Effective practice with young people who offend

Recent debate about how to intervene with young people who offend has increasingly focused on what constitutes effective practice. Such practice has been defined by HM Inspectorate of Probation as that which produces the intended results 1 and most contributors to the debate have assumed that the desired outcome to which effective practice should aspire is the reduction of offending. Section 37 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 places a duty on all those working within the youth justice system to have regard to a principal aim of preventing offending by children and young people and, by implication, to ensure that interventions within that system are informed by an evidence base as to what is effective in these terms.