Transforming Youth Justice

Anna Souhami has provided a most welcome addition to the existing body of vigorous and compelling debate around the impact of New Labour's reforms of the Youth Justice System. Transforming Youth Justice: Occupational Identity and Cultural Change reports an ethnographic study of the transformation of a social services youth justice team into a multi-agency youth offending team (known as the ‘Midlands YOT’) over a 14-month period from 1999–2000. Drawing upon observational research and semi-structured interviews, underpinned by critical management and occupational culture literature, Souhami explores the ‘underside’ of Labour's radical reforms of youth justice—their impact upon practitioners’ occupational identities, occupational culture and their everyday working lives. As such, the book's focus complements the animated ideological, theoretical, practical and ethical criticisms of the impact of Labour's youth justice reforms that have been promulgated by a cadre of critical youth criminologists. In particular, the author shows how New Labour's attempts to bring...

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