The authors focus on practitioners in the field of the socio-penal regulation of youth. The emphasis is on their perceptions of recent transformations in this area and on their reactions to these changes. Special attention is given to the recent shift to community as both a site of action and a participant in regulatory processes. Practitioners perceive that the result, especially in the current context of the quest for efficiency and the management of risk, is a pressure to adopt a generalist approach to their work and to constrain their sphere of intervention. The end result is a practice which responds more but invests less and which risks increasing rather than decreasing referals to the judiciary.