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Reflexivity and Criminal Justice pp 57–79Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

When the Stars Align: Juvenile Justice Policy Reform in New South Wales

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Abstract

This eloquent summary of what it is like to advocate for the rights of young people in the policy process was made by a very experienced policy advocate who was a participant in a recent research project that I conducted, examining policy decision-making in the New South Wales (NSW) juvenile justice system (Fishwick 2015). It describes the moments when, constellations of conditions come together and create the opportunity for progressive policy decisions to emerge. And, as the quotation implies, these moments happen less often than those of us involved in advocating for social justice would like. Consequently, I would argue, when they occur, it is important that we make the most of them. As a critical social scientist, who for many years was engaged in policy activism in the third sector, I completely understood where my interviewee was coming from and her words encapsulated the very reason why I was trying to understand how particular policy decisions were taken, in the hope that I could then work out how those advocating for young people’s rights and interests could intervene even more effectively in the policy process. The study covered a specific period in NSW juvenile justice history 1990–2005 during which I was involved in campaigning for reform as both a researcher and advocate in the third sector (known as the non-government or not-for-profit sector in Australia). As I explain later, it was a very frustrating period in youth justice policy since it often felt like that just as we took one step forward in moving towards rights and social justice informed change, we were also being pulled backwards and sideward as we tried to defend the very positions we had just gained.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There are three levels of government—commonwealth, state/territory and local government. The states are Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria and the territories are the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory.

  2. 2.

    Juvenile Justice Advisory Council 1993; NSW Government 1996 NSW Parliament Legislative Council Standing Committee on Social Issues 1992 and 1996.

  3. 3.

    The NSW Legal Aid Commission also funds a panel of expert children’s solicitors who specialise in care and protection matters; they are community based and private practice solicitors. They have recently established a children’s civil law section.

  4. 4.

    Kingdon (2003: 2) argues that policy development is not always a neat, staged sequential, rational process. Policy streams relating to agenda setting, options development and implementation co-exist and are populated by different groups of people. And, the flow of policy decisions is not always from the top-down it can flow from the bottom-up as well as horizontally and across streams.

  5. 5.

    Like the depiction of history as subjunctive in Alan Bennett’s (2004) The History Boys, history is seen in complexity theory as a series of moments of possibilities and it is the intersection of multiple factors that affects the choice of what is on offer.

  6. 6.

    The revival of the study of institutions in public policy provides an example of this; see McKay et al. (2010) and Considine (2005) for a discussion of ‘New Institutionalism’. See also Wacquant (2011) on institutions and criminology.

  7. 7.

    The research period predated the surge in social media and no doubt the landscape has changed since.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Independent researcher and scholar, Sydney, Australia

    Elaine Fishwick

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  1. Elaine Fishwick
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom

    Sarah Armstrong

  2. Menzies Building, Monash University, School of Social Sciences, Clayton, Australia

    Jarrett Blaustein

  3. Law School, Old College, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

    Alistair Henry

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Fishwick, E. (2017). When the Stars Align: Juvenile Justice Policy Reform in New South Wales. In: Armstrong, S., Blaustein, J., Henry, A. (eds) Reflexivity and Criminal Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54642-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54642-5_3

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