| Abstract: | The paper discusses the reasons for the large amount of critical commentary that New Labour's reforms of the youth justice system have attracted. It explores the extent to which there is something ‘new’ about these reforms, suggesting that there are important differences when New Labour's approach is compared with its predecessor's. It then discusses the main lines of critical commentary on the reforms, concluding that much of it is over‐abstract and insufficiently empirically informed. The paper concludes with some ambiguous evidence on what the impact of the reforms has actually been. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
