Managing Youth Crime through Multi-Agency Partnerships

Abstract

In the past decade, the multi-agency approach has increasingly come to dominate policy debates on crime control and criminal justice. In the diverse fields of crime prevention (Home Office, 1990d, 1991b), drugs control (HM Government, 1994; ACMD, 1994; London Drug Policy Forum, 1994), local policing (Home Office, 1993), prison disturbances (Woolf, 1991) and punishment in the community (Home Office, 1990e; Smith et al., 1993), ‘partnerships’ between statutory agencies, voluntary bodies, local businesses and communities are formed, linking organizations and groups with different goals, cultures and traditions. The emphasis on multi-agency intervention in the prevention and control of juvenile delinquency is, quite clearly, not a revolutionary breakthrough in the ways in which those problems had previously been discussed. This chapter looks at the reworking of the multi-agency approach as a feature of the discourse of criminal justice, and contrasts this with the local organization of juvenile delinquency as a contested site of intervention for different agencies.