Book Review Sample: Reviewing a Book on Youth Justice

Model Answer

The Book and Its Argument

In Rethinking the Child in Youth Justice: Risk, Rights and Reform, Cormack (2020) sets out to challenge the risk-focused paradigm that has dominated youth justice policy in England and Wales since the late 1990s. The book’s central thesis is that a preoccupation with predicting and managing risk has obscured the welfare needs of children who offend, producing a system that criminalises vulnerability rather than addressing it. Cormack argues that youth justice practice should be reoriented around a children-first ethos, in which offending behaviour is treated as one indicator among many of a child’s broader circumstances, rather than the primary lens through which intervention is designed. The scope of the text is deliberately broad: it moves between doctrinal analysis of statute and case law, empirical findings drawn from practitioner interviews, and normative argument grounded in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This breadth is one of the book’s distinguishing features, allowing Cormack to connect abstract debates about childhood and culpability to the everyday realities of youth offending teams. The argument develops across seven chapters, moving from a historical account of risk-based reform, through empirical chapters on assessment tools such as AssetPlus, to a concluding chapter proposing a rights-based alternative.

For undergraduate criminology students, the text offers a clear entry point into a long-running debate about whether youth justice should be organised around risk, welfare or rights, and it does so without oversimplifying the tensions between these positions. Cormack situates the argument within the wider welfare-versus-justice literature associated with earlier writers such as Goldson and Muncie, but distinguishes the book’s contribution by focusing specifically on how risk technology, rather than sentencing philosophy alone, now mediates that older debate in day-to-day practice.

Summary of Contents

The book opens with a historical chapter tracing the shift from the welfare-oriented approach of the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 to the risk-management model introduced by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and consolidated through the creation of the Youth Justice Board. Cormack argues that this shift embedded actuarial risk assessment into everyday practice, reshaping how professionals understood the children in front of them. The middle chapters draw on interviews with youth offending team practitioners and survey data on how risk assessment tools are used, showing that many workers experience these instruments as a barrier to, rather than a support for, professional judgement. A chapter on legal frameworks examines how the doctrine of doli incapax and the age of criminal responsibility interact with risk-based sentencing guidelines, arguing that current arrangements sit uneasily with children’s rights obligations under international law.

The penultimate chapter compares the English and Welsh system with reform in Scotland, where a Children’s Hearings System has moved further towards welfare-based decision-making, using this as a case study of an alternative model that treats offending as a welfare, rather than purely criminal, concern. The final chapter sets out practical proposals, including reducing the weight given to actuarial risk scores in decision-making, investing more in early, voluntary support, and training practitioners to exercise greater professional discretion alongside, rather than instead of, formal assessment tools. Throughout, Cormack combines legal analysis with qualitative practitioner voices, giving the book conceptual depth and practical grounding that many purely doctrinal texts on youth justice lack.

Critical Evaluation

The book’s principal strength lies in its combination of legal, empirical and normative analysis, which allows Cormack to move convincingly between abstract argument and everyday practice. The practitioner interviews are particularly persuasive, since they demonstrate that scepticism about risk-based tools is not confined to academic critics but is shared by many of the professionals who use them daily. The historical chapter is similarly well evidenced, drawing on primary policy documents to substantiate its account of how risk thinking became embedded in youth justice institutions. However, the empirical sample is relatively small and drawn from only three youth offending teams, all in urban areas of England; Cormack acknowledges this limitation but does not fully explore how findings might differ in rural or Welsh contexts, which limits the generalisability of the practitioner data.

The comparative chapter on Scotland is illuminating but comparatively thin, and a reader unfamiliar with the Children’s Hearings System may find the account under-explained relative to the detail given to the English and Welsh system. There is also a degree of over-reliance on a rights-based framing that, while conceptually coherent, receives less critical interrogation than the risk paradigm it is set against; concerns about victims’ interests, for example, are acknowledged only briefly, and a more sustained engagement with critics of children’s rights approaches would have strengthened the book’s normative argument. Cormack’s writing is clear and accessible, avoiding unnecessary jargon, which makes the book suitable for readers encountering youth justice debates for the first time, and the method of triangulating policy documents, interview data and legal doctrine is well suited to a topic where each source type alone would tell only part of the story. On balance, the evidence presented supports the central argument more often than it strains it, and where the book’s claims exceed its evidence, as in parts of the Scotland comparison, this is signalled rather than concealed.

Contribution and Audience

Rethinking the Child in Youth Justice makes a useful contribution to a well-established debate by grounding it in recent practitioner experience rather than relying solely on policy analysis, which is where much of the existing literature is concentrated. It updates earlier welfare-versus-justice debates for a period in which risk assessment technology, rather than sentencing philosophy alone, has become the primary mechanism through which risk-based thinking operates. The book will be of most value to undergraduate and postgraduate criminology students studying youth justice modules, as well as to trainee youth offending team practitioners seeking to understand the theoretical assumptions behind the tools they use.

It is less suited to readers seeking a comprehensive doctrinal account of youth justice law, since legal analysis, while present, is secondary to the empirical and normative argument, and readers wanting detailed statutory commentary may need to supplement the book with a dedicated youth justice law text. Compared with broader introductory texts such as Goldson and Muncie’s edited collection, Cormack’s book is narrower in scope but more argumentatively focused, making it a strong companion text rather than a standalone introduction to the field, and well placed on a reading list alongside more descriptive overviews of the youth justice system.

Conclusion

Overall, Rethinking the Child in Youth Justice offers a well-argued and evidence-informed challenge to risk-based youth justice practice, strengthened by its combination of historical, legal and empirical material. Its central claim, that risk management has displaced welfare as the organising principle of youth justice, is persuasively supported, even if the empirical base could be broader and the treatment of rights-based critique more balanced. For students seeking to understand how academic critique of youth justice policy is constructed, and how empirical practitioner research can be used to support a normative argument, the book is a valuable and readable resource. It is recommended as core reading for undergraduate youth justice modules, ideally alongside a broader introductory text offering fuller doctrinal coverage of the legal framework the book engages with only in outline.

References

Case, S. and Haines, K. (2021) Abolishing Youth Justice Systems: Children First, Offenders Nowhere. Bristol: Policy Press.
Cormack, L. (2020) Rethinking the Child in Youth Justice: Risk, Rights and Reform. Bristol: Policy Press.
Goldson, B. and Muncie, J. (eds) (2015) Youth Crime and Justice. 2nd edn. London: Sage.
Muncie, J. (2015) Youth and Crime. 4th edn. London: Sage.
Smith, R. (2014) Youth Justice: Ideas, Policy, Practice. 3rd edn. Abingdon: Routledge.
Youth Justice Board (2023) Youth Justice Statistics 2021 to 2022: England and Wales. London: Ministry of Justice.