Managing Turkey’s Marginalized Youth: ‘Managerialism’ in Turkey’s Youth Justice and Penal Systems

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, Turkey’s youth justice system has undergone extensive reforms. However, it is centred around high-security remand imprisonment. Based on the research conducted between 2014 and 2015 to comprehend how high-security remand imprisonment has acquired such a central role, this article provides an analysis on the ways in which the system has diverted into a peculiar ‘managerialism’. Certain themes emerged revealing the turn to ‘managerialism’: (1) lack of coordination between different professional units and lack of evidence-based policymaking, (2) prioritization of speed and technology, (3) peripheral role of social work officials and (4) the importance of prisons.

Introduction

Turkey’s youth justice system and penal system in general have undergone extensive reforms in all aspects, within the legislative, judiciary and executive strands since the early 2000s: legislations have been amended and new courthouses have been constructed along with the introduction of new management technologies, such as the Sound and Video Information System and the National Judiciary Informatics System. Hundreds of small district prisons have been closed down since 2006 as they did not meet international standards and about a hundred new ‘healthy, secure, and electronically equipped prisons that are eligible for rehabilitation services’ (Directorate General of Prisons and Detention Houses, n.d.) have been constructed. In conjunction with the acceleration of Turkey’s accession to the European Union (EU), many judges, prosecutors, police, prison guards, teachers, religious officials and healthcare professionals have received various trainings in human rights (Babül, 2017). Youth justice system workers have received a great share of these reforms and trainings (Buker et al., 2019). This reform process indicated an enhancement of child welfare at the discursive level. Despite the extensive reform process, the system has not evolved into a model embracing and prioritizing child welfare and protection.

Instead, a peculiar type of prison has emerged from all of the newly built facilities; that is, a high-security remand prison for young pre-trial detainees. This new remand prison has become the central element of the system to manage youth in conflict with the law and reveals a securitization process that does not reflect the discourse of reforms. Between 2014 and 2015, I conducted fieldwork to understand how high-security remand imprisonment has attained such a central position and what role(s) it performs in the youth justice system. The results related to this particular question have been published elsewhere (Kavur, 2021). The operation of the whole youth justice system has been studied in order to situate remand prisons within this system. Observations in the courts and prisons and narratives from youth justice professionals, reveal certain characteristics that indicated a managerialist turn, as mentioned previously by Uluğtekin (2014). This article contributes to the scarce literature on Turkey’s youth and criminal justice systems by thoroughly discussing this managerialist approach.

The managerialist trend has penetrated various strands of the public sector in criminal justice, social services, health and education systems in various geographies; particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but also in countries like Sweden with a stronger welfare regime (Harlow et al., 2012; Robert, 2005b). This trend is considered to be a part of the neoliberal turn (Harlow et al., 2012; Lewiskin et al., 2021). One of the aspects of the neoliberal strategy is to shift the responsibility of public welfare provision from the state to the third parties, such as the private sector or non-governmental organizations, while accountability of these third parties are controlled mostly by quantifiable market goals. Hence, professionals such as social workers both in the public and private sectors are caught between their professional values and managerial priorities. In the broad sense, managerial discourse is criticized for highlighting quantifiable and routinized aspects of public welfare provision and overlooking qualitative aspects and, most importantly, the autonomy of individual professions (Olakivi and Niska, 2017). Along with this de-professionalization, there is a managerial drive for increased performance in economy, efficiency, effectiveness and evidence-based practices (Harlow et al., 2012). ‘Taking ‘politics’ out of policy, and focusing on pure technicism (Harlow et al., 2012: 538) is one of the ways to describe the managerialist trend.

