ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a study undertaken in juvenile justice in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The study involved the observation of 117 interviews between juvenile justice workers and young people on court orders which required supervision and 73 interviews with young people, and 73 interviews with workers. The study had multiple goals. It aimed to examine the nature of supervision offered by juvenile justice workers, particularly in relation to the effective practice skills identified in the literature. It also aimed to examine the relationship between supervision skills used by juvenile justice workers and the responses and reoffending rates of clients. Previous publications (Trotter 2012, forthcoming; Trotter and Evans 2012) have reported on the specific worker skills identified through the observations, the relationship between the use of skills and reoffending rates by clients and on the extent to which the impact of effective practice skills is dependent on the levels of engagement of the offenders under supervision.
