Under the Scaled Approach - which is due to come into force alongside the YRO at the end of this year - the level of intervention will be based on an assessment of risk and need, as well as the severity of the offences committed.
The concerns and criticisms to which I alluded in those talks have surfaced rather sooner than I had anticipated (CYP Now, 28 May-3 June). The basis of my own assertion was the evolving debate in the 1970s around so-called "justice for juveniles" following the introduction of more welfare-oriented measures for young offenders. These sought to reflect the contention, made forcefully in political debate and legislation at the end of the 1960s, that the depraved were also deprived - that a background of social disadvantage was a significant factor behind youth offending behaviour. This was, of course, the precursor to the now famous mantra of being tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.
The trouble was that, through the disposition of a Care Order, further decisions about the lives of those young people came to rest with social workers rather than with the courts.
For some young people, almost irrespective of the offences for which they had come before the court, the consequences of a Care Order (which gave local authority social workers enormous discretionary power) were negligible: they remained at home and saw their social workers from time to time. There was little change in their daily lives. In contrast, other young people found themselves removed from home and placed in local authority care - and again, such action did not equate in any clear way with the nature or number of offences committed.
All this produced a backlash towards the end of the 1970s, as those advocating more proportionate punishment (on the grounds that too many young people were "getting away with it") forged a strange alliance with the more liberal lobby concerned with justice (on the grounds that interventions were too often disproportionate to the offences for which young people had been sentenced). Both camps were profoundly opposed to the injustices perpetrated by what they considered to be "administrative justice". My recent lectures on youth justice suggested that a similar lobby of strange bedfellows would emerge in the next two or three years, determined to challenge the Scaled Approach. It seems, however, that the "justice" lobby, in voicing concerns that it will discriminate against people from disadvantaged backgrounds, has already taken off.
Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan
