Introduction

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 set of arrangements for monitoring and managing offenders who have been assessed as presenting a high risk of serious harm to others. To understand the current operation of MAPPA with regard to young people, it is necessary to consider this quite specific practice issue within the wider context of recent developments in youth justice, which in turn reflect political and public concerns about serious offending by young people. The chapter therefore begins with an outline of the current youth justice system before moving on to a discussion of some of the questions raised by the introduction of MAPPA.

The youth justice system in England and Wales

More detailed histories of the development of the juvenile justice – now youth justice – system are available elsewhere (Bottoms and Dignan, 2004; Morgan and Newburn, 2007). The aim here is simply to provide an overview of the current framework and procedures for dealing with children and young people who offend. Although the origins of the youth justice system can be traced back over a century or more, major reforms were introduced by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, leading to what some have described as the ‘new youth justice’ (Goldson, 2000).

Structure and governance

Section 37 of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act stated that ‘[i]t shall be the principal aim of the youth justice system to prevent offending by children and young people’ and all those who work within youth justice are required to have regard to that statutory aim.