Resettlement work with young people: using individual case studies to assess costs and benefits
15 March 2016
Effective resettlement has a wide range of benefits, both to individual young people and to wider society, but research also suggests very strongly that ‘getting it wrong’ can be enormously expensive to a range of stakeholders. Issues concerning costs and benefits are therefore of key importance to the field, not least because budgets continue to be under considerable pressure. There is a pressing need for evidence concerning the costs and benefits of different approaches to inform decision-making at several different levels. This briefing focuses on how individual case studies can be used to help us understand and demonstrate the costs and benefits of resettlement work with young custody-leavers. It explores specific areas that should be considered as part of a cost-benefit assessment and provides examples of costed individual case studies. The briefing ends with some comments on cost-benefit trajectories, and on the scope for using costed case studies to draw conclusions about wider groups of young offenders.