduce offending among those alreadyin the criminal justice system, and as a way ofpreventing others at risk of becoming criminalsfrom entering this system.

Central to the interventionist projectoutlined in the Report is a specificinterpretation of the ‘causes of crime’. For allpractical purposes, this causal model reflectedthe conclusions drawn from the criminologicalresearch studies conducted by Professor DavidFarrington of the Cambridge Institute ofCriminology (see Farrington 1994, 1996). Drawingdirectly on Farrington’s work, the reportconcluded that ‘high risk factors’ include:

…gender, with boys more likely to offend than girls;inadequate parenting, aggressive and hyperactivebehaviour in early childhood; truancy and exclusionfrom school; peer group pressure to offend, unstableliving conditions; lack of training and employment;and drug and alcohol abuse. (Audit Commission 1996:58).

This long list of ‘causal factors’ derivesmainly from the multi-factorial studies of crimeconducted by Farrington in his longitudinal studyof over 400 ‘traditional’ working class boys.

Beginning in 1961, the study traversed everyconceivable aspect of the boys’ social andpersonal lives: from family circumstances,income, family size, employment and child rearingpractices, to school performance, truancy andinterpersonal behaviour (Farrington 1994). As theAudit Commission ( 1996: 58) report put it:

Those who experience many or all of these factorsthroughout their childhood and teenage years are atthe highest risk of getting caught up in the cycleof antisocial behaviour, including offending whichis then difficult to break. Those who startoffending at an early age are more likely to becomepersistent offenders .

Although Farrington claimed that no singlefactor or even cluster of factors couldnecessarily guarantee the onset of offending, thevarious relational dynamics occurring in thecontext of ‘the family’ were seen as central toexplanations of crime creation:

…the presence of adverse family background (poorparental supervision, cruel, passive or neglectingattitude of the mother, parental conflict) doubledthe presence of a later juvenile conviction…we cannow show that family factors predict delinquencyindependently of other factors (Farrington 1994:11).

Despite Farrington’s failure to clearly definethe various terms used to describe aspects offamily functioning, and the corresponding dangerof imposing middle class values and standards onworking class people, his conclusions are given athorough and entirely uncritical airing by theAudit Commission ( 1996: 62) who claimed forexample, that:

Inadequate parenting is strongly associated withlater offending. Neglect by parents, poor maternaland domestic care before the age of five years,insecure attachment, family conflict, and theabsence of a good relationship with either parenthave all been shown to increase the risk ofbehaviour problems and subsequent offending.

Likewise, the Audit Commission (1996: 62) hadno trouble in concluding, with all the authorityof those possessed of certainty, that:

Young people who say that their attachment to theirfamily is weak, are most likely to report that theyhave committed offences, as are those who haveexperienced cruelty and abuse at the hands ofparents. The nature of parental supervision is alsoimportant. Parents who rely heavily on harshpunishment, or who are erratic in their discipline,are twice as likely to have children who offend.Harsh punishment is also associated with moreviolent and frequent offending.

Significantly, this confidence and certaintyis actually severely modified by the usualmethodological scruples. Although the Report‘reveals’ that family factors were most closelyassociated with longer-term offending, the taskof ‘measuring’ the impact of intra-familyfunctioning on crime was decidedly difficult:

Predicting the future behaviour of individuals is…closely linked to factors such as parental conflictand the quality of life in the early years, althoughthese are…difficult to measure (Audit Commission1996: 62).

The Report further suggests that the risk ofoffending was higher in families with ‘poordisciplinary practices’ and for those who livedin underprivileged neighbourhoods:

Research has shown that children who are brought upin families with lax parental discipline and in apoor neighbourhood have a higher risk of becomingoffenders’ (Audit Commission 1996: 62).

To support this claim, the report provided twoshaded geographical maps detailing thestatistical correlation between low-income areasand high crime in the West Midlands (AuditCommission 1999: 63). Yet, despite such confidentidentification of risk factors in ‘high crime’areas the report offered an importantqualification:

While it is useful to predict the local areas inwhich children are most likely to become delinquent– on the basis of family size, social status andparental separation – these factors are also able toidentify three quarters of individual offenders, butthey may overpredict fivefold (Audit Commission 1996: 62.Our emphasis).

As we note below, such considerations take onparticular importance when we begin to unravelthe various philosophical-cum-methodologicalassumptions relied upon by risk-basedresearchers. The need for caution when confrontedby confident empirical conclusions becomes evenmore pressing when we consider the huge sums ofpublic money devoted to British youth crime-prevention programs. Indeed, the overarchingprogram of intervention suggested by the AuditCommission involves a wide range of governmentdepartments, voluntary organizations and other‘agencies’. The Audit Commission report assertsthat the causal factors identified by researcherslike David Farrington:

…can be used to help target measures to preventcrime by identifying areas where young people are athigh risk. Steps can be taken by a wide range of

agencies to address problems before those at riskstart to offend. Such agencies would involve parents‘who can be helped to bring children up to respectthe law and the rights of other people’, schools,social services, health, leisure services and youthservices, housing, training agencies, and drug andalcohol services ‘ (Audit Commission 1999: 59).

Particular emphasis is given in the report to‘improving parenting’:

Parents who are bringing up their children indifficult circumstances can be helped byprofessionals (or by volunteer, experienced parents)to improve their partnering skills and produce betterbehaved, more trustworthy children who need lessexpensive supervision and intervention later on…Parent education aims to help parents develop self-awareness and self-confidence and improves theircapacity to support and nurture their children’(Audit Commission 1999: 63).

To facilitate improved parenting skills, theReport recommended a range of support initiativesincluding family centres (staffed by multi-agencyworkers), volunteer networks and a host of other‘nurturing’ approaches. It was also recommendedthat social services, health services, educationdepartments and other organisations ought topilot support and parent skill-training schemesin ‘deprived areas’. Under the guidance of childand adolescent mental health workers, parentswere urged to involve their ‘at risk children’ ina host of learning tasks such as helping them‘solve problems’ in ‘structured ways’. Parentsare further urged to improve disciplinarytechniques and communication processes.

Evaluation of such initiatives, should,according to the Commission, be undertaken inorder to establish whether parenting skills haveimproved and whether this has altered the

behaviours of children and young people deemed tobe at risk of offending. The Commissionreiterated this recommendation, suggesting thatany program of intervention should be targeted,and, most importantly, that this should takeplace as early as possible in the life of thechild. This need for early intervention isimperative, because some of the damage may havebeen done inside the womb:

It may be possible to identify children early on thatcould benefit from targeted help and thereby avoidproblems later on. Characteristics such as low birthweight and having problems shortly after birth; poorperformance in IQ test at age three, and earlychildhood behaviour, which is aggressive,hyperactive, impulsive or disruptive, are keyidentifiers. Health visitors are likely to have akey role in identifying the local areas and familieswhich may be most at risk’ (Audit Commission 1996:64).

