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In her first Perspectives, Lisa Harker, of the Institute of Public Policy Research, argues that it is time to put the onus on a preventive approach to young offenders. After all, locking them up has not worked.

There are signs that we are entering a new chapter in criminal justice debates. First the Conservative home affairs spokesperson Oliver Letwin trespassed on New Labour territory in a speech on the "neighbourly society". Then the home secretary David Blunkett issued a powerful critique of the overuse of incarceration. It seems a new search for definition on left and right has begun.

But don't hold your breath. Such shifts in political discourse have tended to be barely traceable in criminal justice practice. Against the backdrop of frenetic policy activity and political debate over the past 10 years, the criminal justice system has been characterised more by continuity than change. One trend has dominated above all else: the rise in the prison population.

The mushrooming in prison numbers has been driven by a mistaken belief that criminal behaviour can be tackled by locking away criminals. Policy makers have consistently failed to balance detention as a punishment and deterrent with proactive intervention to reduce anti-social behaviour at every stage, from crime prevention to the rehabilitation of offenders. Prevention has always been seen as second best to a misconceived notion that detention is the principal cure for crime.

The continued practice of holding young teenagers on remand in adult prisons shows the dominance of this approach, which overrides rhetoric about the negative impact of jails on young people. For more than 20 years there has been concern about the use of custody for young boys, exacerbated by a series of scandals involving bullying and even suicides. Despite evidence that prison conditions are conducive to abuse, self-injury and further criminal activity, successive governments have allowed the number of teenagers held in prison on remand to rise.

A pledge to phase out the use of custody for teenagers, first made by the Conservative government in the Criminal Justice Act 1991 and repeated by every successive home secretary, has had little impact on practice. Indeed, the picture looks considerably worse a decade on: the numbers have increased three-fold since 1991.

Despite concern about practise inside institutions, governments have been reluctant to appear shy of cracking down on young offenders. At the last election, a New Labour manifesto pledge to "improve the standard of custodial accommodation and offending programmes for young offenders" was overshadowed by heavy promotion of proposals to strengthen the power of the courts to detain persistent young offenders awaiting trial. The inference of such emotive rhetoric is that incarceration is part of the solution to criminal behaviour among teenagers when it is manifestly still contributing to the problem.

The establishment of the Youth Justice Board under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 promised a transformation in youth justice. More emphasis was placed on youngsters spending less time in custody and more time being supervised in the community.

But in practice under-investment in alternatives to prison has meant that teenagers on remand are often kept in prison custody when they could be placed in local authority secure accommodation, benefit from training centre places or be supervised under other community schemes. Less than 10 per cent of young offender places are in local authority secure accommodation.

All this flies in the face of the evidence that tells us that custody is a blunt weapon to fight antisocial behaviour. The legacy of failure is manifest in the high rates of conviction among adults: as many as one in three British men is convicted of a crime by the age of 40. In the context of the biggest British prison population ever recorded, and the highest locking-up rate in the EU (with the exception of Portugal), the rising number of teenage remand prisoners is but symptomatic of the ideology on which our entire criminal justice system is based.

There is no doubt that the turn-around in views expressed by both Oliver Letwin and David Blunkett offers hope that a more preventive approach could be taken to reducing crime. But talking isn't enough - a new rhetoric has to be matched by fundamental changes in the beliefs that underpin criminal justice policy and widespread changes in practice.  

Lisa Harker is deputy director of the Institute of Public Policy Research.