Preventive Work in the Community

Abstract

The renewed enthusiasm for ‘prevention’ in youth justice in England and Wales in the mid-1990s grew out of a disillusionment with the apparent inability of the ‘systems management’ strategies of the 1980s to contain or reduce youth crime (Audit Commission, 1996). In the 1980s many local authority youth justice sections abandoned both preventive work with young people ‘at risk’ and ‘in need’ and more intensive long-term work, including day-care provision for young people who would otherwise be in residential care or custody. In its place they developed a far more narrowly focused strategy of ‘systems management’ which concentrated upon time-limited, offence-oriented work with ‘high tariff’ adjudicated offenders. This change was due in part to the currently popular view that in intervening too early, or too intensively, in the lives of youngsters in trouble, one might stigmatise them in ways which would draw them deeper into the justice system (Cohen, 1979; Thorpe et al. 1980). This political/theoretical rationale notwithstanding, the major factor in this narrowing of the scope of youth justice in the 1980s and 1990s was cutbacks in local government expenditure which led to a progressive reduction in the human and material resources available to youth justice workers.