Introduction

New Labour, taking office in 1997, lost no time in setting out its plans for reform of the youth justice system (YJS) in England and Wales. Following the critical report, Misspent youth (Audit Commission, 1996), the No more excuses White Paper (Home Office, 1997) expressed dissatisfaction that the intervention offered to young people offending, or at risk of offending, was too little, too late or too ineffectual. The subsequent Crime and Disorder Act 1998 established a primary aim for the YJS of prevention of offending by children and young people, seeking to give coherence to a disparate range of agencies and activities. In section 39, this was bolstered by the requirement on local authorities to bring key partner agencies together in multi-agency Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) and management structures to support them.

It is now more than 10 years since New Labour's reforms and this is a timely point at which to examine what these reforms have meant, the values that informed them and how much has endured under the Coalition government. Becker (1967) suggested that sociological (and criminological) enquiry always takes one side or another, and this would seem to be true of social (and criminal justice) policy development as well. This chapter suggests that New Labour's reforms were on the side of adults, responding to fears and anxieties about young people, particularly those not in education, employment or training (pejoratively called NEETs). And New Labour was not alone, as authors have noted a common process of ‘adulteration’ across jurisdictions – a failure to distinguish children's particular needs in criminal justice policy and the application of sanctions (Muncie, 2006; Muncie and Goldson, 2006).

Structural reform, however, is not necessarily a single event and involves a much longer process of adjustment and evolution. Certainly, the new YJS in England and Wales has been characterised by change over the ‘noughties’, rather than stability, and there has been no inevitable uniformity in the ideas, values and beliefs that have motivated developments across this period. This chapter offers thoughts about how the YJS has worked with and absorbed conflict and contradictions, and where YOTs now find themselves in the Coalition world. How different is this to the youth justice arena of the 1990s and that of the early 2000s?