ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with how successful the two projects were in reducing the rate of offending among the young people with whom they worked. It discusses problems in interpreting our figures on reoffending, in particular the difficulty of making valid comparisons between the criminal careers of the young people at the projects and young offenders who received other forms of intervention. The use of four-year data is unusual in evaluation research, and the number involved is too small for confident conclusions to be drawn, but a possible interpretation of figures is that even when young people were influenced in the desired direction by attendance at Freagarrach, the power of influence waned over time in most cases, as a result of the lack of supportive networks in their lives that might have maintained the benefits gained from the project. The project's first task was to engage the young people and, their families, in work that offered the possibility of positive change.