‘Structured’ and ‘targeted’ forms of earlyintervention were seen as most usefully appliedin the context of nursery education. Thus,children should be exposed to pre-schooleducational environments that are characterizedby structured modes of learning, conducive staff-pupil ratios and, of course, more research toevaluate whether all this works in terms ofbringing up more socially-acceptable, conformistand law-abiding children. Local authoritiesshould be actively involved in ‘targeting schemesto provide intensive, structured pre-schooleducation and home support for three or four yearolds, in which parents are involved, to areas ofhigh risk and deprivation, and they should beevaluated’ (Audit Commission 1996: 65).

In addition to the promotion of services totackle ‘school misbehaviour’, truancy and drug

and alcohol problems, the Report recommendsgreater co-operation between key institutionsinvolved in the ‘socialization’ of young people.Moreover, the work of institutions such asfamilies, schools, religious institutions andcommunity organizations should be aimed atensuring that ‘children have the opportunity tobecome responsible and capable citizens’ (AuditCommission 1999: 94).

In detailing a strategy to reduce risk amongcertain cohorts of children and young people, theauthors of the Report recommended a coordinatedresponse by local authorities and centralgovernment departments. They placed less emphasison criminal justice measures to deal with crimeand more on the ‘targeting of preventive servicesto deprived areas, piloting and evaluation ofpreventive services and local coordination toprevent youth crime’ (1996). While the authors ofthe Report urge consultation with those living in‘areas of highest risk’, and the active inclusionof the ‘community’ in any program ofintervention, the overriding aim of the project‘should be’ to develop programs designed to‘address risk factors known to be associated withoffending’ (Audit Commission 1999: 100).

Putting theory into practice

At least in the eyes of the Blair governmentand readers of the tabloid press, the AuditCommission and the Youth Justice Task Forceprovided the right kind of foundation for a long-awaited overhaul of the juvenile justice systemin Britain. Drawing on criminological researchand ‘evidence-based’ programs of intervention thenew system was to rely on a co-ordinated range ofactivities designed to diminish the level of risk

among certain categories of young people – mostlyfrom ‘deprived areas’.

The resulting legislation was the Crime andDisorder Act 1998 This Act provided for the creationof a Youth Justice Board designed to advise theHome Secretary on the progress of the youthjustice system, and to monitor the generalperformance of the system as well as to advisethe Home Secretary on national standards. Thesestandards would help to shape the work of newly-created multi-disciplinary Youth Justice Teamsand to ensure the evaluation of programs and theenhancement of ‘good practice’.

Chaired by Lord Warner of Brockley, the workof the Youth Justice Board was underscored by acommitment to ‘early intervention in the lives ofyoung people’, the creation of effective andlocalised systems of youth justice, ‘strongintervention’ by the Board when local agenciesare failing, and a general coordinated approachacross government to ‘tackle offending as anurgent priority’ (Youth Justice Board 2001: 1).

By overseeing the creation of a new regime ofyouth justice (based heavily on proposals set outin Misspent Youth) the Board gave full expressionto a reinvigorated commitment to a philosophy ofrehabilitation. As Pitts (2000: 25) comments:

Whereas the rehabilitative techniques of the 1960shad aimed to ameliorate emotional and socialdeprivation, this new approach to rehabilitationaimed to restructure the modes of thought, thevalues, the attitudes and the behaviours of youngoffenders, the control strategies of their parentsand the classroom regimes presided over by theirteachers. While presenting themselves as new formsof rehabilitation, these techniques werestraightforwardly ‘correctional’ in both intent andcontent.

The new system of justice set out in the Crimeand Disorder Act 1998 established a wide range of newpenalties aimed at both young offenders and theirparents. Parent Orders provided for programsdesigned to enhance parenting skills. (In 1999over 1,100 Parent orders were granted by thecourts). Anti Social Behaviour Orders, ChildSafety Orders and provisions for local curfewswere established as ‘pre-emptive’ crime controlmeasures. Final warnings and Reprimandsconstituted the basis of pre-court, ‘last ditch’interventions, while a range of non-custodialpenalties and semi-indeterminate Detention andTraining Orders formed the core of the newschedule of court administered penalties.Custodial and non-custodial provisions containedin the Act allowed for the blending of a range ofsentencing rationalities such as retribution,deterrence and rehabilitation – all aimed at theprimary goal of preventing and/or reducingoffending among ‘at risk’ youth.

The work of the Youth Justice Board wasconcerned most closely with non-custodialpenalties and the development and implementationof programs aimed at those children, young peopleand their families deemed ‘at risk’. The work ofthe Board was pitched primarily at primary andsecondary levels of crime prevention throughinterventions designed to alleviate the pre-dispositional conditions associated withoffending. The design of the new system seems tohave taken into account the Bonnemaison programin France, the Perry Pre-School project in NorthAmerica and the Pathways to Prevention program inAustralia. This is especially so given the waythe Youth Justice Board presided over a vastinterlocking network of initiatives, activities

and interventions all ‘targeted’ at young peopleand families in ‘high crime’, ‘deprived’ areas’.

The financial costs of such a program haveproved to be considerable. For example, in 1999the Youth Justice Board allocated 2.28 millionpounds to 40 new education and training programs,23 million pounds to Youth Justice Teams in orderto recruit new specialist drug workers, and 2million pounds for 24 ‘behavioural programs’.

In 1999, funding was also provided for 70Youth Inclusion Programs in the most deprivedareas in England and Wales. These programs weretargeted at young people deemed to be ‘at risk’because of drug and alcohol abuse and providedfor a range of specifically tailored educationand skills-based programs. By summer 2000, therewere over 200 Youth Inclusion Programs inexistence with over 20,000 young people involvedin various programs. In a press release, theYouth Justice Board boasted that 102 YouthInclusion Programs in the most deprived areastook up 591,818 hours of young people’s time witha further 35,000 hours of volunteer time devotedto these projects (Youth Justice Board 2000: 1).The Board further claimed that its programs had asignificant impact in terms of crime reductionamong young people: 36 percent reduction in houseburglaries and an 18 percent reduction in thegeneral level of youth crime.

Primary responsibility for the implementationof plans to address the problems experienced byat risk children and young people was given tolocally-based Youth Justice Teams. Comprised ofstaff seconded from the Police, Probation Serviceeducation, social services, the health serviceand occasionally, the youth services andvolunteer workers, the role of these teams was toestablish a comprehensive Youth Offender Plan.