This managerialist turn takes different shapes in different country contexts and manifests itself variously in different sectors. In Turkey, according to the literature, managerial values disclose themselves in the health and civil society sectors. For instance, Zihnioğlu (2019) draws attention to the depoliticization of civil society through the funders’ expectancy on short-term and measurable outcomes. In her work on manifestations of human rights reforms in Turkey, Babül (2017), refers to a tendency to measure success with quantifiable targets. Agartan (2019), states that Turkey has experimented New Public Management reforms since the 1980s in public sector facilities and particularly on health. Her findings indicate physicians’ concern over the erosion of professional autonomy, overridden by managerial interests. Uluğtekin (2014: 201) compares the secondary positioning of doctors under the rule of hospital managers in Turkey with that of the social workers in the management of the youth justice system and draws attention to a managerial tendency. Based on their evaluation of studies in Europe, Canada and Turkey, Cartuyvels and Bailleau (2010) have stated that a managerialist turn within youth justice systems’ reforms have been influenced by neoliberalism. Within this comparative study edited by Cartuyvels and Bailleau (2010), İrtiş, who has extensively studied Turkey’s youth justice system, concludes that the Turkish system, ‘oscillates between an attitude that is both repressive and lax and a protectionist will that is not detached from neoliberal tendencies’ (İrtiş, 2010: 251). The managerialist turn is most clearly observed in the governance of new high-security remand prisons for the youth; however, the overall justice system deserves closer scrutiny.

In this article, I will be presenting the processes in the legislative, judicial and executive branches, and will provide an analysis of the direction that Turkey’s youth justice system has taken. First, I discuss the transformations and continuities in the youth justice realm in relation to Turkey’s welfare regime. Youth criminality, legislations, social work and prisons will be explained. Next, the methodology of the empirical research will be shared. Narratives from the youth justice professionals will be presented followed by a conceptual discussion on managerialism.

A Brief History of Youth Criminality and Crime Control in Turkey

Early prisons

The modern history of youth criminality and crime control in Turkey begins with the establishment of reformatories in the late 19th century. Reformatories were founded primarily for destitute children, but also accepted those in conflict with the law. They are regarded as the first successful industrial training schools of the late Ottoman times (Öztürk, 1995). During the Republican Period, between 1933 and 1953, reformatories were ruled as labour-based prisons (Sipahi, 2006). Most importantly, the aim has been disciplining and incorporating the convicted youth into the cheap labour force. Today, they are called Juvenile Education Houses and are open prisons based on vocational training, in which young people work outside during the day as an apprentice and spend the night in the institution. During apprenticeship, young convicts are employed in the manual, labour-intensive sectors, such as the automotive, furniture or textile industry, with the hope of continuation after release. These institutions are low-security prisons. In contrast, more recent institutions of the early 2000s are high-security, closed prisons for young pre-trial detainees. Before presenting these later institutions of crime control, first, criminalization process and the state’s response to crime are briefly discussed below.

Criminalization

Today, most offences are related to property and drugs, sometimes involving bodily injury. Ümit (2006) has outlined the root causes of criminality as internal migration from the rural to urban and from the East to the West (Buker and Erbay, 2018), low socio-economic and cultural capital related to urban segregation, school dropouts, consequent involvement in (in)formal job market or working on the streets as well as the consumption or dealing of drugs. Young people in the margins of urban life are criminalized and are perceived as risky to the society (Uluğtekin, 2012). Mercan (2021) and Mercan and Şen (2020) argue that the illegal drug market constitutes a source of aspiration for marginalized, lower-class youths, who have little hope of participating in legitimate society. Mercan and Şen (2020) further draw attention to the complex relations between neoliberal urban governmentality, emergence of slums and the rise of illicit enterprises, claiming that urban transformation projects increase the retail-level drug trade by forcing people to abandon their squatter houses, and to turn to sites of illicit activities.

Socio-economic reasons or ethno-racial discrimination are not considered in the courtroom as the potential causes of property crimes. Gönen and Yonucu (2011), who have studied the representation of ‘criminals’, state that the perception of the urban poor as a security threat conceals the structural inequalities that lie behind the criminality. Rather, children are portrayed as dangerous adult offenders, while the objective of the court is to provide justice to the victims (Kurtege-Sefer, 2010a). In property-related cases, litigants belong to wealthier classes and offenders are either generally low-educated Kurdish employees or unemployed male juveniles from the lower classes (Kurtege-Sefer, 2010b). In relation to this, Gönen (2017) draws attention to the intensification of the ‘tough on crime’ measures of the police in the early 2000s. Complementing Kurtege-Sefer (2010a, 2010b), Gönen (2011, 2017) claims that these measures rest on a deliberate strategy of profiling and criminalizing the ethno-racially differentiated urban poor. Socio-economic inequalities and ethnic discrimination are disregarded, while the responsibility of the criminal act is individualized. Besides these above studies which show the overrepresentation of Kurds and other groups in youth courts, Hürman’s (2020) work specifically deals with the disproportionate penalization of Kurdish children through counter-terrorism acts.

