Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK

This article examines how the UK’s Troubled Families Programme (TFP) works as a strategy of domestication which produces and delimits certain forms of ‘family life’. Drawing upon critical geographies of home and empire, the article explores how the TFP works to manage the troubled family as part of a longer history of regulating unruly households in the name of national health and civilisation. Viewing the TFP as part of the production of heteronormative order, highlights how the policy remobilises and reconfigures older forms of colonial rule which work to demarcate between civility/savagery, the developable/undevelopable. In examining the postcolonial dimension of neoliberal social policy, the article stresses how the TFP relies on racializing and sexualised logics of socio-biological control borrowed from imperial eugenics. Reading the TFP in this way contributes to our understanding of neoliberal rule. That the troubled family can be either domesticated or destroyed (through benefit sanctions and eviction) equally reveals the extent to which domesticity works as a key site for the production of both ‘worthy’ and ‘surplus’ life

The ‘Great Decarceration’: Historical Trends and Future Possibilities

During the 19th Century, hundreds of thousands of people were caught up in what Foucault famously referred to as the ‘great confinement’, or ‘great incarceration’, spanning reformatories, prisons, asylums, and more. Levels of institutional incarceration increased dramatically across many parts of Europe and the wider world through the expansion of provision for those defined as socially marginal, deviant, or destitute. While this trend has been the focus of many historical studies, much less attention has been paid to the dynamics of ‘the great decarceration’ that followed for much of the early‐ to mid‐20th Century. This article opens with an overview of these early decarceration trends in the English adult and youth justice systems and suggests why these came to an end from the 1940s onwards. It then explores parallels with marked decarceration trends today, notably in youth justice, and suggests how these might be expedited, extended, and protected

Transatlantic ‘Positive Youth Justice’: a distinctive new model for responding to offending by children?

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Palgrave Macmillan under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/A model of ‘positive youth justice’ has been developed on both sides of the Atlantic to challenge the hegemonic punitivity and neo-correctionalism of contemporary actuarial risk-based approaches and the conceptually-restricted rightsbased movement of child-friendly justice. This paper examines the origins, main features, guiding principles and underpinning evidence bases of the diferent versions of positive youth justice developed in England/Wales (Children First, Ofenders Second) and the USA (Positive Youth Justice Model) and their respective critiques of negative and child-friendly forms of youth jus tice. Comparing and contrasting these two versions enables an evaluation of the extent to which positive youth justice presents as a coherent and coordinated transatlantic ‘movement’, as opposed to disparate critiques of traditional youth justice with limited similarities

Introduction to the Special Issue on GBCS and Elites: Stratification or exploitation, domination, dispossession and devaluation?

This general introduction locates the GBCS papers on the elite, and their respondents, within a context. It emphasizes some of the key points made by the respondents in order to intervene in a discussion about what is at stake in doing sociological research on class. It draws attention to the differences between on the one hand status and stratification, and on the other class struggle perspectives, and hence the difference between a hierarchical gradational analysis and a relational one based on the struggle between groups over value. I begin to answer a question raised by many of the respondents in this special issue: “what is the question that the analysis of class is designed to answer?” I also draw attention to some of the problems with Bourdieu’s “structuring architecture”, showing how the partial reproduction of Bourdieu presents fundamental problems, leading to a Great British Stratification Survey (“GBSS”) rather than a GBCS. The different trajectories in class analysis that confusingly merge over the concept of culture in the present are briefly mapped, showing very different intentions in analysis. I argue that to understand class we need to understand the processes of classification: exploitation, domination, dispossession and devaluation, and their legitimation. Overall this special issue extends the sociological debate on class into a larger political frame about injustice, classification and value. It develops arguments from anthropology that maintain that it is the ability to define what value is (through culture) that is the ultimate difference in politics and power