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Persistent high levels of recidivism among young offenders (Luke and Lind 2002; Weatherburn et al. 2012) and the over‐representation of Indigenous young people (Cunneen and White 2011; Snowball 2008; Tauri 2012) have long been features of youth justice in Australia. Other problems – such as the increased rates of young people committing sex offences (Dwyer 2011; O’Brien 2010), increasing numbers of young people criminalised for new offences such as ‘sexting’ (Lee and McGovern 2013), and increasing numbers of young female offenders being drawn into youth justice systems (Carrington 2006; Carrington and Pereira 2009) – have emerged more recently. In this paper, we draw on the concept of ‘imaginary penalities’ (Carlen 2010) to argue these chronic problems are partly informed by ‘imaginary’ understandings of how and why young people (re)offend; reflect ‘imaginary’ understandings of what works to address young people’s (re)offending; and reflect ‘imaginary’ ideals about the primary purposes of the youth justice system. We acknowledge up front that answers to these questions require a great deal of new empirical research. This paper is only a beginning that sets out exactly what such an ambitious project might look like.

Item Type:	Refereed Conference Paper
Keywords:	Youth justice
Research Division:	Human Society
Research Group:	Criminology
Research Field:	Critical approaches to crime
Objective Division:	Law, Politics and Community Services
Objective Group:	Community services
Objective Field:	Children's services and childcare
UTAS Author:	Dwyer, AE (Associate Professor Angela Dwyer)
ID Code:	105871
Year Published:	2013
Deposited By:	School of Social Sciences
Deposited On:	2016-01-18
Last Modified:	2018-03-15
Downloads:	138 View Download Statistics