This paper highlights the ways in which the formerly welfarist system of youth justice in Scotland has become infused with a set of competing and contradictory logics, including those of punitiveness, marketization, and managerialism. These changes have constructed a new set of audiences for youth justice (namely victims and communities) whose needs agencies must now strive to satisfy. All of this has been accompanied by a moral panic about youth offending started by Ministers and reinforced by the media. The paper argues that the key to understanding Scottish trends lies in an elision which has taken place between political capacity building (modalities of power) and a process of cultural drift (modalities of identity) in the post-devolutionary era. As such the Scottish case highlights the need to explore both convergent pressures and cultural singularities in building theories of penal transformation.