Introduction to Special Issue: Exploring Confinement from the Perspectives of Young People

How do young people experience confinement, and what are the consequences of being confined? These are the key questions we wish to address in this special issue. The confinement of young people is a contested issue and generally not given much attention. In most societies, only a small number of young people experience being confined. However, because confinement is one of the most intrusive forms of control and punishment, and often directed at young people in the most vulnerable life circumstances, it calls for academic scrutiny. Confinement, even for a short time and under lenient conditions, can have detrimental effects on young people’s well-being, health and development (Nowak, 2019). A global United Nations (UN) report assesses that 1.4 million minors are confined in pre-trial remand or sentenced, and a further 670,000 are deprived of liberty by social authorities (Nowak, 2019). Young people are confined in a range of institutions within criminal justice, child protection, immigration services and mental health care where deprivation of liberty is not reduced to confinement but includes isolation, control of communication and other measures restricting young people’s autonomy. This special issue explores how young people experience and make sense of various forms of confinement and conveys their perspectives on how it shapes their lives for better or worse.

Confinement in Locked Institutions

Reform schools, secure institutions, intensive care units or training camps are only some of the varying names given to locked institutions. While these names imply specific national forms of organization and meaning, they also draw on a euphemistic rhetoric that downplays the key element of confinement in these institutions. Often, the institutions operate in a nexus between criminal justice and child protection services, catering to the needs of both offending youth (in pre-trial remand or serving a sentence) and youth in protective care, assessed as being harmful to themselves or others. Scholars have documented how treatment and care within institutions with a mandate to punish and provide care result in contradictory and ambiguous practices and interventions, and young people often struggle to distinguish between practices serving to protect them and those serving to punish them (Harris & Timms, 1993; Henriksen & Prieur, 2019).

Young people in confinement report a varied and complex mix of problems regarding criminality, mental health, alcohol and drug use, along with problems relating to school and family (Vogel, 2012). International studies show pervasive problems for young people leaving secure care (Bullock et al., 1998; Osgood et al., 2010; Walker et al., 2005), and recidivism is often high. A Swedish study shows that after 2 years, two-thirds had either re-entered secure care or had a serious conviction (Vogel et al., 2014). In Denmark, it is estimated that two-thirds are convicted of a crime within 2 years after secure placement (Center for Folkesundhed og Kvalitetsudvikling, 2014). While confinement often serves the purpose of both protection and rehabilitation of young people, studies find that young people are at risk of (further) criminalization during secure care placement due to both negative socialization and institutional labelling processes (Bengtsson, 2012a; McAra & McVie, 2012). Moreover, understanding the consequences of youth confinement includes acknowledging youth as a life period involving identity building and developing a sense of self. Experiencing the penal materiality and restrictive measures of a locked facility, as well as the rupture of everyday life and social relations, can leave a lasting impact on a young person’s sense of self and life trajectories (Cox, 2018; Enell et al., 2018).

The experience of living in a locked institution is shaped by intersecting categories of gender, age, ethnicity and capabilities. The global UN report assesses that only 6 per cent of confined minors are girls or young women (Nowak, 2019). Studies have documented how locked institutions are tailored to accommodate young men, often neglecting the needs and interests of girls (Henriksen, 2017; O’Neill 2001). Girls are often confined on welfare grounds, particularly due to concerns about engagement in transactional sex or mental illness (Creegan et al., 2005; Henriksen & Refsgaard, 2020; Roesch-Marsh, 2014; Vogel, 2016). However, studies also show that gendered stereotypes in closed institutions construct girls as overly sexualized and pathological by reproducing discourses of female vulnerability, which do not resonate with the girls’ perception of self or reinforce their ‘endeavours for autonomy’ (Vogel, 2018). The global UN study reports a high over-representation of poor mental health for young people in confinement, and a high risk of confinement having a negative impact on mental health (Nowak, 2019). Poor mental health is most likely not restricted to girls living in confinement, though multiple studies imply this. Studies provide insights that emphasize the relevance of a gender-sensitive approach to understand the causes and avenues of treatment for alleviating mental health problems of young people.

The confinement of young people in locked institutions varies greatly between countries, even between societies with quite similar welfare states and child welfare services. Among the Nordic countries, Norway and Finland do not have locked institutions. However, in both countries, a young person placed in out-of-home care can be locked up for up to 30 days as a restrictive measure. Tysnes and Reime’s article in this special issue explores coercive placement in residential care in Norway from the perspective of young people with serious drug and behavioural problems. They find that coercive placement can be necessary and helpful when the institutions manage to protect the young people and provide support and meaningful treatment. Contrary to Norway and Finland, Denmark and Sweden have locked secure institutions where young people are confined as an alternative to prison and on welfare grounds. In this special issue, Enell and Wilińska explore how young people in Swedish secure care relate to the contradictory images of the ‘child in danger’ and the ‘dangerous child’ by negotiating, opposing and transposing these images. The authors argue that restrictive measures seem to deny young people relations through which a sense of safety and care can be established. Thus, the study challenges the concept of ‘secure care’ in child welfare services, arguing that it is experienced neither as secure nor as caring.

