YOUTH JUSTICE ACT

Youth Justice Act

Youth Justice Act

Introduction

The U.K. Crime and Disorder Act 1998 is legislation that passed by both Houses (Commons and Lords) of the U.K. Parliament in December 1997 for youth justice, subsequently received Royal Assent in July 1998. It has been of considerable importance to criminal justice academics and practitioners because it changed U.K. youth justice law and criminal justice policy in relation to a number of key areas.

Finally, possibly the most widely discussed innovation was the extension of local authority responsibilities for crime reduction. While it is not possible to discuss the entirety of the act here, it is pertinent to discuss the background of the act in terms of its social and political context and to highlight the key areas of interest, namely youth justice and community safety (Lab, 2007, 129).

Context of the Act

It is necessary to understand the social and political context of any legislation. In relation to the U.K. Crime and Disorder Act (hereinafter referred to as CDA), there are three key issues. First, the competition for political power in the United Kingdom rests, as it does in many democracies, on the law and order platform and wishes to present a political party to the British electorate as being tough on crime. Legislation is therefore, surrounded by politics, which is usually driven by a responsiveness to populist public demand. In this sense, the CDA represents part of a wider response to the perceived need for the British government to respond to rising crime rates. Unlike many acts, however—, which are often automatic responses to situations—the CDA planned over a period.

The Labour Party had announced in their 1997 general election manifesto that crime reduction and community safety were central to their criminal justice strategy, should they be elected, but the source of this focus actually lay in a previous report, which explored the second of the key issues refer to here. The Home Office's 1991 Morgan Report, Safer Communities: The Local Delivery of Crime Prevention Through the Partnership Approach had reflected a change in thinking about who should be responsible for preventing crime. This report suggested that the responsibility for crime reduction, which was traditionally thought of as being the sole remit of the police, should be allocated to local authorities.

This report indicated that the youth justice system was both inefficient and expensive and suggested that the British criminal justice system was failing to address offending by young people; there was a lack of programs directed at offending behavior; the system needed to be speeded up; and there needed to be much closer working relationships between the main agencies involved in youth justice. The CDA can also be seen as an integral part of branding and modernization of the old into “New” Labour Party, in which the manifesto on public services and public policy changed dramatically (Ekblom, 2005, 47).

Youth Justice

In terms of youth justice, the CDA made a number of significant changes. The existing formal and informal cautions replaced with a reprimand or (for ...