Title:
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Recognition, retribution and restoration : youth penal justice and the issue of youth, gangs and crime in Canada and England
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This thesis focuses on contemporary institutional and societal responses to the rising profile of
inner-city youth gang violence to provide a recognition centred account of the retributive turn
apparent in contemporary youth penal justice. The discussion is informed by the institutional
determination that the inner-city gang youth belongs to a violent minority of serious offenders for
whom penal administrators reserve their most punitive sanctions. Surveillance has become
normalised as part of institutional aims to curtail this violent minority. In this pursuit, policing
authorities are guided by an authoritative stereotype of the inner-city as a place apart, a place
characterised by deviance. I seek, therefore, to explore how the focus on punitive sanctioning
privileges curtailment goals ahead of concerns about dignity and respect, thus undermining the
conditions of agency for the inner-city youth, in general.
The analysis emphasises that relations of disrespect undermine the conditions of agency for
inner-city youth as social agents. I argue this is made possible through policing surveillance
practices which disrespects youths' rights and dis-esteems youth culture. To elucidate on these
claims I rely on data gathered in inner-city communities in two jurisdictions: London, England and
Toronto, Canada. I acquired this data through semi-structured interviews with advocates who
work in the inner-city, with inner-city youth, in a civil society capacity. This data is evaluated
alongside youth legislative material from both England and Canada.
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