ABSTRACT
Young adult offender, the The term was first used when the Advisory Council on the Penal System was asked in 1970 to examine sentencing arrangements with respect to persons aged seventeen and under twenty-one. See the Committee’s Report under the chairmanship of Sir Kenneth Younger, Young Adult Offenders (1974). The Younger Report recommended a generic custodial sentence, the custody and control order, to replace imprisonment, borstal training and detention centre sentences, and a new non-custodial sentence, the supervision and control order. The central purpose of the Younger Committee was: ‘the encouragement of treatment of an increasing proportion of young adults in the community, and the necessary switch of resources within the penal system in order to implement this change of policy to the benefit of public and offenders alike.’ However, the thrust of the Younger Report was not acted upon and the Labour government’s Green Paper Youth Custody and Supervision: a New Sentence (Cmnd 7406, 1978), dealt only with custodial arrangements. In the event it was the Conservative government’s White Paper, Young Offenders (Cmnd 8045, 1980) which found legislative expression in the Criminal Justice Act (1982) with a new sentence of youth custody (replacing imprisonment and borstal) and modifications to the detention centre sentence.
