Jobs, Not Gaols: a New Agenda for Youth

economically developed world, to develop a new agenda for youth policy generally, especially in terms of the needs of the economically dispossessed. Major structural changes in economic and social life have altered in important ways the shape of growing up, and are reflected in such phenomena as exceptional levels of youth unemployment. Some of the more dramatic effects of these changes result in what are perceived to be high, and perhaps intolerable, levels of youth crime. While these, in turn, tend to create pressures to reconsider juvenile justice policies, it is the present argument that the critical public priorities should not be narrowly conceived around issues of youth crime, but instead should be drawn broadly, and boldly, to address the wider contemporary crises facing young people. Attempts to formulate juvenile justice policies, in the absence of wider social changes, may have the negative effect of creating a vicious spiral of coercive control. No matter how enlightened, or how informed these might be by such terms as "reintegrative shaming", policies confined to the restricted boundaries of juvenile justice cannot address the more embracing economic problems, and may inappropriately focus attention on the consequences of youth alienation, rather than on its sources. One cannot but be impressed in talking with young people today, at all social levels, with the general absence of hope, dreams or ambitions. There is a widespread sense of a "denied future" which is, of course, especially concentrated among the dispossessed and unemployed. Solving such problems will not be easy. On the one hand, our present political leaders, both those in, and those who aspire to, office appear by their words and deeds willing to sell off the futures of young people in order to achieve balanced budgets, level playing fields, or reduced account deficits. On the other hand, the economic and social forces themselves are complex, and become easily obscured in the economic rhetoric of the day.