The article considers the impact of targets set for criminal justice agencies on the effort to prevent youth crime.

This article argues that the histories of probation must be taken into account when implementing standardised probation practice because the current configuration of probation still depends on these social and historical conditions.

One of the effects of 2004 National Standards (Youth Justice Board 2004) appears to have been that greater emphasis is now placed upon timely and efficient administration, rather than the content and quality of options presented in the youth court by Youth Offending Teams (YOTs), (Smith, 2007).

This paper considers the place of metaphor and analogy in criminal justice discourse. Thinking (and speaking) metaphorically is an unavoidable aspect of the framing of social problems.

The following accounts represent different personal views of the implications of performance culture in professional settings.

In the last 25 years or so, the concept of ‘performance’ and its concomitant suffixes ‘culture’ and ‘indicators’ have come to dominate discourse surrounding public service policy and practice, as a consequence of a radical shift in the ethos of public sector provision that emerged following the election of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

‘It is a question of extracting from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful forces.’ (Foucault 1991 / 1975, P. 154)