The brief for this plan was that it shouldestablish and coordinate a range of services forat risk children, young people and theirfamilies. Framed in an epistemological contextstructured around the developmental theories ofcriminologists like Farrington, as well asrecommendations contained in official governmentreports, the Youth Justice Teams were chargedwith the responsibility of developing ‘early,targeted intervention to deal with anti-socialbehaviour and divert young people from crime…’(Youth Justice Board 2001: 2).

A key element in this approach was the use of‘cognitive skills training’. Designed to alterthe ‘criminogenic’ values and attitudes of actualand/or potential offenders, early interventionprograms were required to address both thebiological and psychological factors thatappeared to predispose some individuals tooffending. These factors included everything fromlow birth weight, low IQ, through to‘aggressivity’ or ‘impulsivity’, as well as theintra-familial conditions associated with ‘poorparenting’. Cognitive skills training would beused specifically to address the values,attitudes and worldviews of those deemed at risk.Individual counselling, group-work and anassortment of community-based programs wereproposed to achieve this goal.

The nature and scope of activities overseen bythe Youth Justice Board and implemented ‘on theground’ by Youth Justice Teams is awe-inspiring.Even more awesome is the amount of governmentfunds invested in supporting the range ofinterventionist programs. Based on aphilosophical platform that seeks to get ‘toughon crime’, the challenges facing the newarchitects and practitioners of youth crime

control are daunting. They are especiallydaunting given the assumptions upon which thiswhole program rests.

The trajectory set for this interventionistproject derives from a set of narrow and highlydubious assumptions about the origins of criminaland ‘anti-social’ behaviour. The mélange offactors used to explain crime derive fromtraditions of criminological inquiry that havelong been characterized, by the belief thatcriminal activity could be explained directly byreference to a range of measurable individual,familial and social factors. In developing acritique of this perspective we draw attention tothe essential and essentialising elements ofyouth crime prevention discourses that underpininterventionist programs in a number of English-speaking western countries (Hogg & Brown 1998).

The role of science – once more

The theoretical foundations of New Labour’sapproach to juvenile justice are deeplyproblematic. These foundations are alive and wellin the work of developmental criminologists likeDavid Farrington, who maintain that the essentialfactors linking some young people to crime can be‘scientifically’ mapped via processes ofclassification, measurement and interpretation.Crime and its supposed ‘causes’ are thusobjectified phenomena amenable to the systematicapplication of ‘scientific method’. The analysisof regression, correlation and deviation are themethodological props upon which this elaborateinvestigative process is built.

Inevitably this kind of research identifies anarray of ‘explanatory’ or dispositional factors,some of which may or may not be associated with

offending. Farrington himself, as well as otherslike his mentor Donald West (1982), readily admitthat they cannot accurately predict which factorsin whichever permutation can ‘trigger’ offending.As Utting (1994: 18) argues:

It is important to recognize that…attempts to targetand stigmatize young children as potential offendersusing statistical predictors are likely tomisidentify a proportion of children who will notturn to crime, while missing many others who areequally at risk.

In effect, this means that even in their ownterms, using all the sophisticated methodologicaltechniques available to them, these researcherscan never claim predictive certainty. While‘margins of error’ are certainly part of theexplanatory armory of positivistic researchers,the fact remains that the intervention strategiesmounted to confront crime among young people are,at best, based on inaccurate forecasts of whoshould or should not be ‘targeted’. Further, asPitts (2000: 12) observes:

…if we are unable to accord some degree of causalprimacy to ‘parenting’, ‘truancy’, ‘drug abuse’,‘homelessness’ and the like, to theories of the waysin which these correlates interact, we are littlenearer understanding the causes of youth crime andour choice of methods of intervention haphazard. Inthe event, a process of political and scientificattrition has resolved this, by no meansinsignificant, problem.

By laying claim to a ‘scientific status’ -where the idea of ‘science’ clearly draws on thelegitimacy and the accomplishments of the naturalsciences- multi-factorial research effectivelyserves to legitimate, at least from agovernmental perspective, a plethora of

interventions whose explanatory powers areactually highly dubious. The kinds of scientificmethod involved here, with its celebration ofimpartiality and objectification, provide aconvenient way of screening out alternativeexplanations of crime and its causes. Forinstance, critical theories that raise awkwardquestions about the categories employed in risk-based approaches, and the skewed focus onparticular sorts of risk, find little or noexpression in official British reports on youthcrime. Instead, reports like Misspent Youth devotetheir pages to countless and repetitiousstatements that dwell on a selective range of‘factors’ that appear to correlate with crime.

Reductionism

Perhaps more concerning from a theoreticalpoint of view is the failure of developmentalresearchers to incorporate any kind oftheoretical reflexivity into their explanatoryframeworks. Central to their analytic endeavorsare a range of categories that purport to either‘describe’ or to ‘explain’ the nature and causesof juvenile offending. For example, as we havealready explained in regard to the Australiancase study, the category of ‘crime’ is useduncritically to refer to rates of offendingcalculated by official governmental agencies. Noeffort is made to question these sources orindeed the fact that they are based on a varietyof practices like highly differential policingpractices which precisely target the activitiesof young immigrant or working-class people.Corporate crime, white-collar crime and thecrimes of the rich and powerful are effectivelyscreened out of this analytical exercise.

Instead, crime is equated with the actions ofthe inner urban poor and disadvantaged. MisspentYouth reinforces this impression though its focuson ‘high crime areas’ and ‘deprived areas’. Suchviews dovetail neatly with wider discourses thatcorrelate the ‘crime problem’ with particularsections of society, most notably the‘underclass’ or, in the current Britishgovernmental vernacular, ‘socially excluded’populations.

In effect, crime is reduced to an‘individualistic’ account of human behaviours forwhich ‘the individual’ ie poor, working-classmale and immigrant must be held ‘responsible’.Such time-honoured accounts underpin a range ofintervention strategies designed to alter theattitudes and behaviours of ‘at risk’individuals. ‘Cognitive skills training’ andother tailored interventions are used asdissuasive instruments in the battle againstantisocial and criminogenic tendency. In this way‘it is assumed that if those ‘at risk’ can think‘straight’, they will go ‘straight’ (Pitts2000:30).

This simplistic, and yet immensely popularapproach, rests on dubious and antiquated ideasabout the origins of crime and the prospects forits prevention/reduction. As Pitts (2000: 30)argues:

In so reasoning, the purveyors of cognitive skillstraining, like the eighteenth century Classicists,conflate rational/logical thinking with moral/law-abiding thinking; in so doing commit a categoricalerror since they fail to distinguish between, thecognitive machinery which enables logical thought,and the ethical choices made possible by a capacityfor logical thought. The assumption that peopleengage in crime because they lack capacity forlogical thought is, at least, tendentious since, in

reality, people often resort to crime, violence ordeception because, in the circumstances in whichthey find themselves, it ‘works’ for them.

