Understanding Youth Offending: Risk Factor Research, Policy and Practice

In recent years, youth justice policy has been increasingly shaped by a concern to manage risk. The Youth Justice Board's assessment tool Asset is thus underpinned by a commitment to the "risk factor paradigm" (RFP): the idea that it is possible to identify factors that predict delinquency and to mitigate them to prevent offending. The Scaled Approach takes the implication of the approach to its logical conclusion, linking the intensity of punishment to a risk of reoffending score generated by the Asset assessment.

It is precisely this uncritical acceptance that makes Case and Haines's book so important. The authors conduct a painstaking review of the evidence base for the RFP, exposing its limitations. They argue convincingly that the research has, for the most part, involved an over-simplistic reduction of the causes of crime to a number of measurable variables, underplaying the broader social and economic context to which young people are subject. The approach treats children as "crash test dummies", impelled towards certain forms of behaviour by the presence or absence of risk, rather than as active agents contributing to their own destiny. The Scaled Approach is described as a "selective, subjective and misinformed reading" of the evidence on which it purports to draw.