Legislation

The Child Protection Law (Law no: 5395, 2005) reflects the political economy and the residual understanding of social security in the country. The Law bears a distinction between a child in need of protection (victim) and a child in conflict with the law (perpetrator), inferring that the latter is not in need of protection. Protection measures, consisting of family counselling, education, health, housing and care, can be applied to both groups but in different forms and under different titles. The protection measures applied to those in conflict with the law are instead named as security measures. These protection or security measures are given by the judge after consulting social work officials. ¹ However, judges are legally obliged to consult the social work officials and forensic experts, only if the perpetrator is below the age of 15, in order to check whether the child is at the stage of discretion; that is, whether he or she is aware of the meaning and consequences of the actions. Although the social work official’s duty is identifying the needs of the young defendant and proposing a roadmap to the judge, the only time the judge is actually obliged to consult one is when the young defendant is under 15. After this age, the child is perceived as an individual responsible for the committed offence, regardless of the socio-economic environment.

Social (in)security and erosion of social work

The insignificance given to the socio-economic background of the child is historically based on the scarcity of long-term policies aimed at social security and welfare. Social work was first introduced in the 1960s (Özbek, 2006); however, family and community have remained as the fundamental support for youth (Göçmen, 2014), while social policies targeting urban poverty remained scarce. From the 1980s onwards, Turkey’s political economy transformed in line with the neoliberal tendencies. In this outward-oriented liberal era, income inequality rose due to both global conditions and domestic developments (Pamuk, 2013: 313). Since the early 2000s, Turkey’s capitalist welfare regime is described as informal, eclectic and residual, strengthening social stratification and inequality among society (Buğra and Candas, 2011; Buğra and Keyder, 2006; Eder, 2010). In accordance with neoliberal transformations, since the 1990s, boundaries between the state, civil society and the private sector have been blurry, in terms of setting policy on social services (Kartal, 2008). Consequently, the focus in youth justice is not on the socio-economic causes of crime, but rather on the criminalization of the marginalized poor.

Van Den Brink (2019), who has conducted comparative research on contemporary youth justice systems across Western societies, puts forth the general argument that there has been a shift from a ‘modern penal-welfarist view of the offender as a deprived individual in need for support and treatment [to] the late modern culture of crime control [which] portrays offenders rather as culpable and dangerous criminals’, or at least a hybridity of these two approaches (Van Den Brink, 2019: 251). This shift in the rhetoric from ‘children in need of assistance’ to ‘children as a security concern’ is observed quite differently in Turkey, where welfarist views have never been fully embraced (İrtiş, 2010). In practice, social inquiry reports have hardly ever been prepared, and often do not fulfil the criteria even if they are so. In the rare cases in which they do, judges do not read them due to lack of time (İrtiş, 2010: 237). As well, institutions that would address the needs of the child remain insufficient. Judges and prosecutors have power over social work officials in this solid, non-flexible, hierarchical atmosphere (Uluğtekin, 2014). Regarding the social work officials’ peripheral positioning in the youth justice system, Uluğtekin (2014) draws attention to the managerialist mentality in Turkey. Similarly, Neves (2013) and Cummins (2017) argue that managerialism side-lined social work values in the European context; withering the ‘social’ dimension of ‘work’, rendering it to case management (Neves, 2013: 116).

