This chapter will provide a brief introduction to systems for responding to offending by children and young people in England and Wales, of which Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) are one significant element. The aims of the chapter are to:

provide an overview of the youth justice system in England and Wales for readers who may be unfamiliar with it;

explain what MAPPA are and how they work;

begin to highlight some of the complexities of the system as a foundation for the more detailed analysis and discussion of later chapters.

MAPPA, as described in more detail below, are a...

The 1990s saw a growing preoccupation with high-risk offenders, particularly their accurate identification, reliable risk assessment and effective risk management. By the turn of the century this preoccupation had also extended to young offenders, and included the formalised use of risk assessment tools and increasing attention to the early identification of those young offenders likely to become ‘dangerous’ (see Kemshall, 2008a, for a full review). A key component of the policy and organisational response to high-risk offenders was the development of the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) (see Kemshall, 2003, for a full review). By the late 1990s, MAPPA extended...

This chapter focuses on why there may be practical difficulties for Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) and those running Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) to work alongside one another, stemming from both historical trends and differing occupational cultures. This is not to say that all YOTs have problems working within the MAPPA framework; anecdotally we know that many YOTs operate very successfully in this area. However, the impression gathered from YOTs that took part in a recent research project (hereafter termed the Oxford MAPPA study) and reports from participants in a subsequent symposium was that this relationship can be problematic, and...

Tensions in our approach to children and young people who offend are by no means new and over the last 50 years or so these have been expressed in a variety of epithets, which, while headline grabbing, have not always been helpful. ‘Social welfare’ versus ‘justice’, ‘deprived’ versus ‘depraved’, ‘deeds’ versus ‘needs’ and ‘care’ versus ‘control’ are just a few examples of how this debate was framed in the post-war years, particularly the 1960s and 1970s. The tension remains today but the reformed youth justice system reflects a belief that different approaches can be used and that there is no...

This chapter explores some of the issues surrounding the assessment and management of young people who have been involved in serious offending in Scotland. It begins by outlining how Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) have been set up in Scotland and identifies some of the practical challenges and issues that have arisen in the early implementation of these arrangements. The second section of the chapter briefly reviews some of the findings of a recent literature review on the risk assessment and risk management of children and young people engaging in offending behaviours. The review was commissioned by the Risk Management...

At first sight, Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) may appear to be an obvious example of the dominance of ‘risk’ in current criminal justice and penal policy. However, although risk-based governance (O’Malley, 2004) is clearly a significant feature of modern society, there are still ‘unresolved struggles for pre-dominance between risk-based reasoning and other resources of knowledge, influence and prestige’ (Loader and Sparks, 2007, p 85). This suggests that the implementation of risk-based ways of working can be affected by interaction with other practice paradigms, as well as factors such as organisational culture or the professional values of practitioners.

A related...

It is often claimed that, over the last decade, UK criminal justice policy has become increasingly preoccupied with the concepts of risk and public protection. Indeed, some academic and practitioner accounts now represent risk-based thinking and practices as the all-pervasive – and even dominant – force in contemporary offender management. However, during this very same period, the UK legal system² experienced its most seismic shift in decades: namely, the growth of rights consciousness and claims, the passing of the 1998 Human Rights Act (1998 HRA) and an ever-expanding culture of rights adjudication. This chapter will argue that these developments are...