The failure to consider either the socialrelations or the choices and practices which ‘atrisk youth’ engage in, characterises a lot of theBritish risk-based explanations of juvenileoffending. Additionally, the heavy emphasis givento family and individual factors is achieved atthe expense of an effort to theorize the complexconnections between issues of inequality, povertyand policing. At best, such factors are lightlysketched on to the background. The origins ofcrime are not seen to be completely unrelated togovernment polices and regulatory practices, butrather are said to lie firmly with the ‘deficits’that beset particular ‘types’ of young people andtheir families.

Conclusion

Interventionist ‘solutions’ to a narrowlyconceived ‘crime problem’ are necessarily hinged,according to a developmental perspective, on abroad range of programs aimed at addressing thedeficits of certain population groups.

Misspent Youth eg., proposes a bold and expensiveinterdepartmental and multidisciplinary programof intervention which, through the management ofthe Youth Justice Board and, at ‘ground zero’,through the operations of Youth Justice Teams,has resulted in significant points of contactbetween practitioners and those at risk. Targetedinterventions, however, are directed specificallyat individual deficiencies exhibited by parentsand young people. For the former, this may mean‘parenting skills’ programs and, for the latter,‘cognitive skills training’.

Administered by a new cadre of Youth JusticeWorkers, as well as by a small army of education,health and welfare specialists, these programsare reminiscent of earlier interventions in whichselected families from the ‘lower orders’ taughthow to be good parents and responsible citizensthrough the Settlement House programs (Benjamin,Bessant, & Watts 1997). This similarly ensuresthey come to appreciate middle class values andconform to appropriate codes of behaviour (Hunt1999). ‘Appropriate’ child rearing practices,application of normative practices of care andsupervision and the promotion of more ‘effective’forms of ‘communication’ between parents andtheir children are central to this project.Family-oriented interventions derive, of course,from the epistemological foundations upon whichthe work of the Youth Justice Board and YouthJustice Teams are based.

Thus, although the Youth Justice Boardestablished a battery of programs to assist youngpeople and their families in avoiding theprospect of crime, little or no attention hasbeen drawn to how the ‘big questions’ (ie.,poverty) typically associated with such behaviourmight be addressed. Poverty, deprivation anddisadvantage are mentioned only as key correlatesof crime. Yet, there is no mention of specificproposals relating to how, precisely, such‘problems’ might be alleviated. Instead, theemphasis in Misspent Youth rests on behaviourmodification and attitudinal change. Indeed, asPitts (forthcoming: 13-4) rightly points out,there is a significant body of empirical workwhich demonstrates that serious juvenileoffending may be correlated far more closely with‘neighborhood’ factors rather than parentingissues per se. Given the claims of many risk-

based researchers about causal links betweenpoverty and crime, and given governmentcommitments to reduce youth at risk, it does seemvery odd that issues of poverty, disadvantage,poor housing, education, inadequate leisure andrecreation facilities, lack of support servicesare largely ignored (Wikstrom and Loeder 1997,Pitts and Hope 1998, Young 1999, Jones 2001).

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Chapter Six: Governance ofSocial Problems and Problem

Populations

A city is composed of different kinds of men: similar people cannotbring a city into existence.

(Aristotle, The Politics)

The 1980s and 1990s can be characterised by apopular and academic preoccupation with thethreat that ‘delinquent’ and ‘criminally-inclined’ young people were said to pose tosocial order (Davis 1996). There is a longhistory of ‘moral panics’ about ‘hooligans’(Pearson 1984) and larrikins in the nineteenthcentury, and, since the 1950s about ‘youthcultures’ like ‘bodgies and widgies’, ‘punks’,‘goths’, etc. The search for solutions to various‘youth-related’ problems has been most marked inrelation to crime and public disorder.

Moral panics over juvenile crime haveinvariably been accompanied by an often frenziedsearch for solutions (Simpson 1997). The moralpanics however, have undergone a transformationover the past few decades from discourses about‘maladjusted youth’ informed by a sociology ofdeviance to the new scientific-legalrepresentation of them as being ‘at risk’ (Rose1990, 1998). Contemporary risk rhetoric nowhinges more on the factors that predispose someyoung people rather than others, to a life ofcrime. In adopting a multi-factoral assessment of

Governance of Social Problems and Problem Populations

levels, types and inventories of risk, theresearcher hopes to establish a predictive, aloose causal map or grid to calibrate thelikelihood of offending in any givencircumstance. It is then the responsibility ofpolicy makers and practitioners, those at theinterventionist ‘coal face’, to develop specificprograms to address and overcome the riskfactors.

Whatever else they achieve, risk-basedresearch informs practices that promote a moreintensive focus on the behaviours of targetedgroups of juvenile offenders and their families.Aboriginal offenders and those from the‘badlands’ of ‘the urban poor’ come in for theclosest scrutiny (Carrington 1992, 1993). One ofthe outcomes of risk-based interventions is that,despite acknowledging the effects of ‘social’ or‘environmental’ factors, they are invariablydirected towards the objective of correcting theindividual via incursions into their everydaylives.

In stressing the intellectual framework of thescience of risk and the ways certain styles ofreasoning are set loose then, we should notforget then that there are numerous practicalconsequences. The emergence of risk discoursesover the past two decades has produced aheightened concern about criminal, anti-socialand delinquent young people. One consequence arenew management tasks prescribed by the ‘scienceof risk’ foreshadowing extensive and frequentinterventions across the life-cycle.

Government of the young person

Whose conduct have the various processes ofgovernment set out to govern? A central problem

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of government has always been represented interms of ‘class’, though the government ofproblems emerging from age cohorts and gender hasnever been far behind, giving rise to concernsabout social problems like poverty, unemploymentand working-class crime.

In the nineteenth century it was the‘dangerous classes’ who were identified asresponsible for crime. Today the ‘underclass’ canbe just as readily invoked as the source of allour contemporary social problems (White 1994a;1994b: Vinson 1999). As Pearson (1983) pointsout, the fears of the ‘respectable middleclasses’ have long been translated into bothempirical scientific enquiry into what the ‘lowerorders’ are doing as well as persistentcorrectionalist and welfarist projects designedto limit the damage they can do to ‘society’. Theempirico-positivist gaze has remained steady inthis regard as have the subtle undertones ofeugenicist thought running through the history ofsuch discursive practices and research projects.

The restructuring of Australia’s labour marketand the near-complete collapse of the full-timeyouth labour market (Wooden 1998: 35) inparticular, have provided a context for aburgeoning academic interest in ‘the youthproblem’ as well as a context in which publicanxieties about young people have flourished.xxv

The undoubted problem of youth unemployment hasbeen a major contributing factor in recurrent‘moral panics’ about the spectre of a youth‘underclass’ of unemployed, homeless andmarginalised young people (White 1994a; Rutter,Giller, & Hagill, 1998).

This is another way of saying that publicconcern about ‘at risk’ young people owes much tothe publicity given to research or to discussion

Governance of Social Problems and Problem Populations

and speculation by the media, politicians andsocial commentators. Public concern over issueslike juvenile crime has been sufficient togenerate a powerful mix of anxiety and publicoutrage. To a large extent, the media has beenoperating as an agent of moral indignation inserving to shape and define the social problem ofyouth at risk. The vocabulary used in media andpopular reports on what are known by researchersas ‘youth at risk’ reflect arguments about adecline in moral standards and the demise ofcivilised society (Eckersley 1992; Eckersley1993). These discussions have typically selectedout youth unemployment, youth homelessness, youthsuicide, juvenile delinquency/crime and drugaddiction as core problems.

Such concerns are not new. Much of the newrisk talk begins with a discussion about thedeteriorating socio-economic environment. It isargued that young people now encounter ‘newmorbidities’ that present major obstacles tobecoming adult. Batten and Russell’s (1995: 1)position is typical:

The term ‘at risk’…is used to describe or identifyyoung people who, beset by particular difficultiesand disadvantages, are thought likely to fail toachieve the development in their adolescent yearsthat would provide a sound basis for a satisfyingand fulfilling adult life.

These new concerns have fitted seamlessly intomuch older discourses about the necessary and‘normal’ steps all young people must take if theyare to achieve a ‘normal’, ‘mature’ adult status(Griffin 1995). The development of life course-theory and research over the twentieth centuryhas been used to reassure us that there are‘normal’ developmental steps, cognitive skills

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and social accomplishments (all set against agerankings) which it is argued can be accuratelymeasured to determine how well individuals aretravelling down their path toward an inevitablerendezvous with responsible adulthood.

Schools and new modes of governance

Education institutions have developed into keysites for identifying and monitoring ‘youth atrisk of unemployment’ and for providing points ofentry for intervention into their lives. Schoolsalso offer an ideal site because most youngpeople are required by law to pass through thesystem.

Education institutions have become criticalfor the management of youth ‘at risk’ ofunemployment. This is evident, not only by theimplementation of education policies since the1970s directed towards encouraging young peopleto remain in education institutions, and morerecently by the introduction of the Department ofSocial Securities, Common Youth Allowance(Edwards 2001). These new arrangements makereceipt of income support conditional on theyoung person’s return to school or to some formof training. The Victorian government’spreparation for the increase in youth at risk isevidence of a national trend:

To prepare information and advice about young peopleexpected to remain in school or return to educationand training as well as the result of theintroduction of the Common Youth Allowance, theDepartment of Education commissioned a series ofresearch and development projects entitled the

Governance of Social Problems and Problem Populations

Successful Learning Projects (ie., Ward et.al.,1998:3).

The durability of this confidence in approachthat worked for an industrial society, inconjunction along with increasing credentialismand political imperatives to ‘soak up’ theunemployed, means education institutions such asschools, TAFE colleges and universities havebecome life-rafts on a sea of hopeful imaginingsabout their ability to reconstruct a securesociety like the one we ‘remember’.

The increased responsibilities for educationinstitutions include having to:

compensate for the ‘failure’ of ‘the family’as well as for the collapse of the full-timelabour market, and address new ‘problems’ allegedly created bythe ‘breakdown of ‘the family’ and youngpeople’s inability to obtain full-timeemployment.

The category of ‘youth at risk’ has seen thisextension of governance through the educationsystem. Dryfoos’ vision of what she calls a ‘one-stop’ service that extends throughout theeducation system of a variety of human servicesdirected to other aspects of one’s life, isillustrative of a progressive or benevolentmethod for extending the governance of youngpeople, and through them, of their families.Turning schools into ‘one-stop centres’ providesdirect access to students on a daily basis, sothat their educational, physical, psychological,and social needs are addressed in a ‘rational,holistic fashion’. Facilitating this through theschools is intended to ‘relieve the burden’ on

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‘society’ by changing high risk behaviours(Dryfoos, 1996:1).

Bypassing nostalgia

In effect, one response to the consequences ofthe breakdown of the traditional industrial orderhas been to retreat into the past by fortifyingmany of the institutions that were central tothat order. The strategy of keeping most youngpeople in some form of education/training for aslong as possible as a solution for ‘youth atrisk’ is a classic example of a response informedby older modes of thinking and acting to solveproblems occurring within what Beck (1992) hascalled a ‘risk society’.

While much of the rhetoric about thecontemporary role of education talks aboutembracing change, what we are seeing involvesresistance to change. As Lowenthal explains,harking back to the past often happens in hardtimes; indeed, disillusionment with the present‘can induce a dangerous addiction with thevisitable past’ (1995). Similarly Franklin (1998:2) points out that this response builds onidealised notions of community, and encouragesefforts to bring back ‘the family’, reconstructneighbourhoods and re-assert a commonsensemorality, to create the solidarity we once‘knew’. We see this in the requirement thateducation institutions become front-lineresponses to unemployment (Bessant 1995).

Schools have been called on to developstrategies that would stop students ‘at risk’from leaving school ‘early’. As Sweet (1998: 12)notes:

This priority has seen substantial effort andexpenditure put into successive initiatives such as

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the Australian Trainee Scheme, Career StartTraineeships, the Australian Vocational Certificate,the Modern Australian Apprenticeship and TraineeSystem and New Apprenticeships…Successivegovernments have been increasing access to suchemployment-based structured training opportunitiesas a key strategy in increasing young people’saccess to vocational education and training and incombating the difficulties that they face in thelabour market.

Encouraging young people towards vocationaleducation has been a government priority. AsSweet notes:

Increasing young people’s participation invocational education and training has been one ofthe central priorities of government during the1990s. Between 1989-90 and 1995-96 governmentexpenditure on TAFE increased by 21 percent in realterms, from $1.9 billion to $2.6 billion (Sweet1998:11).

Yet schools are institutions of the oldindustrial order, and despite the recentrestructuring, they remain very much the productof that old order, and, says Beck, this ‘isdoomed to fail’ (Beck 1998: 9-22). The politicsof these orthodox responses mean we will staybound to industrial notions of ‘progress’. Thebelief that the risks we face -like unemployment-can be tamed by reclaiming industrialinstitutions and nineteenth century models ofhazard assessment may prove sadly inadequate.

