ABSTRACT
The extended and diversifying reach of modern criminal justice systems and attendant penal processes have comprised defining features of many nation-states since the 1980s and, further, such phenomena have given rise to an increasing interest in comparative criminology. But in essence, the principal research thrust has tended to privilege adult criminal justice and to overlook youth justice and penality. Here, we seek to examine the specificities of penal cultures as they apply to children and young people and, from the early 1980s to the present, we analyse both continuities and changes in the evolution and development of key legal, political, policy and social dimensions of youth justice and penality. This chapter introduces the various forms that contemporary youth justice assumes, temporal and spatial patterns of convergence and divergence and the means by which penality is further mediated through social structural relations – including ‘race’, gender, ability/disability and social class – and intersectional formations. We review our conceptual framework and set out our mixed-methods research design and methodological approach. The complexities of comparative research are signalled, alongside some of the key competing and/or intersecting themes and narratives that are explored in detail throughout the book.
