The relationship between young people and practitioners is the centre-piece of youth justice provision, yet little research-based knowledge has accumulated on its minutiae. After reviewing reforms affecting professional discretion, the paper draws on the concepts of dyadic relationships and praxis to reinvigorate a research agenda aimed at delineating a more nuanced understanding of practice relationships. Drawing on practice wisdom from across related social work fields, we argue that centralizing the practitioner-young person relationship remains the key to successful practice and thus needs greater, more detailed research attention. These claims are supported with a number of pilot interviews with youth justice workers about successful interventions that complement and extend related studies. The paper concludes with suggestions for research to enable joint activity between young people and practitioners to 'rethink' youth justice.

The paper proposes a framework for politically-informed analysis of policy processes, to enhance understanding of the inconsistencies of youth justice policies. It begins from the importance of political discourse and argues that multiple discourses reflect political tensions which produce inconsistency. It focuses on the punitive detention of young people, and the paradoxical disjunctures between policy and practice in the 1980s. A second example concerns young people's rights. These analyses highlight the importance of theorising differences between the rhetorical, the codificational and the implementational modes of the policy process, particularly with regard to governance, and the power of front-line staff.

This article explores competing accounts of an apparent inversion of the previously prevailing relationship between young people's unemployment and the incidence of youth offending at a time of economic recession. It begins by highlighting the faltering association between unemployment and offending, and considers the paradoxical implications for risk-based methodologies in youth justice practice. The article then assesses explanations for the changing relationship that suggest that youth justice policies have successfully broken the unemployment-offending link; and alternatively that delayed effects of recession have yet to materialize, by reference to the work of four inter-governmental organizations and to youth protests beyond the UK. In place of ever more intensive risk analyses, the article then focuses on the adverse effects of unemployment on social cohesion, and proposes a rights-based approach to youth justice that recognizes the growing disjuncture between the rights afforded to young people and the responsibilities expected of them.

This article argues that the prevailing discourses of transitions and of social exclusion are no longer adequate to describe or explain the experiences of a substantial minority of young people. Reporting on a study of 800 16–19-year-olds, it is argued that an extensively diversified market in post-16 options produces instability and dislocation. Some young people are able to normalize these experiences of serial short-life engagements with courses and jobs into emergent new subjectivities, constructed around highly interdependent modes of studentship, employment and consumption. For others (the poorest students, those with special needs, some racialized groups) these subjectivities are not available.

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