Discipline, educate and punish: Law, discourse and praxis in a Portuguese youth detention centre

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study in a Portuguese youth detention centre (YDC), the article discusses the divergent discourses of law, the judiciary and detention centres, and the way they are put into practice. While the law gives priority to young offenders’ ‘education’, both the sentencing practices of the judiciary and the institutional practices of YDCs adopt and implement primarily a disciplinary stance on youth justice. The article anatomizes how these divergent discourses intermingle, and contrasts the institutional discourses with the inmates’ views of, and reactions to, the disciplinary mode of operation of the centres. It is suggested that the regime of confinement and strategies of reward and punishment of the YDCs induce juveniles to adopt only short-lived changes of conduct, ultimately confining the law’s precept of education to a praxis of behavioural conditioning.