A number of studies have explored how young people experience confinement and everyday life in a locked institution. A Danish study highlights the issue of boredom as a key trait in the young people’s narratives (Bengtsson, 2012b). Studies also find that young people struggle to understand the purpose of their placement (Enell, 2017; Vogel, 2018) and that they experience anxiety because of not knowing when they will leave, having no influence on the decision to terminate their placement (Henriksen & Refsgaard, 2020). In a study on training camps for sentenced young people in the USA, Cox (2011) finds that the young people learn to ‘do the programme’, implying that they follow the rules and logics of the rehabilitation programmes to qualify for early release. Henriksen and Refsgaard, in their article in this special issue, explore a similar issue of young people’s temporal experience of confinement in Danish secure institutions. The article identifies various subjective experiences of time being ‘slow’ or even ‘dead’ when young people are kept in isolation or are waiting for their stay to be terminated, and how they actively engage in ‘making time’ to gain some control of their time in confinement. Especially in the UK and USA, researchers’ access to closed institutions is getting increasingly difficult due to ethics boards restricting particularly qualitative and ethnographic research inside closed spaces (Henriksen & Schliehe, 2020; Myers, 2015). However, youth perspectives are vital for improving the support provided for young people in vulnerable positions, particularly interventions that include confinement or restrictive measures.

Confinement as Deprivation of Liberty

Confinement in a locked space is only one form of deprivation of liberty. Other forms include restrictions on mobility, relational contact, access to information and communication, which can also be experienced as confinement. Thus, it may be important to conceptualize confinement in a broader sense to include a wider range of experiences related to the deprivation of liberty. Various institutional settings include some degree of deprivation of individual liberty because of its uniform practices, structures and rules. In corrective institutions, restrictive measures can be temporarily imposed on young people to regulate their behaviour or to protect them, just as the legal regulation of these institutions can impose restrictions on one’s liberty. In their article for this special issue, Petájäniemi, Kaukko and Lanas consider how young asylum seekers experience confinement and waiting during and after their stay in a temporary shelter in Finland. They argue that the experience of confinement extends beyond being locked up, ‘since they are for years confined in forced movement, indefinite waiting and othered as a number in the system’. While the young asylum seekers are not physically confined through being locked up, they are trapped in a system that deprives them of their liberty and prevents their successful transition into adulthood.

The deprivation of liberty is an important human rights issue. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) provides an important regulatory framework for the confinement of young people. Article 37 states that children should not be confined with adults and that confinement should be a last resort and as lenient as possible. In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the CRC, a global report has taken stock of the extent, form and effects of depriving children and young people of their liberty (Nowak, 2019). The most recent general comments to the CRC identify needs and concerns related to youth in detention, thus emphasizing that the confinement of minors is a key concern in the promotion of children’s rights (CRC Commission, 2019). While studies have documented the form, function and experiences of confinement, only a small number of them have critically assessed the systems of adjudication and general processing that impose restrictive measures on young people. Roesch-Marsh (2014) has studied the decision-making logics and practices in Scotland, arguing that managers, practitioners and young people ascribe different meanings and explanations to ‘out-of-control behaviour’. In this issue, Pösö, Kalliomaa-Puha and Toivonen investigate how young people use the appeal system in Finland to correct errors regarding restrictive measures. The article finds that the appeal system is largely used by parents and offers limited access to justice for children and young people. The study portrays an adult-centred system of processing complaints which is not geared at including children’s and young people’s perspectives. The study opens an important line of inquiry regarding children and young people’s participation in wider decision-making processes, showing that even those processes that are set up to include their voices, such as children’s hearings and children and youth boards, often fail to do so. According to the CRC, young people have the right to be heard in decisions regarding significant matters in their life; however, very limited knowledge exists about how young people experience and participate in the decision-making processes that result in confinement or other restrictive measures.

Confining Youth

The CRC emphasizes that no child should be punished for offences that are not punishable for adults. However, young people are often confined, and sometimes criminalized, for conduct that links to youth lifestyle, edgework and experimental transitioning into adulthood (Bengtsson & Ravn, 2019; Ferrell, 2017). Across the world, young people are confined on grounds of truancy, absconding, drinking, using drugs, transactional sex and disruptive behaviour. In some countries, these constitute status offences, and in other countries, such behaviours result in confinement to enable protection and care. While whether such actions are legally or socially sanctioned differs nationally, youth end up in locked institutions or with restrictive measures for largely the same kind of behaviour, which contributes to criminalizing the conduct of youth (Nowak, 2019). Thus, confinement and state-imposed restrictive measures serve an important function of regulating and even criminalizing aspects of youth culture.

Professionals, such as judges and social workers, across a range of national contexts express views that confinement is an effective means to reduce youth crime, whereas, to the contrary, there is no evidence of such an effect (Nowak, 2019). A Scottish study of 3,500 case files from child protection documents that deep-end interventions offered to young people increase the risk of crime (McAra & McVie, 2007). The study concludes that policies and interventions centring on diversion and re-integration are the most effective at reducing youth crime. We need a better understanding of the trajectories in and out of confinement and the institutions regulating young people’s agency and cultural practices. Structural explanations such as institutional neglect (Myers, 2013) and institutional labelling processes (McAra & McVie, 2007) have been shown to play a significant role in recruiting and keeping young people in confinement. We also need to consider the implications of confinement and imposition of restrictive measures on young people during a transitional part of their life. For a selected group of young people, a substantial part of their formative years is spent in a restrictive environment that largely fails to provide them with basic knowledge and skills to transition from childhood to adulthood. For these young people, their agency is restricted at a time in their life when it is supposed to expand.

Hopefully, this special issue contributes to a much-needed discussion on how confinement and restrictive measures relate to the social control and regulation of young people. We need more research based on young people’s perspectives on confinement and restrictive measures which includes them not only as recipients of protective or punitive interventions but also as people with expertise and valuable insights into the complexities of these interventions. Such a discussion should involve scholars, as well as practitioners and politicians, vested in seeking ways to reconcile young people’s right to autonomy, protection and care with or without the use of confinement.