Creative tensions? Young offenders, restorative justice and the introduction of referral orders

This article examines the introduction of Referral Orders into the youth justice system in England and Wales. Placing the new Orders within the recent history of youth justice within this jurisdiction, it considers the experience of the eleven pilot areas in attempting to recruit and train the cohort of volunteers required to enable youth offender panels to operate. Using data from a Home Office-funded evaluation of the pilots it examines the first nine months of Referral Orders, the operation of Youth Offender Panels and the attitudes of sentencers towards the new disposal

The community order in England and Wales: Policy and practice

The idea of a generic community sentence first emerged officially in England and Wales in 1988. The first half of this article traces the development of this policy initiative through its various guises, until its introduction in the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The new order, not surprisingly, given its fragmentary development as a policy, is expected to achieve a variety of objectives, many of which move in the direction of a more punitive penal culture. In the second part of the paper, using official statistics, trends in the use of the order are examined and compared with the suspended sentence order. The implications of the results of this analysis for the probation service are discussed