ABSTRACT
The development of the ‘growing out of crime’ or ‘systems management’ approach to juvenile justice during the 1980s has been generally acknowledged to have been a penal success story. Traditional tensions between ‘justice’ and ‘welfare’ models lessened as a multi-agency approach attempted to combine the best of both worlds in order to reduce the numbers of young offenders being imprisoned at the same time as resisting net-widening among pre-delinquent youngsters. But the myth of the ‘hard core’ of dangerous and/or persistent young offenders was tenacious and the murder of James Bulger ‘proved’ that the ‘stunted little man’ — the prematurely worldly wise artful dodger identified by Matthew Davenport Hill in 1855 and cited in Pearson (1983) — was still dangerously alive and well in the 1990s. By the end of the century, the New Labour government was demanding that ‘no more excuses’ be made for young offenders and the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 was described by some as ‘the biggest shake up for 50 years in tackling crime’ (Muncie 2000: 14). This chapter will explore just how different the treatment of young offenders is at the start of the twenty–first century and how much continuity remains with past attitudes.