Latest prisons

Eventually, the new high-security prison with the special name ‘Children and Young People’s Closed Institutions for Execution of Punishment’ emerged in the early 2000s to manage youth aged 12–18 years old. These prisons were exclusively introduced for young pre-trial detainees. While some young people are locked up for more than the average period of 8 months, others stay for a month until the first trial and then are released, before potentially being arrested due to another case. The number of high-security prisons for young pre-trial detainees (8) is higher than the number of the low-security Juvenile Education Houses for convicted youth (4) (Turkey’s Center for Prison Studies (TCPS), n.d.) On an average day in 2021, there are approximately 1000 young remand prisoners, while convicted young prisoners are around 500 (Directorate General of Prisons and Detention Houses, 2022). Around 10,000 young people are estimated to be circulating in remand imprisonment every year (Yalçın, 2016). During the COVID-19 pandemic, convicted children were released earlier, while there were no alternative control mechanisms against pre-trial detention (Şekerci, 2022). Apparently, incapacitating the young people in high-security remand prisons is rendering Juvenile Education Houses redundant, diminishing the emphasis on discipline and labour. Youth is managed in the high-security remand prisons for an uncertain period of time, with little evidence of child protection or progress towards transformation. There is simply ‘better’ management of young people through these warehouse-like new institutions with less focus on reformation.

In parallel to the youth justice system, during his research on adult prisoners, İbikoğlu was told that the ultimate goal of the Directorate of Prisons and Detention Houses was to eliminate wards and low-security prisons (İbikoglu, 2012: 8). He argues that there has been a transition from the political prisoners’ disciplinary regime to a security-oriented managerial regime of control. This prison population is no longer mere subjects of a sovereign or subjects to be transformed into ideal citizen, but are managed and reduced to utilitarian individuals (İbikoglu, 2012: 100). According to Akdeniz et al. (2019), lately, overcrowding of the prisons has been handled quite peculiarly, as well. The prison sentence is stripped from rationalities of punishment and transformed into an issue of ‘prison population management’.

Managing youth, controlling crime

Based on their observations on the American prison system, Feeley and Simon (1992, 1994) have drawn attention to the ‘New Penology’, which is managerial rather than transformative. In relation to the old penology that targeted the ‘normalization’ and reintegration of the individual into the community, in New Penology, the target shifts from intervening and transforming individuals to making rational classifications according to the dangerousness of the unruly groups for better management. Likewise, Castel (1991) highlights the departure from the traditions of psychiatric medicine and social work in France and the United States to innovate preventive strategies that dissolve the concrete individual and replace him or her with risk factors.

In Turkey, high-security remand imprisonment is not an institution that transforms individuals, as Juvenile Education Houses are, but functions as a custodial institution that ‘manages aggregates’. In the remand prison system, ‘incapacitation before adjudication, particularly without any rehabilitative or retributive goal, smacks of the managerialism objective. The intent is simply to manage efficiently unchangeable population (primarily poor minority males) and preserve social tranquillity’ (Kempf-Leonard and Peterson, 2002: 435). As the neoliberal governmentality advances in Turkey, preventive and security-oriented practices increase (Doğuc, 2014: 60; Özkazanc, 2011). This has commonalities with New Penology’s response to the underclass in the United States (Feeley and Simon, 1992: 467), which is also underlined by Özkazanç (2011).

Bottoms’(1995) differentiation between types of managerialism provides a suitable framework to discuss the manner in which young people in conflict with the law in Turkey are governed. He differentiates between ‘systematic’, ‘consumerist’ and ‘actuarial’ managerialism. In systematic managerialism, the emphasis is on inter-agency cooperation between different branches, such as the police, the court, the probation service and the prison service to fulfil the goals of the system, as well as an emphasis on creating a strategic plan, creating key performance indicators and active monitoring of aggregate information – basically all kinds of systematic control of information that can be observed in corporations’ annual reports. On the contrary, consumerist managerialism refers to a bottom-up approach, where criminal justice employees’ opinions as consumers are valued to affect the higher organization of the system. Finally, there is the actuarial aspect of managerialism that Bottoms finds closest to the ‘New Penology’ (Feeley and Simon, 1992). ‘If prison can do nothing else, incapacitation theory holds, it can detain offenders for a time and thus delay their resumption of criminal activity’ (Feeley and Simon, 1992: 458). For instance, identifying drug courier profiles and preventive detention exemplify aspects of managerialism (Feeley and Simon, 1994). The findings of this research highlight actuarial type of managerialism in Turkey that could be identified as the New Penology. Specifically, actuarial justice presupposes that crime is normal and can only be minimized, relies on the concept of risk profiles rather than individuals, is focused on managing aggregates rather than transforming individuals and is preoccupied with estimations and preventions rather than addressing past causes (Robert, 2005a).

