The Referral Order 20 Years on: Deals, Jewels and Mules
| Author | Nigel Stone |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225419889205 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1473225419889205
Youth Justice
2019, Vol. 19(3) 299 –308
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1473225419889205
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The Referral Order 20 Years on:
Deals, Jewels and Mules
Nigel Stone
Twenty years ago and hard on the heels of the innovations within the Crime and Disorder
Act 1998, the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act (YJCEA) 1999 introduced a strik-
ingly novel element into sentencing children and young persons in England and Wales, an
order (the ‘referral order’) diverting the convicted juvenile from court to the attention of
an extra-judicial forum, a ‘youth offender panel’, to agree ‘a programme of behaviour the
aim (or principal aim) of which is the prevention of re-offending by the offender’.1 Now
governed by the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act (PCC(S)A) 2000 ss.16-28
(as variously amended), referral orders (described in 2007 as ‘something of the jewel in
the crown of the reformed youth justice system’2) remain a central feature of the juvenile
justice landscape in this jurisdiction.3 This anniversary retrospective has been prompted
by two recent Appeal Court judgements that point up some of the more debatable compo-
nents of this measure.
To recap briefly the ethos behind the legislative thrust of the New Labour government,
elected in 1997, a central tenet was that ‘an excuse culture’ had developed within the
youth justice system, failing to break the link between juvenile crime and disorder and
‘tomorrow’s hardened criminal’, implying that young persons ‘cannot help their behav-
iour because of their social circumstances’, assuming ‘that young offenders will grow out
of their offending if left to themselves’ and staging court hearings in a manner that ren-
dered the youthful defendant a mere supine spectator, never challenged ‘to engage his
brain as to what he has done’. ‘Rarely are they confronted with their behaviour and helped
to take more personal responsibility for their actions. The system allows them to go on
wrecking their own lives as well as disrupting their families and communities.’4
In this spirit, the referral order was primarily conceived as a mandatory intervention for
young persons pleading guilty – and thus assumed to be owning responsibility for their
misconduct5 – on their initial conviction of a criminal offence (or each of the offences then
prosecuted), ‘the category of young offender most likely to benefit from intervention at a
Corresponding author:
Nigel Stone, School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, Lawrence Stenhouse Building, Norwich NR4 7TJ,
Norfolk, UK.
Email: n.stone@uea.ac.uk
889205YJJ0010.1177/1473225419889205Youth JusticeStone
other2019
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