Back Page: My Week - Call off the Welsh arsonists - we have fire

At the NSPCC, where I sit on a research advisory group, we discuss the costs and consequences of child maltreatment. The difficulty is that there's no clear relationship between the various intervention options and the incidence of maltreatment, which is not to say that the interventions are ineffective. It's not unlike the incidence of youth offending which, in the final analysis, has little to do with the decisions of the criminal courts.

TUESDAY: Working at home on a chapter for a book I've entitled The Risks of Risk-Preoccupation. My thesis is that when legislation provides sentencers with an unprioritised potpourri of conflicting purposes, public protection tends to win out. And when probation officers and youth offending team workers are guided by what the Youth Justice Board terms a risk-proportionate "Scaled Approach", the lesson of history is that everyone becomes more risk averse and our interventions more intensely punitive. When I can't concentrate on this I'm mesmerised by the news, the banking crisis and the Conservative Party conference trying to make the news.