Abstract:The measures introduced in the 1982 Criminal Justice Act show signs of accelerating the trend towards the use of custodial penalties for persistent and/or serious juvenile male offenders. This situation places an unwelcome obligation on practitioners within social services or the probation service to develop programmes offering sufficient control and containment to appear to magistrates as credible alternatives to custody. At the same time strategies must be devised to maintain the place of such programmes at the top of the tariff so that they take only those offenders who would otherwise have been placed on detention centre or youth custody orders. Recently initiated time‐intensive community‐based schemes may help some young offenders, but the authors argue that a realistic alternative is presented by developing structured goal‐oriented packages which involve a determinate period in residential