| Summary: | Internationally, the assessment of risk via the application of standardised assessment tools has become routine practice across criminal justice and penal systems. Ostensibly, risk assessment tools enable the prediction, and thereby prevention, of reoffending and recidivism. The use of risk assessment tools in the juvenile justice system in NSW, Australia is less than 20 years old, yet since 2001 one specific tool, the Youth Level of Service Case Management Inventory Australian Adaptation (YLS/CMI-AA), has become a key technology in interventions with young people. Young offenders who come into contact with the justice system are guaranteed two things: to be assessed for their risk of reoffending, and then to be treated for their offending behaviour, based on their predicted risk. Poststructural analyses of risk assessments have highlighted the way that the concept of ‘risk’ has become central in modern day systems of discipline and punishment and is implicated in both the governing of juvenile offenders and the population more broadly. This thesis builds upon existing work on risk to closely interrogate how juvenile justice risk assessment tools constitute, or make, the ‘problem’ of juvenile offending. The study applies Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) policy analysis approach to the YLS/CMI-AA 2.0 risk assessment tool and to a corpus of related texts to illuminate how risk assessments regulate, and actively shape who is defined, marked and classified as ‘risky’. In this sense, they are understood to do more than simply ‘predict’ and ‘prevent’. The WPR analysis enables the interrogation of the problem representations, or problematisations, that are lodged within texts such as the assessment tool, user guides and so on. This study demonstrates how the risk assessment tool administered to young people in NSW problematises crime as fixed, static, and something that has always existed, thereby making the imagined standards of behaviour appear to be real and wholly ahistorical. It also produces offenders as having a set of specific and common characteristics that include deviancy, immorality, and various forms of failure. The concept of ‘criminogenic pathways’ is integral to these representations and the risk assessment tool also firms up and naturalises taken-for-granted ideas about how somebody becomes an offender. This thesis contributes to international scholarship on the uptake up of risk discourses in juvenile penality by demonstrating how risk assessment tools have introduced a new form of governing, one that is backed by the ‘neutrality’ of science, and by extension the ‘neutrality’ of the state. The supposed assurance of ‘neutrality’ is used to defend, explain and justify the overrepresentation of certain people in penal systems, and, in Australia, Indigenous young people in particular. In addition, it appears that risk assessment tools function to regulate and discipline both juvenile offenders and ‘non-offending’ people more generally. The thesis also underlines the importance and usefulness of poststructuralist analytic strategies such as the WPR approach to defamiliarise fields concerned with the juvenile offender problem
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