Negative Practice

Abstract

As we have seen, there was a time when it appeared that the juvenile justice system might be separated from the system of political legitimation. The reforms pioneered by the Wilson administration, which culminated in the 1969 CYPA and the 1970 Social Services (Reorganisation) Act, were an attempt to remove the young offender from the criminal justice arena and juvenile crime from the political agenda. These initiatives, informed by the research of some of the most eminent British social scientists of the day, created the administrative basis and the theoretical rationale for the parallel development of local authority social services departments and professional social work. Beyond the ‘scientific’ rationality of this endeavour, however, lay what Booker (1980) describes as ‘The Utopian belief that, through drastic social and political reorganisation, aided by the greater use of State planning, we should be able to create an entirely new kind of just, fair and equal society’. It was an optimistic ideology predicated upon a belief that the intrinsic altruism and goodness of human beings could be realised if the fruits of a perpetually expanding economy could be scientifically targeted on social problems. When, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the economy went into recession and it became clear that Britain could be entering the kind of protracted economic crisis which the dominant, Keynesian, explanations of economic life maintained were no longer possible, doubt was cast upon the entire reforming enterprise.