With a major shift in emphasis away from containment and retribution to crime prevention, especially preventing re-offending, one of the effects was supposed to be a reduction in the youth prison population.
Yet press reports of poor conditions for juvenile offenders in Holloway women's prison last week, and the week before at the Ashfield Young Offender Institution in the West Country, have yet again focused national attention on Britain's propensity to lock up young people. With the under-18 prison population now around 2,900, that is more than twice as many as 10 years ago.
Yet for Lord Warner, the man charged with implementing the reforms as chairman of the Youth Justice Board, a much better measure of whether the system is working is a Home Office report that showed a 15 per cent reduction in reoffending by people who had been through the youth justice system in 2001 compared with four years previously.
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