Working in the community with young people who offend

Two particular developments inform youth criminal justice policy making and practices in several countries including Britain, the US and Australia: an ‘at risk’ approach for conceptualising youth offending, and assessing young offenders’ propensity to reoffend, and a ‘what works’ evaluation framework to assess the effectiveness of interventions to prevent further offending and to identify the most promising crime reduction and prevention programmes (Sherman et al. 1997, Nuttal 1998, Utting and Vernard 2000, Communities That Care (CtC) 2001, Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) 2002).