Sticks and Carrots… and Sermons’: Some Thoughts on Compliance and Legitimacy in the Regulation of Youth Anti-Social Behaviour

This chapter explores issues of legitimacy and compliance at the boundaries of criminal justice in the context of anti-social behaviour interventions with young people, where crime control interfaces with wider dynamics of public policy – including housing, education and welfare services – and interacts with civil legal interventions and multiple systems of behavioural regulation. He suggests that the novel technologies and tools of control spawned in the name of regulating anti-social behaviour present critical challenges for legitimacy and embody mixed assumptions about motivation and agency that inform possibilities of compliance. These assumptions he argues are particularly salient, yet often in reality decidedly confused, in relation to children and young people who are subject to diverse and inconsistent messages as to their competencies in their transition to adulthood. The chapter seeks to shed some light on the conceptual parameters and empirical issues that pertain to a more rigorous discussion and analysis of how we might understand and think about legitimacy and compliance in, and around, criminal justice.