Methodology

In 2014 and 2015, I conducted fieldwork with the objective of understanding the role(s) of remand imprisonment in Turkey’s youth justice system within governmentality studies (Foucault, 2007, 2008). Looking into how different actors approach, and are affected by, pre-trial detention and crime control required me to scrutinize the operation of the youth justice system from various angles, and to direct questions to the participants, not only on issues such as imprisonment but on crime control and social protection. Prior to the fieldwork, the managerialist turn was marked in the literature on Turkey’s youth justice system by Uluğtekin (2014), which needed to be unpacked in detail. I reached out to 38 youth justice professionals, which consisted of 7 female lawyers, 12 social work officials: 8 female and 4 male, and 8 male prosecutors and 11 judges, 2 of them female. In total, I had interviews with 6 juvenile judges, 2 head judges of the juvenile heavy penal courts, 1 retired member judge of the juvenile heavy penal court and 2 criminal peace judges; 8 of the 12 social work officials were interviewed in pairs/small focus groups.

Youth justice professionals were questioned about their daily occupational experiences, challenges they face, their views on the reasons of crime and techniques of crime control, their knowledge on prisons and their views on social protection mechanisms. I approached judges, lawyers, prosecutors and social work officials with different sets of open-ended questions, ranging between 37 and 45 in number. Questions were adopted and posed differently in each interview. Sometimes, I informed different professionals with data that I had acquired from the previous interviews, asking them to comment on the new information, while adhering to the anonymity principle. Consequently, all the interviews complemented each other until data saturation. Each lasted between 30 minutes and 3 hours depending on the availability of the professionals. I also had access to different professional groups via different techniques. Judges, prosecutors and social work officials are usually in their offices during working hours, and most welcomed me when I randomly knocked on their doors and introduced myself as a researcher and they introduced me to their colleagues. Lawyers, on the contrary, have their own offices. There are prominent (mostly female) lawyers who have dedicated themselves to fixing the injustices in the operation of the youth justice system, who are accessible for research with a similar purpose. I communicated with these lawyers in advance to get an appointment. I reached out to other lawyers during the courtroom observations.

Besides the interviews, I observed 65 hearings. I also conducted interviews with 50 young prisoners in six different prisons. Since the main discussion in this article is around the management of the youth justice system and occupational issues, prisoners’ narratives are not considered in this article, but elsewhere (Kavur, 2021). Informed consent was obtained in all interviews. All participants have been left anonymous. Field notes taken on each fieldwork day complemented the data drawn from the interviews and courtroom observations to reach similar patterns on crime control.

Findings

Discussions mostly revolved around crime control and management and less around the sociological roots of being in conflict with the law; that is, economic deprivation and social inequality. In fact, there is a difference between prosecutors and some judges on one hand, who are in favour of crime control in a managerialist mentality and advocative lawyers and social work officials on the other side, who view children as those in need of protection. Overall, certain themes emerged revealing the current state of affairs in youth justice: (1) lack of coordination between different professional units and lack of evidence-based policymaking, (2) the significance of technological developments and speed as indicators of system efficiency, (3) the peripheral role of social work officials and (4) the importance of prisons as spatial control mechanisms and the embodiment of security.

Lack of coordination and lack of evidence-based policymaking

One of the central themes brought up throughout the interviews is the absence of coordination and cooperation between different units and different professional groups. Cooperation is rather lax and depends highly on individuals’ efforts rather than systematic planning. Emel is a lawyer who takes care of youth justice cases and advocates for justice and rights. She shared her concerns in her overview of the process:

Let me tell you something from my own observations. Social work officials, judges, prosecutors, police officers and lawyers are probably the groups that receive the most training . . . but still this is the sphere that makes the highest number of practical mistakes. Why? . . . most probably due to professionals’ . . . how to say that word, practical-ness is not the right word, it’s not professional deformation, how to say it? . . . I mean they just do their work routinely and just that. When the case comes to him, the prosecutor knows that he has to ask for a social inquiry report for that case, but says, ‘I know this case, no need’ and that’s it. Then the lawyer catches this and says to himself, this child needs a social inquiry report and then says, ‘the judge will return a verdict of not guilty, so why bother’. The judge looks . . . that’s why I cannot find the right word. Everyone sees the mistake there, but everybody is somehow concerned with terminating the procedure as if these times will pass.

