‘We Were the System’: Practitioners’ Experiences and the Juvenile Justice Mosaic in the 1980s

Abstract

During the 1980s, the significant use of institutionalisation for juveniles common in the 1970s was radically reversed. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of both male and female juveniles sentenced to custody fell dramatically, from 7000 to 1400. In the same period, the proportionate use of non-custodial options increased and also the overall number of juveniles dealt with by the youth justice system was reduced by 37%. A strategy of ‘diversion’ (from custody, from prosecution and from the youth justice system altogether) was evident (Telford and Santatzoglou, 2012). A significant policy event of the time was the Conservative government’s 1983 Intermediate Treatment (IT) Initiative, which offered significant resources to voluntary organisations, working in partnership with local authorities, in return for providing alternative-to-custody, community-based projects for juvenile offenders. Notably, youth justice practitioners were seen as instrumental in the occurrence of the diversionary transition. As one practitioner has put it: ‘what happened [during the 1980s] was very special; the input from practitioners’ (Lorna Whyte in Rutherford, 1992, p. 26). Indeed, accounts written in the early 1990s strongly associate the custodial decline with practice activity in shaping innovative community programmes (Allen, 1991, p. 49; Ball, 1992, p. 280; Pitts, 1992, p. 136; Gelsthorpe and Morris, 1994, p. 983).