“The Government Was Like God”: Evidence, Expertise and Policy-Making in Youth Justice

Politics and policy are centrally implicated in the socio-historical construction of youth justice responses, yet the contexts, mechanisms, and processes influencing the ‘making’ of youth justice policy remain under-researched and poorly understood. The limited research evidence base devoted to youth justice policy-making (YJPM) has tended towards reductionist conceptualisations of ‘policy’ as restricted, static outcomes produced by governmental policy ‘actors’. However, privileging the YJPM status and role of senior governmental policy actors serves to reify their claims to being the ‘expert’ youth justice knowledge holders. This legitimises their exercise of power and ‘governance’ over non-governmental groups (e.g., civil servants, frontline practitioners, and academics) by dominating knowledge creation and claims to expertise in policy-making contexts. This research, therefore, seeks to identify and elaborate these complex, relational, and dynamic contexts and the attendant mechanisms of change that interact to drive YJPM. Semi-structured interviews with different stakeholder groups across youth justice contexts identified distal (macro) and proximal (meso/micro) contexts—mechanism relationships that drive YJPM. We conclude that the dynamic influence of organisational and professional identity (i.e., self-identity and identity assigned to others) is significant across contextualised mechanisms of YJPM, particularly the perceived identity, status, and role of the expert who attributes the credentials to contribute effectively to policy-making processes. This, in turn, leads us to discern and discuss three distinct characterisations of the youth justice policy–evidence–expertise nexus, namely: (i) evidence-endorsed policy; (ii) evidence-based policy; and (iii) evidence-enhanced policy.