Set up to fail – welfare-based sanctions and probation for children involved in crime in Denmark

The debates on system responses to children who come into conflict with the law are ongoing. In this article, we analyse how new system responses to youth crime create ‘punitive pockets’, when child welfare services are intertwined with systems of control and penal approaches to behavioural regulation. The new Danish system of youth crime prevention was introduced as an alternative to lowering the minimum age of criminal responsibility in order to divert children from the criminal justice system. The new system is a hybrid between child welfare and criminal justice logics, and we argue that child welfare interventions are curbed by systems of control and punitive practices. Drawing primarily on qualitative data from a mixed-methods study of the policy reform, we highlight that children experience a system that focuses on punishment and control, and that the most vulnerable children facing multiple disadvantages experience being ‘set up to fail’.