Partnership in a Local Juvenile Justice System: The Case for Marginality

Abstract

The 'alternative custody' scheme for serious young offenders reported on here illustrates the difficulties that a voluntary organisation encounters when it seeks to work in collaboration with statutory services in the juvenile justice field. It would seem that joint ventures between state and non­state agencies are likely to increase, given the emphasis of recent reports on the value of inter­agency collaboration: Barclay Report (National Institute for Social Work 1982); Wagner Report (HMSO 1988; Griffiths Report (HMSO 1988) and the proposal that private agencies might be used in the provision of some forms of social control put forward in the Green Paper Punishment, Custody and the Community (1988). The research findings suggest that relationships between voluntary and statutory organisations are far from problematic and that current difficulties will be magnified if the move towards this kind of inter­agency collaboration is to continue.