If we are to respond effectively to change,and specifically to the problems resulting fromthe shift towards a post-industrial, post-full-employment society, we need to ask whether we areaddressing the actual causes of problems such asunemployment. Framing the problem in terms of‘youth at risk’ effectively renegs on the

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opportunity to address the actual causes ofunemployment.

Although critics of national employment policysince the 1980s have called for more jobs, thenumber of new jobs required to meet the needs ofyoung people—and others—wanting jobs remainsinsufficient. The political resistance on thepart of business and other elite groups toinvestment in the public sector has been onemajor constraint. The private sector, unlikely inthe foreseeable future to alter its preferencefor ‘down-sizing’ so as to preserve its profitline has been another.

What we are seeing with the category of ‘youthat risk of unemployment’ is an attempt byproponents to force a relatively new development(a restructured labour market) into an oldparadigm which takes industrial culture as a‘given’. So we observe attempts to discover thecauses and/or indicators of ‘youth at risk’ (ofunemployment) without considering the possibilitythat a new set of theoretical, philosophical,ethical and practical paradigms are required.

According to Beck, industrial society and fullemployment have been dependent on the unequalpositions of men and women, but the dynamics ofindividualisation which accompanied this meansthat people have been progressively removed fromthe traditional ‘constraints of gender’. ‘Underconditions of modernity, for example, women havebeen released from their ascribed roles (ie, asmother/wife) in search of ‘a life of their own’.This ‘liberation’ however has not occurred withyoung people, indeed we observe the opposite—‘increased governance.’ Modernisation not onlydissolves the notion of full-time waged labour,it also directly challenges many of the ‘givens’of industrial culture (Beck 1993).

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Instead of insisting of returning most/allyoung people to institutions (like schools) as a‘solution’ to youth unemployment, perhaps it ismore productive to ask questions like thefollowing:

In a context of material abundance, and adecline in the demand for human labour, can weseparate income from waged labour? How can we provide the fundamental experiencesonce inherent in the young person’s initial workexperiences? Besides full-time waged work, whatopportunities can we develop to help facilitatea young person’s identity formation? Surely we must ask: given the changes thathave taken place, on what basis are young peoplegoing to receive an income? And, how are youngpeople going to participate in those fundamentalexperiences previously provided by waged work?

We now see the new labour systems emergingthat remove the traditional risks of a scarcityof work. This is not a bad thing if it is handledthoughtfully. Beck argues that these laboursystems redistribute and transform unemploymentinto a developmental productive force. Accordingto Beck ‘…the risks accompanying the forms ofunder-employment compete with the partial freedomand sovereignty gained in being able to arrangetheir own lives’ (Beck 1993: 148).

At the same time as under-employmentchallenges the individual, it also presents newquestions about the models of social order andsocial integration we have traditionally reliedon—and which are deeply inscribed into the socialsciences.

From intervention to crime prevention

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There is one other distinctive implication ofthe new science of risk discourse. Like the older‘sociology of deviance’ the primary business ofthe sociology of risk involves what Foucaultreferred to as ‘dividing practices’ thatdistinguish in this instance between those whoare at risk of certain ‘problems’ and those whoare not. While most ‘risk’ research gives theimpression of distinguishing between those ‘atrisk’ and ‘the rest’, the ‘youth at risk’category differs from older categories of thedelinquent, in terms of its capacity topotentially incorporate the entire population ofyoung people.

It is also fair to note that its actual effectto date has been a continuation of criminology’straditional preoccupation with ‘the coloured’,‘the poor’ or ‘working-class people’, ie., allthose who in Hagan and McCarthy’s (1997) hatefulphrase, make up the ‘surplus population’. Assuch, risk-based research is part of adisciplinary practice that involves marking outthose viewed as posing an actual or potentialthreat to social order and applying regulatorystrategies to them.

The authors of the Pathways to Prevention Reporteg., insist that it is worth concentrating on‘investment in ‘child friendly’ institutions andcommunities, and the manipulation of multiple risk andpredictive factors at crucial transition points, suchas at around birth, the pre-school years, thetransition from primary to high school, and thetransition from high school to higher educationor the workforce (National Crime Prevention 1999:10). The main aim is to intervene and interveneearly at each major stage in a young person’slife. The Pathways to Prevention Report states that:

Governance of Social Problems and Problem Populations

…developmental prevention involves interventionearly in the developmental pathways that lead tocrime and substance abuse.

Thus it is suggested that, ‘intervention canoccur most effectively’ at each ‘transitionpoint’ in a young person’s formative years(National Crime Prevention 1999: 10).Intervention, according to the Report, needs tobe tailored to the particular circumstancesfacing each child at various transition points soas to offset the consequences of ‘cumulativerisk’ (National Crime Prevention 1999: 11). Earlyintervention, in the strategic rather than strictlychronological sense, is thus crucial to thepreventive process. The primary rationale,however, is to intervene ‘early’ (a pre-emptivestrike as it were) in the developmental process,presumably well before any signs of criminal ordelinquent behaviour arise.

The quandary here is that if it is notpossible to identify the precise likelihood ofthose who may or, equally, may not engage inoffending, then how should a ‘targeted’ programof intervention be mounted? A blanket approach tointervention, implicit in much of the Report,would intervene in the lives of all those deemedat risk, irrespective of whether those youngpeople have or have not actually offended. Facedwith such a problem, the architects of crimeprevention may suggest scales, grids, maps orinventories that differentiate between types ofrisk. But which factors take precedence in anyanalytical explanation? Or are they to beregarded as equally important? Is it possible totarget those most at risk? How does risk apply tothose from middle-class or affluent backgrounds

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who may, in various ways, be more protected fromthe reach of the state?

These are both technical and theoreticalquestions that intrude into any risk managementapproach to crime prevention. Ethical and moralquestions also arise in relation to the promotionof greater state intervention, often for no otherreason than that it is deemed ‘necessary’ by thestate. What, say, do ‘at risk’ populations get inthe quest to prevent crime? Why should the stategaze so intensely on some of our most vulnerableand powerless populations? Why is the scrutiny sopartial and based on a narrowly conceived ‘crimeproblem’? Why has the ‘Pathways to Prevention’report so studiously avoided addressing thesequestions?