Similarly, lawyer Melis stated, ‘Everyone is spoilt by the other’. Both lawyers narrated the normalization of dealing with young people’s criminal cases as routine paperwork. Social inquiry interviews easily become insignificant in the prosecution process. The disconnection between the different branches of the system – legislative, executive and judiciary powers – and also the lack of dialogue between actors within the same branches indicates extremely weak inter-agency cooperation.

Upon my question about ‘evidence-based policymaking’ in the sphere of youth justice, lawyer Selin responded sarcastically:

We do not do such things. We do not feel the necessity of such a thing as a society.

We do whatever comes to our mind and we believe that it works very well . . . thus we search for no evidence. In fact, various institutions have been introduced into the system such as probation, deferment of the announcement of the verdict or mediation. 10 years have passed, and there has to be a revision after some time . . . That’s why there is no search for evidence . . . unfortunately.

A lack of long-term graphical data representing trends in the system indicates a lack of key performance indicators and no monitoring of aggregate information. These features of a ‘systematic type of managerialism’ as identified by Bottoms (1995) are rather absent in this context. Ultimately, there is no systematic managerialism with evidence-based policymaking, data collection and criminological research, nor are there consultation services from professionals.

Prioritization of system efficiency: Technology and speed

Rather than coordination between different professional units or evidence-based policymaking, significance is given to system efficiency within the court process. Especially with prosecutors, discussions diverted towards system management; that is, management of cases in a speedy manner.

Prosecutor Kenan stated:

Before 2005 there was no UYAP (National Judiciary Informatics System), and then they distributed computers to us. Training started. I bet it does not exist even in Europe. . . Our prosecution system is very fast [referring exclusively to the arrests]: instructions and warrants arrive in the same minute. It takes 5 minutes to scan folders.

The emphasis on system efficiency in most prosecutors’ accounts is worth noting. However, this does not necessarily connote to a desire to do ‘risk management’. The language and investigation of risk have been introduced into Turkey’s youth justice system by Ögel, but has not become ubiquitous within it (Ögel and Karadayı, 2011). As such, the managerialist conduct of social work and youth justice in Turkey does not adopt knowledge production techniques on risk calculation as done in English-speaking Western countries (Haines and Case, 2008; Parton, 1998).

The emphasis given to system efficiency, fast-tracking and newly introduced technologies to manage data and to provide security, with no agenda of penal welfarism (Garland, 1990), indicates a managerialist mentality that prioritizes crime control, with practitioners adopting the ‘can-do’ values of the private sector (Garland, 2001: 188). Prosecutors find themselves preoccupied more with technological advancements, speed and efficiency than with the socio-economic causes of crime.

Insufficiency of social inquiry, social security and social work

As the causes of crime are not considered, responses or feedback from the professionals (legal experts/social work officials) are not taken into account. For instance, a social work official’s duty to conduct social inquiry interviews may conflict with the priority given to physical security, especially for young defendants in pre-trial detention. Social work official Füsun said:

Here progression is realized by putting a tick next to European Union criteria . . . For instance, there is no room for social work officials to conduct interviews in this courthouse . . . I talk in the pre-trial detention waiting rooms . . . I try to talk to the child surrounded by that many men [the gendarmes].

Similarly, social work official Melek referred to the Child Protection Law’s shortfalls:

It is a good law in terms of protective care measures but the implementation is problematic. In the simplest sense, there should be no handcuffs. There is a conflict with the gendarmes [army officers appointed for security]. I mean, the social work officials are in conflict with the gendarmes.

