The spending watchdog has called for early intervention to keep teenage criminals out of prison and blames professionals for not listening.

£150,000: the cost of a wasted youth

The taxpayer could save at least £80 million a year if young offenders were diverted from a life of crime at an earlier stage, a report from spending watchdogs says today. The Audit Commission says that effective intervention in the lives of likely teenage criminals could save them from prison and other expensive regimes.

“Many young people who end up in custody have a history of professionals failing to listen, assessments not being followed up by action and nobody being in charge,” says the study on youth crime. “If early intervention had been provided for just one in 10 of these young offenders, annual savings in excess of £80 million could have been made. Targeted and well-managed early intervention programmes can be effective if they are properly co-ordinated. Agencies such as schools and health services should take full responsibility for preventing offending by young people.”

The report also suggests that alternatives to custody, such as surveillance programmes, community service and reparation orders, should be used more often. Whereas it costs up to £50,000 to keep a young offender in custody, new intensive surveillance and supervision programmes (ISSPs) cost £8,500 a year to run and give offenders more to do.

However, in a separate report, the National Audit Office says that early evidence shows that 60 per cent of offenders on these programmes fail to complete them. It also suggests other non-custodial alternatives lead to more re-offending than would otherwise be expected.

Since Labour came to power there has been a major shake-up in the youth justice system, with offenders brought to book faster than before. The cost of tackling the problem has risen from £250 million to £394 million, with two thirds going on detentions in custody.

Juvenile offending is estimated to cost the economy more than £10 billion a year and accounts for nearly a fifth of the total annual cost of crime. A survey of 5,000 children aged 10-17 suggested that more than one in four — about 1.25 million of all young people - have committed a criminal offence in the last 12 months. Around 270,000 young people aged 10 to 17 in England and Wales were arrested in 2002-03 — about five per cent of their age group and more than twice the rate for the adult population. Although the number of known juvenile offenders has fallen since a peak in 1992, the level of offending has stayed constant in the past five years, though the police are catching fewer offenders.

However, the number of juveniles cautioned or convicted for violence, drug offences and robbery has risen and the number locked away in secure facilities increased steadily during the 1990s before beginning to level off.

The auditors criticise the lack of education and other programmes for those in custody, which they see as partly the cause of the high reconviction rates. More than 80 per cent of young offenders released from detention are back before the courts within two years.

Last year the courts in England and Wales sentenced 93,200 young offenders, of whom 64 per cent received a community sentence, seven per cent were jailed and the remainder were fined or discharged. The Audit Commission says that if the courts are to be persuaded to send fewer serial offenders to jail then the credibility of community sentences needs to be improved. But significant savings could be made if custody was used less and agencies intervened more effectively at an earlier stage.

It calculated that a 15-year-old boy, known as James, had cost the taxpayer more than £150,000 since he was five, including two expensive custodial sentences. He had been through costly sessions with education specialists and psychologists between the ages of six and eight, before becoming involved in crime at 10. Like many thousands of young offenders, James regularly failed to attend school and offending increases markedly among those who play truant or are excluded.

Judy Renshaw of the Audit Commission said: “Many of these young people who are in trouble are not getting school attendance for a whole variety of reasons, not necessarily because they are formally excluded. Schools need to be more closely involved.”

The reports coincide with new police powers to deal more severely with anti-social behaviour. They will be able to disperse groups of people who have gathered in an area designated an anti-social hotspot by the local council. Children's charities have objected to this measure as it would affect young people who had committed no crime.

By Philip Johnston
21 January 2004
 

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