ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the rise of welfare and treatment approaches to dealing with youth crime culminating in the introduction of intermediate treatment (IT) by the 1969 Children and Young Persons Act (CYPA). Then it turns to a discussion of the punitive turn and resulting move to punishment and control which, although having antecedents in the law and order decade of the 1980s, actually began in the early in the early 1990s and coincided with the development of the exclusive society'. The developments in the youth crime and youth justice sphere have paralleled the embracement of neoliberalism by successive governments over recent decades. This ideological move to the political right has involved economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment which have been filled by neoliberal penality and the advance of punitiveness. The rationale for the new orthodoxy includes the fact that much behaviour which is formally penalised is no more than a manifestation of a relatively innocuous working class youth culture.