Professional autonomy of social work officials collides with concerns over crime control and physical security measures exercised by the police, the gendarme, prison guards or prison managers. The historically peripheral positioning of the profession of social work manifests itself in the youth justice system. Based on this research, five factors undermine the value of social work as a profession: (1) the ambiguity in the job definition of the social work official, caught between determining the imputability of the child and determining his or her needs for social security, (2) the legal position of social work officials as ‘others’ rather than core elements of the court, (3) inferior positioning of the social work officials under judges and prison managers, (4) the ambiguity of the eligibility criteria to do social work, as a psychologist, a social service graduate and a maths teacher ² can basically carry out the same task and (5) the ambiguity in the timing of the use of social work officials, who are torn between the prosecution bureau and courts. Moreover, as stated by Çoban (2016), social work officials are not provided with the resources for conducting examinations of the children’s social environments.

Speaking of the hierarchically inferior positioning of his profession, social work official Ali told of the time he was reprimanded for not obeying the judge he was appointed to when he requested not to attend a trial in order to complete a social inquiry report. He argued against his inferior position in relation to the judge:

It is impossible to go out and conduct field research because then you have to get permission [from the judge]. If the state does not trust me when I say I go out to do field research, then the state should not trust the report that I prepare . . . In Turkey, everything is for show.

Managing aggregates in high-security prisons

In the absence of social inquiry and social security interventions that tackle the root causes of illegality, such as social inequality and racial discrimination, high-security prisons emerge as the first-resort mechanism for crime control. Criminal peace judge Savaş shared his views over alternative mechanisms to imprisonment:

Reintegration and rehabilitation studies are unfortunately insufficient. Drug treatment does not work properly. They take blood tests once a month, saying if he is smoking or he is not . . . They are working neither with the family nor within the social environment. There is no infrastructure. Accordingly, signing in the police station is the preferred alternative control mechanism for those prosecuted for drugs. Probation and the juvenile court are responsible for following the cases, but they do not. They say that we notified him by paper, but he did not show up, so let him get a prison sentence.

Elaborating on the difficulty of reaching prisons in daily life, Lawyer Emel stated:

Pay attention! In all cities, prisons have started to be built outside the cities. These prisons are in total isolation/segregation . . . The meaning of building a prison campus outside the city is to segregate the workers, detainees, sentenced prisoners, their families, everyone who has a duty there – the lawyers, doctors, etc. – everyone from society. It means killing their socio-cultural lives.

Similarly, Lawyer Selin expressed her disapproval of prison policy:

They have gathered the prisons together. . . Turkey is a big country, there cannot be a fair trial by opening 2–3 prison campuses [with courthouses inside] nor can there be any ameliorative programmes for the sentenced prisoners. There needs to be a road that strengthens the reintegration of the child. Where will he work? Where will he reside? . . . They [Ministry of Justice] do not work cooperatively with the families, and then there is no-one to give the child to . . . These are not ameliorative institutions; in fact, these are storages/warehouses . . . They [Ministry of Justice] will comprehend their mistake and will have to rebuild them.

Both lawyers drew attention to the remoteness of the new prison campuses that have container-like juvenile prisons inside, which are difficult to reach by anyone from outside, including the defence attorneys or social work officials, indicating a managerialist mentality.

On the contrary, referring to the new big prison campuses, particularly on youth remand prisons, Prosecutor Ali stated:

‘This prison campus is very good. I was there yesterday’. He added that the prisons in this campus were constructed to higher standards than in Europe. ‘Did they show you the aquarium, the football field, etc.? If I were you, I would visit that campus’.

Opportunities provided by prison designs and facilities and system management matter more than imprisonment rationalities, mostly for prosecutors, and so the distinction between prison sentence and remand imprisonment is disregarded. Judge Melih did not possess knowledge of the different types of juvenile prisons. Moreover, he had no knowledge of the ratios of pre-trial detention and remand imprisonment. I asked him whether there was any connection between recidivism and pre-trial detention. He responded:

Certainly, there is a link between the two. If a child is coming to the court for a second time, the judge thinks that the child has not been reformed, and he has to be detained.

Remand ratios remain high in relation to prison sentences, as judges send defendants to remand imprisonment due to the high number of cases, giving them a ‘taste of custody’ in the absence of social work interventions during prosecution process. Psychosocial staff members in the prison undertake work under the control of the managers and conduct mostly just psychological relief. In all the above responses, the rationalization of remand imprisonment could be taken as control and a commencement of the prison sentence. As a matter of course, remand imprisonment emerges as a spatial control unit, a warehouse that is designed to work as a first-resort deterrence mechanism with less focus on reformation.

