It's not what you would expect from a community sentence. There's no scrubland that needs clearing, fences that need painting or a gang of young people reluctantly serving out their punishment. Instead there is just one young man and two youth offending team (YOT) workers happily chatting away and restoring a bike.
While this might seem like a soft way of punishing criminal behaviour, Paul Howard, reparation co-ordinator and the brainchild behind Wandsworth YOT's bike project, believes it is a far better use of both the young people's and the workers' time. Here, hidden away in an undisclosed location in Wandsworth, southwest London, young people are learning about the human cost of their actions by repairing old and stolen bikes and giving them to the victims of one of the UK's fastest-growing crimes - cycle theft.
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