Framing the debate

Public protection is always high on the political agenda in one form or another. The phrase ‘public protection’ began life within the criminal justice sphere as part of the government White Paper Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public (Home Office, 1990, cited in Merrington and Stanley, 2007, p 437). Since its introduction into the political lexicon, ‘public protection’ has been transformed into an umbrella term to cover a range of activities by local authorities and other government agencies, but within the context of this book the phrase relates solely to serious offending (that is, violent and sexual offences). Although the phrase may have been formally introduced fairly recently, ‘[t]he probation service has been accountable for the protection of the public from serious offending ever since it took responsibility for the supervision of released prisoners in the 1960s’ (Merrington and Stanley, 2007, p 437). A long-running topic within the criminal justice literature has been what the state's response should be to those individuals who threaten serious harm to others (see Bottoms, 1977). Current debates in criminology focus on security and the governance of criminal justice (Zedner, 2003; Loader and Walker, 2007). Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA), as their name suggests, are a part of this debate. Until now, much of the discussion about MAPPA has focused on their application to adults. More recently, however, there has been a growing academic and political interest in the use of MAPPA for young people. The ways in which organisations, charged with the task of managing the risks posed by young people, view and treat those they are working with is a critical nexus where conflicting assumptions about ‘being young’ are laid bare, and where the difficulties encountered by criminal justice agencies in working with the young are most apparent. The contributions included in this book offer insights into these issues from a range of perspectives and highlight a number of areas, both practical and theoretical, that require further attention.