The likely outcome of the developmentalstrategies proposed by the Pathways report is thecreation of a vast army of accreditedprofessional personnel dedicated to the task ofhelping to reduce crime through countlessprograms, domiciliary visits and other forms ofintervention. Implicitly, interventionism iscelebrated for its own sake as somethingnecessary and good for those deemed ‘at risk’.State intervention for purposes of restoringsocial order or ensuring normative acquiescenceis something working-class families have beenhistorically familiar with (Rose 1989). Yet,while such interventionism is proposed as a ‘goodpractice’ its documented history shows a litanyof intrusive, coercive and regulatoryrecollections on the part of those subject to theattentions of state sponsored officials. Crimeprevention becomes simply the latest in a longline of disciplinary strategies evoked tolegitimate increased official intervention into

Governance of Social Problems and Problem Populations

the lives of some of society’s most vulnerablemembers.

Simply put, the arguments presented in suchprojects are not persuasive. The economic/socialoutcomes likely to emerge from the proposedprojects are minimal, indeed we have concernsthat the policies and practices likely to resultcan have a damaging impact on the lives of theyoung people, their families and the localcommunities deemed to be at risk. It would beencouraging to see an acknowledgment of argumentsthat the interventions that risk based projectslike the ‘Sibling Study’ and Pathways to Preventionare designed to produce will not necessarilyimprove individual or social life (see Rose 1993;Danziger 1990).

Through these risk-based assessments,researchers promise early-warning systems thatidentify the defiled and/or injured young peoplewho have become public liabilities and hence oflimited capital value. Once identified, they arepromptly directed into processes of containmentwhere they are treated, classified, frequentlyincarcerated and in due time regulated intoresponsible adult life. There appears to be noawareness in the documentation of what may bepolitically, socially and ethically problematicabout the project.

More efficient case management is one of theintended outcomes of this risk based research.Indeed case management is one of the mostconvenient and effective intervention strategiesavailable to workers (especially in the currentmanagerialist climate). The usefulness of casemanagement lies in its capacity to individualiseintervention through the application of‘customised’ programs and practices. As weindicate below, the articulation of risk to

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practice is completed through a process groundedin concerns about correction or normalisation.

Here we see disciplinary power in action,centred around and reliant upon the notion ofdocile bodies. The Sibling Study is aimed towardsdisciplining the body in ways that provide asubmissive, productive and well-adjusted youngperson. Those young people judged to be ‘at risk’thereby become objects of scientific study andexpert management, as they are implicated innetworks of power relations that disciplineunruly forces seen to ruin chances of theirnormalisation.

Conclusion

These risk-based studies are blind to the role ofpolicing in constructing the ‘crime problem’ andto the wider contexts of social and economicdecline that bear down on young people and theirfamilies. The privatisation of responsibility forthe welfare and education of young people issimply overlooked in this risk based research.There is no consideration of the fact that sincethe early 1980s millions of dollars have beentaken from the public and community sectors forthe care, protection and education of youngpeople; a withdrawal justified in terms of a‘necessity’ to deal with fiscal debt. This ishonoured in conjunction with the new doctrines oflimited collective responsibility (O’Neill 1994).Ignored is the general shift in thinking aboutpublic spending that dictates provision forbasics. Institutions like schools, health careand social security are cut and substituted withmore prisons and police. The way in which our

Governance of Social Problems and Problem Populations

submission to market generated values, outlooksand imperatives has restricted options toprotect, care for and educate children and youngpeople is omitted from the analysis.

For example, if we are going to talk aboutrisk, could it be argued that the liberal notionof the individual as the basic social/market unitis what locates many young people in variousstates of precarious vulnerability and therebyplaces them greatest risk? If we agree for amoment to accept risk-based researchers’ dubiousarguments about social inheritance; if we acceptarguments about the inter-generationaltransmission of underclass life-styles etc, thenwhy doesn’t that argument apply to the idea thatpoor public health and an impoverished educationand welfare system also form a critical part ofthe legacy inherited by succeeding generations?

The omission of these factors in the analysisof ‘youth at risk’ is a staggering indictment ofwhat seems to be a preoccupation with the need toidentify more traditional individual-centredcauses of juvenile crime.

Indeed, such questions intrude upon the fixedgaze of empirical science which is earnestlydevoted to the process of identification andclassification. Sadly also, the predictivequality of empirical studies is often verydisappointing (Utting 1994)—a point confirmed bythe qualified doubts of some of the most wellknown of blunderbuss investigators (Farrington1994, West 1978).

Also of concern are the likely outcomes ofsuch representations of ‘youth at risk’ onrelations between older people (ie., lawenforcement officers, teachers, parents etc) andyoung people. Because the way we see thingseffects our responses, especially in terms of

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problem-solving, these approaches tounderstanding young people cause considerabledamage to our capacities to relate with, and makesense of, young people.

These dividing practices reinforce oldernotions of adjustment and what we can expect interms of the transition to the development ofadult capabilities. They reinforce the ‘normalprocess’ of socially necessary andpsychologically inevitable adolescent maturationinto a successful adult role. They definegradations of ‘maladaptive’ or risky behavioursthrough the deployment of ‘psycho-social models’to ‘diagnose’ the early ‘symptoms’ of‘dysfunctional youth’, now called ‘youth atrisk’.

This apparent ‘necessity’ to portray ‘youth atrisk’ as foreign or different from ‘us’ enhancestheir transgressive status which inhibits thecapacity of many adult experts to relateeffectively with those young people. If theobjective of such risk-based research is tointervene with effective outcomes, then it isimperative to resist the tendency to portrayyoung people as though they were some raresubdivision of humanity whose behaviours enableus to understand and respond to them in terms ofwhere they fit in the matrix of types.

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Conclusion

The social sciences have long maintained aninterest in identifying and ‘knowing’ thecharacteristics of certain ‘types’ of youngpeople. The primary business of disciplines likesociology, psychology, criminology etc around‘youth at risk’ has been to catalogue, correlateand classify the factors that distinguish actualor suspected ‘youth at risk’ from the rest of theyouth population (Rose 1990, Tait, 1993, Bessant,1991, 1993, 1998, Kelly 1998). In methodologicalterms, the search for these distinguishingfeatures is predicated on certain naturalist orobjectivist assumptions essential to conventionalsocial science.

In a period characterised by rapid and intensetransformation, all this talk about ‘youth atrisk of unemployment’ serves to make us aware ofthe fact that widespread alarm on the part ofadults about ‘idle youth’ represents strugglesover moral regulation of a section of thepopulation that has long been seen as needingtight and proper management. Current discoursesabout ‘youth at risk of unemployment’ (andassociated problems) represents an effort todevelop new ways of regulating ‘youth’ at aparticular historic juncture where rapid changesare taking place. These changes raise popularanxiety levels and are based on what they already‘know’ about ‘youth’ as inherently or naturallydeviant in a context characterised by the demiseof traditionally commonly shared values that onceguided conduct in conjunction with thedissolution of older forms of integration (iefamily, community/clan) (Beck 1992).

