Partnership in Working with Young Offenders with Substance Misuse Problems

Abstract

This article describes the quality of the partnerships between youth offending teams and substance misuse projects working with young offenders. It draws on local evaluations of 25 projects funded by the Youth Justice Board's Development Fund from 1999 to 2002. For the most part, the relationships were described in mainly positive terms but a number of areas of potential and actual conflict were identified, notably confidentiality, referral criteria and enforcement. The findings are compared with previous research on partnerships between criminal justice and voluntary agencies, which generally indicate similar advantages and tensions. To some extent, YOTs and projects were able to avoid some of the predictable tensions by careful liaison and planning. However, the speed of the tendering process and the practical complexities of setting up the projects at the same time as the YOTs themselves were coming into being made this difficult for some projects. This article describes and evaluates a major national initiative in encouraging partnership between youth offending teams (YOTs) and statutory and voluntary substance misuse agencies in working with young offenders. It compares the evaluation with the findings of previous research on partnerships in the criminal justice system and identifies a number of persistent challenges to the effectiveness of collaboration between agencies. The initiative took place within the context of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, one of many recent UK acts and policies explicitly intended to improve inter-agency and interdisciplinary working practices in social care and health. The Act established the Youth Justice Board (YJB) and local YOTs to conduct, co-ordinate and develop such work for youth offending, creating teams of youth justice workers from different professional backgrounds, including youth justice, probation, police, social work,