Explaining, Interpreting, and Prescribing: Some Tensions and Dilemmas in the Comparative Analysis of Youth Justice Cultures

This chapter reflects on the implications of a cross‐cultural empirical research study on youth justice in Italy and Wales for transnational prescription of good practice. It examines the challenges in doing comparative studies which isolate the influence of particular elements of criminal justice regimes. Such analysis may seem well suited to transnational policy prescription in that particular elements are more easily transposed than whole systems. But institutional categories and practice may be so culturally imbedded that it becomes very difficult to understand their influence outside those particular cultural contexts. The article goes on to examine the potential (and the limitations) for transnational policy prescription of more holistic interpretive approaches to explanation rooted in analysis of legal cultures. It concludes that such approaches can expand the range of possible policy choices in terms of transnational prescription but cannot offer a means to predict their precise effects.