The search for predicability, coherence andobjectivity in an uncertain world is a goal manysocial scientists continue to work hard toachieve. The job of verifying ‘the obvious’ andconfirming certain ‘apparent’ ‘causal’connections depends on well entrenchedontological, epistemological processes andassumptions about proper research methodologywhich have long been central to the empiricalsocial sciences and closely connected to statesponsored projects of governance.

Indeed, much of the contemporary research on‘youth at risk’ (of everything includingunemployment) sanctions the further extension ofthe surveillance role of social science as itsimultaneously annexes further the governmentalproject that has traditionally defined thecharacter of our schooling system.

The critique developed here has been concernedwith the processes of categorisation used toidentify ‘troublesome youth’. We have argued thatthe categories used in risk-based discourses area powerful component of governmental processesthat make it possible to identify sections of theyouth population as the legitimate targets ofstate intervention. In the projects underscrutiny, we examine the way in which particularcategorising processes are applied selectively todiscrete sections of the youth population seen asresponsible for the ‘crime problem’. It is arguedthat the bodies of knowledge emanating from risk-based thinking rely on methodologies whichsupport the idea that the ‘causes of crime’ arelocated in the pathological make-up of theindividual, his/her family and/or immediateneighbourhood or ‘community’.

We have argued that the central place given torisk-based thinking in juvenile justice is

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indicative of a more general trend towardsincreased governance of young people in advancedliberal democratic states. Indeed, the notion ofrisk has become the discursive conduit throughwhich a range of disciplinary practices have beenapplied to particular ‘problem populations’. Suchhas been the ascendancy of risk discourse overthe past few years that it has become perhaps themajor operational concept in most systems ofAustralian juvenile justice. It has found its wayinto most areas of policy and practice and iscurrently widely regarded as essential to any‘targeted’ and credible response to juvenilecrime.

We have argued that the prescriptions forcrime control being presented to Australiangovernments by the academics involved in thePathways to Prevention project, rely on a number ofunquestioned and narrow assumptions about ‘crime’and ‘criminality’ and how we know ‘crime’. Theseassumptions about ‘crime’ and ‘criminality’ havefor a long time sustained a ‘modernistcriminology’ in which conservative andprogressive criminologists alike have been ableto operate. We suggest that if the concept of‘risk’ has now come to dominate the problem-fixing agendas of many academics and governmentorganisations then this is not a concept tocelebrate or a concept with which we can affordto be complacent.

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203

Index

Abbott, 25Aboriginals, 62Active society, 25adolescence

as agonistic, 83-85idea of, 29and risk, 71-83

adult role 29Ainley, C., 32anti-social youth, 93, 97-99, 105Arblaster, A., 23, 49Aries, P., 86Audit Commission (UK) 99-104Australian Education Council, 31

basic income, 49Batten, M, 12, 31, 32, 116Bauman, Z., 13

Beck, U., 3, 8-11, 16, 50, 118-120, 127

Bell, S., 23Benjamin, J., 111Bernstein, P., 8Bessant, J., 12, 25, 30, 31, 53, 74, 97,

111, 118, 127Blair, T., 97Boreham, P.,25Borowski, T., 68Bourdieu, P., 63Bradley, D., 32Braithwaite, J., 81British crime control policies, 93-109

Brown, D., 70, 108Burdekin, B., 53Burton, J., 32

Cambridge Institute of Criminology,

100-Carlyle, T., 68Carrington, K., 74, 79, 114Caspi, A., 89Cass, B., 25Castells, M., 25Catley, R., 1, 33causes; causality, 123

and crime, 98-109and unemployment, 41-48

central tendency, measuresof, 61Cerny, p., 23Chamberlain, C., 5, 53, 53-63childhood, 86-87Chicago school, 75Clarke, H., 34class and homelessness, 63Cohen, S., 83, 85Comte, A., 8Common Youth Allowance, 29, 117-

115Constable, E., 32Cordray, D., 53contractualism, 23

crime, 4, 25-26, 67-92control and prevention policies, 93-

109, 118-120conventional understanding of, 72-3general theory of, 78-79and risk 73-76and urban poor 74-79

crime rate as social facts, 68crime problem, 70Criminal Justice Commission, 68-85criminology, 20, 67

as governmentality 20critique of causal determinism, 86-87critique of deviancy theory, 88-90

‘dangerous classes’, 115Danziger, K., 55, 56, 123Davis, W., 44, 46, 114Dean, M., 3, 16-21, 39, 54Debelle, G., 37Deet, M., 31Deficit theory, 33-38 delinquency, 31, 71

and risk, 74-76, 82-84, 85-90

Department of Employment Education

and Training (DEET), 35,39

deprivation theories, 107-109developmental psychology and risk, 75-

77, 78-82deviance theory, 2, 15

critique of, 88-90dole bludger, 39 Douglas, M., 13

Dow, G., 25drug use 31Dryfoos, J., 32, 31, 118Durkheim, E., 56

early intervention, 103-105Eckersley, R., 30, 116Economic Policy Advisory Council

(EPAC), 37education

and risk, 113-118and unemployment, 115

Edwards, M., 32, 117Elias, N., 71Elster, J., 24empirical measures of risk, 32, 51empirical research, 71Enlightenment, 11epidemiological research, 60experts, 13

family and risk, 84-86, 98-100, 106-

109, 114Farrington, D., 81, 100, 102, 124fear of lower orders, 112Fincher, R, 2Flyvbjerg, B., 71Fopp, R., 53Foucault, M., 3, 50, 70

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xxii The possibility that a scale designed to ‘measure’ eg., ‘anti-authority attitudes’ has first to define the criteria that will constitute the category, in effect, inventing the phenomena to which the category can then be applied, is never entertained by modernist social scientists. There may be some use in doing this in regard to some categories like ‘unemployment’ but only so long as no-one actually believes the numbers refer to anything ‘real’. The political implications of believing that one can either measure, let alone define anti-authority attitudes, in a value-neutral way are far more worrying. xxiii In relation to the young people’s sexual life, the researchers ask: ‘some young people today sleep with other people, while other young people don’t. What about you? Do you ever sleep with someone?’ Have you slept with someone inthe last month? Why did you sleep with this person?’ Why establish such a line of questioning? Is the assumption thatthose who do ‘sleep’ with someone else are more likely to commit criminal behaviour? xxvNotes? See Hogg & Brown 1998; White & Wyn 1998; Eckersley 1988; Eckersley 1992; Eckersley 1993; but cf. Sercombe 1997; Bessant & Hil 1997.

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