Landmark reforms

After more than one hundred years, the future of a unified Probation Service looks bleak in the face of current proposals by the Ministry of Justice to open up the market for rehabilitation services to new providers from the private, voluntary and community sectors.     

Neighbourhood Governance: Contested Rationales within a Multi-Level Setting – A Study of Manchester

‘Neighbourhood’ is a long standing concept in local governance which was re-energised as part of the post-1997 New Labour policy paradigm. This paper builds on the work of Lowndes and Sullivan which identified four distinct rationales for neighbourhood working – civic, social, political and economic. The utility of the framework is explored through primary research in Manchester, UK. The research shows that different rationales are held by actors at different locations within the complex system of multi-level governance within which neighbourhood policy is made and implemented. Neighbourhood approaches to urban regeneration exist within a congested governance environment. In Manchester, regeneration has been strongly driven by the self-styled ‘Team Manchester’ who have provided an urban entrepreneurial vision for change in the city. Significantly, however, interventions at the neighbourhood level have shown potential for creating opportunities for citizen and community dissent and empowerment not subsumed with the narrative of the entrepreneurial city. Lowndes and Sullivan's framework provides important analytical building blocks and illuminating tools for understanding neighbourhood approaches. This research points to the merit of a dynamic approach recognising competing perspectives and contested agendas.     

Gang affiliation,aggression, and violent offending in a sample of youth offenders

Abstract

Gang affiliation, aggression, and violent offending were examined in case files of 390 youth offenders aged between 16 and 18 years. Results indicated that youth offenders who were gang members and those who were not gang members but exposed to friends in gangs had a significantly higher likelihood of violent offending compared with a reference group of youth offenders who had neither gang affiliation nor friends in gangs. Additionally, youth offenders who had friends in gangs but were themselves not gang members had a lower likelihood of violent offending than youth offenders who were gang members. Finally, results showed that a history of aggressive behavior was significantly associated with violent offending. Implications such as the need to address the influence of delinquent peers and need to address the management of anger and aggression in youths will be discussed. Also, findings point towards the need for prevention and early intervention work.     

Getting On or Getting By? Women, Social Capital and Political Participation

This article considers the utility of the concept of social capital in explaining differences in patterns of political participation among women and men, with particular reference to local politics and governance in Britain. It investigates whether women have access to the same quantity of social capital as men, whether their social capital is of the same type, and whether they use their social capital in the same way as men. Taking forward the 'capital' analogy, the article looks at how rich women are, and the extent to which they invest their social capital in political activity. As well as providing new insights into women's political behaviour, the analysis illuminates key issues for the broader social capital debate—regarding the distribution of social capital within communities, and the nature of the link between networks of sociability and patterns of political engagement.     

Conceptualizing throughput legitimacy: Procedural mechanisms of accountability,transparency, inclusiveness and openness in EU governance

This symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi‐level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an ‘umbrella concept’, encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi‐level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multi‐level governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria—accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness—and points towards substantive institutional reforms.     

On The Odiousness of Greek Debt

Unlike the popular narrative, which suggests that the Greek debt crisis was the result of lavish spending, this article demonstrates that the ‘crisis’ was generated by a transformation of purely private debt into public debt. This finding is supported by the preliminary report of the Greek Parliamentary Committee on the Truth of the Greek Debt, which clearly showed that the exponential increase of private debt in Greece risked the collapse of the private financial institutions exposed to it, namely Greek, French and German banks. This resulted in pressure on the Greek government to recapitalise and nationalise Greek banks through Eurozone and IMF funding. This funding, which came to be known as ‘bailout for Greece’ was nothing more than the rescue of private banks through EU taxpayers' money, only 5% of which went into the Greek economy. The article shows that the process by which the debt was transformed, as well as the post‐crisis bailout were odious, illegal and illegitimate and the ensuing debt itself was unsustainable and wholly against fundamental human rights.     

Engineering a critical realignment of the electorate: The case of the socialists in France

For the first time, largely owing to the Socialists' ability to gain and retain the allegiance of the electorate, France has experienced a major electoral realignment without a concomitant change in governmental system. The Socialists' success results from three major factors: their pre‐1981 electoral strategy which involved refashioning their traditional ideology and rhetoric to appeal to a new, emerging portion of the electorate, the wage‐earners; their subsequent ideological flexibility, which included a move toward more pragmatic politics along with an opening to the centre; and the failure of their rivals on the moderate and the extreme right to mount a lasting challenge with their own counter‐ideologies and policy initiatives.     

Local governance under the Conservatives: super-austerity,devolution and the ‘smarter state’

Through their ambitious devolution programme, the Conservatives show a new assertiveness in relation to restructuring the local state, in contrast to the laissez-faire approach of the previous Coalition government. Although the Coalition piloted devolution, its signature policies of ‘localism’ and the ‘Big Society’ focused on non-state actors, providing rights and opportunities for communities to challenge local government and establish their own services. The Conservatives are promoting devolution as a strategy to stimulate economic growth based on greater sub-regional autonomy and increased competitiveness across and between English localities. ‘Combined authorities’ have the opportunity to champion local identities and acquire new economic development powers from Whitehall. But devolution could be a strategy to decentralise austerity, shifting responsibility to the local level for deeper cuts (56% by 2020) and inevitable service reductions. Local government confronts ‘super-austerity’, where new cuts come on top of previous ones, compounding original impacts and creating dangerous (and unevenly spread) multiplier effects. The Conservatives’ ‘smarter state’ policies, aimed at delivering ‘more for less’, amount to little more than a recycling of new public management diktats. The emerging patchwork of ‘devolution deals’ challenges the redistributive assumptions of the grant regime and could leave disadvantaged areas at particular risk of failure. ‘Metro mayors’ are intended to provide visible and accountable leadership; but roles for locally elected councillors, and prospects for community and citizen engagement, remain unclear. The public has yet to be adequately engaged in what is in danger of becoming a technocratic transfer of power.     

Mass incarceration: ‘a sin against the future’?

Conclusion The move towards incarceration as the response to all social problems is serious for all the reasons given above. It constitutes negative investment in the future and gives a frightening legitimacy to that vision of the society of the future that sees the population divided into three, one third living a comfortable life but behind fortifications, one third incarcerated in some form of camp or ghetto and the other third guarding the homes of the comfortable or working as prison personnel. The 20th century has not had a very good record on incarceration. It has seen Hitler’s concentration camps and Stalin’s Gulag. Nils Christie and other commentators talk already of the US gulag. In Western Europe, still, these are but trends. Imprisonment rates are still generally, except for those of the UK, lower than 100 per 100,000. The punitive and exclusionary attitudes prevalent in the US are not so deeply embedded in European traditions. A philosophy of re-integration into society for offenders still underpins legislation and practice. A philosophy of social cohesion governs institutions. The assumption is that offenders, although they must undergo criminal sanctions and pay back in some way for what they have done, keep their citizenship and must be welcomed back into society. These beliefs are part of European democratic ideals. Much energy will need to be put into supporting and maintaining them in penal policy in the years ahead.