Reducing Child Imprisonment: A Systemic Challenge1

Abstract

This article seeks to make explicit the obstacles to reducing child custody in order to understand better what is required of an effective decarcerative strategy. It argues that a punitive turn, with its origins in the early 1990s, was responsible both for a subsequent inflation of the numbers of children in custodial establishments and for a range of systemic changes which serve to maintain the population of the juvenile secure estate at high levels. Thus, although recent efforts to reduce custody have tended to focus on provision of robust and credible community based programmes, rates of diversion, shifts in the tariff and movements in practitioner attitude are as important as programmatic concerns to the success, or otherwise, of initiatives designed to function as alternatives to custody.