Discussion

Certain characteristics of Turkey’s youth justice system indicate an ‘actuarial managerialism’, as put forth by Bottoms (1995) and also defined as New Penology by Feeley and Simon (1992, 1994). These are the lack of inter-agency cooperation between different units, lack of quantifiable data to track efficiency for developing long-term policies, the wide exclusion of social work officials from the system, immateriality of an understanding of social security/welfare, and finally the importance of prisons as spatial control mechanisms. The number of cases a judge can finish in a given time (courts deal with 40–45 cases a day (İrtis, 2010)), and the number of reports social work officials complete are more important than how each individual case is approached. In the end, the governance of young people takes an actuarial managerialist form, not with a deliberate objective, but rather transforms in a way that is hard for the actors to reverse in everyday conduct.

The concept of ‘managerialism’ provides a basis for explaining the current system. However, it must be employed carefully. Cheliotis, who takes a cautious stance against New Penology, argues that this theory, with its emphasis on risk management, downplays the human agency of professionals of the criminal justice system. Second it ignores the potential positive aspects of managerialism. In addition, as Feeley and Simon later themselves admit, New Penology fails to comprise the fundamental expressive function of government as it fails to link past and contemporary penal rationalities (Cheliotis, 2006). Finally, managerialism as undertaken by Feeley and Simon, is stated to be less concerned with responsibility, fault and moral sensibility, intervention and treatment of the individual offender. It is rather concerned with techniques to identify and classify groups according to dangerousness (Feeley and Simon, 1992: 452). However, I argue that an elaboration of the emphasis over individual responsibility is necessary to comprehend the interpretation of actions of Turkey’s youth justice professionals. I claim that in Turkey’s youth justice system, within which target groups are managed, the individual responsibility of the person as a rational and liberal choice-maker is central to the prosecution process, complementing the profiling and criminalization of the ethno-racially differentiated urban poor (Gönen, 2011, 2017; Kurtege-Sefer 2010a, 2010b) and silencing of social workers. Once the judiciary notices an individual’s failure to keep away from illegal activities on repeated occasions, or involvement in serious crimes involving victims, young defendants are seen as disposable groups of offenders who are individually responsible for their actions. Thus, they can be labelled as dangerous, based on either the quantity or the severity of their criminal activities, leading them to remand imprisonment. Turkey’s informal and residual social security system and rising economic inequality constitute the context in which professionals in the youth justice system shape their ideas.

Conclusion

Based on the research that was conducted to comprehend how high-security remand imprisonment has acquired such a central role, this article has provided an analysis on the ways in which the system has diverted into managerialism, particularly defined as actuarial managerialism (Bottoms, 1995) and resembling the New Penology (Feeley and Simon, 1992, 1994). Upon the basis of a weak social security regime, unanchored conduct of social services and perception of youth in conflict with the law as children not in need of protection but as individually responsible actors of crime, security concerns encompass the whole operationalization of youth justice. Eventually, past causes of crime are not addressed and detainees are managed as aggregates (Robert, 2005a). The shift of emphasis from education/labour-based Juvenile Education Houses to high-security Children’s Closed Institutions for Execution of Punishment for remand prisoners constitutes a novelty intrinsic to the managerialist governmentality. Certain reoccurring themes indicate to a peculiar managerialist turn: (1) lack of coordination between different professional units and lack of evidence-based policymaking, (2) the significance of technological developments and speed as indicators of system efficiency, (3) the peripheral role of social work officials and (4) the importance of prisons as spatial control mechanisms. The constant preoccupation with ‘security’ spreads this managerialism into the courtrooms and prisons.

The findings of this research indicate the necessity to pay attention to this managerialist approach and its shortcomings. As in the case of most research, this study is limited, as well. It would be beneficial to include narratives of the high-rank officials in the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Family and Social Services, too, to discuss these features of managerialism. Future research should take the high-rank officials’ participation into account. In conclusion, based on these findings that demonstrate a managerial stance, I propose to reconsider the formal accounts over legislative and judiciary reforms in the youth and criminal justice systems with a critical approach.