A Revisionist History of Intermediate Treatment

Abstract

SUMMARY This paper examines and challenges the view that intermediate treatment for young offenders in England and Wales has always been intended as an alternative to custody provision. It argues that its origin and subsequent development have to be understood within what was the prevailing welfare discourse at the time of the 1969 Children and Young Persons Act. It traces some of the processes involved in the change that has since taken place, characterized by a move from 'welfare' to 'justice' talk, and suggests that it was only then that the conceptual space for intermediate treatment to operate as an alternative to custody was established. Finally, it examines some of the critical issues raised by these changes in policy and discourse. In the intermediate treatment (IT) arena of England and Wales a particular kind of talk has been produced in recent years, based on a set of beliefs now so seemingly self-evident that they have almost become a truism. This 'new orthodoxy' (Jones, 1984)—the viewpoint that IT is, or at least should be, an alternative to custody or residential care for appropriate juvenile offenders—has become so powerful that it both orders the general structure of the debate about IT into the form of a categorical imperative ('IT is ... a service which supplies care, control and treatment specifically