When a wayward teenager recently appeared before a magistrate he was put on probation for slightly injuring his mother in an argument. But before dismissing him, the magistrate effectively told him: We should have been able to help you before you reached this court. I want to help you. But we still do not have the resources to do so, despite the recommendations made to the authorities to assist youngsters such as yourself instead of turning you into criminals so early in life.

The magistrate's was, thus, an indictment not only of this hot-headed 17-year-old but of the authorities that had let him down so badly. Indeed, how many times had it become evident, one wonders, that he was going off track earlier in his life? How many times could something decisive have been done to bring him back to the straight and narrow but was not done because "we lack the resources"?

One cannot underestimate the scale and complexity of the problems involved. Individuals cannot be viewed in isolation but woven into a background that may include a family history of delinquent behaviour, a neighbourhood seeped in crime, a culture that glorifies aggression and denigrates education, friends dabbling in drugs from a young age. The resources needed to pull one person out of such a mire are prodigious. Catching them young, partly through giving more robust social work and psychological services to schools, would be one way of doing so. The younger, the less resources would be needed to show the child a different way and, at the same time, to save the state from having to deal with a delinquent in the future.

Which is precisely what the lad in question became; the magistrate was anxious that he would not go on to become a full-blown criminal. In his ruling, he was referring to recommendations made by the Commissioner for Children in her 2007 Manifesto for Children about those who come in conflict with the law. Among others, Carmen Zammit called for the setting up of a social work unit in court and specialist police to deal with young offenders more sensitively and for the age of criminal responsibility to be raised from nine years. Another important recommendation was to set up a unit in prison dealing exclusively with the under 18s.

The previous commissioner, Sonia Camilleri, had a year earlier put the issue under the spotlight by publishing an extensive study on children "with very challenging behaviour". The report contained a plethora of practical recommendations. One of the contributors to the study was Anthony Vella, the compassionate member of the judiciary in the above case. From that initiative came the setting up, by the Social Policy Ministry, of a working group that has since drawn up a long-term strategy now awaiting ministerial approval and which envisages the setting up of therapeutic secure units and drug-related residential services.

It is not as if nothing is being done for these youngsters. An NGO has started to provide a residential programme for young children with severe behavioural difficulties and the government's social work agency also runs an outreach programme targeting families and is seeking to expand a community service to a number of towns.

The power to change in a person must never be underestimated. But the opportunity to do so must sometimes be provided from the outside. The authorities need to better understand that the earlier in life this is done, the more it boosts the chances of change.