UK

Catch a thug – and make him even worse

One should never succumb to despair, but it is difficult not to feel a sense of hopelessness when contemplating the hard core of violent young offenders in Britain. Over the past year, there has been a succession of disturbing cases in which youth criminals — perhaps the technical legal term "juvenile" is more apt – have been convicted of horribly violent crimes.

Two of the members of the gang who killed 16-year-old Mary-Ann Leneghan were under 18 when they raped, tortured and murdered her. Danny Preddie and his brother Rickie, who were convicted earlier this year of the manslaughter of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor, were just 13 and 14 years old when they killed him. And most recently, teenagers Donnel Carty and Delano Brown were convicted of murdering Tom Rhys Price in order to steal his mobile phone.

Those cases are the tip of a much larger iceberg of violent teenage crime. The size of that iceberg keeps increasing. Labour has made tackling youth crime one of its priorities: ministers have come up with initiative after initiative, at vast cost to the taxpayer. Dealing with young criminals costs us £3.4 billion a year. The Government has not blinked at the £170,000 it costs, on average, to look after each juvenile who is supervised by the authorities on a special "rehabilitation scheme" (even though places in secure units are a lot cheaper: their average cost is a mere £52,000 a year). Yet the result of the colossal expenditure has been failure. Labour has been no more successful than were the Tories at reducing serious juvenile crime.

Last week, the National Audit Office reported that more than half of those who are served with that flagship Labour initiative, an anti-social behaviour order (Asbo), do not comply with it. Twenty per cent of those issued with an Asbo violate it more than five times. When an Asbo gets treated with contempt, what do the authorities do? In many cases, nothing at all. The lesson the yobs learn is that the law is a joke. The inevitable result is that their offending escalates.

Yet the police have the power to arrest those who breach their Asbos, and if found guilty in a magistrates court, the youngster can be given up to six months in a youth detention centre. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Alf Hitchcock, in charge of youth crime at the Metropolitan Police, told me why such sentences are rarely imposed: "It can take six months for a case to come to trial. By then the crime is — for the child and often for the witnesses — an age ago." It means that the punishment has, as Mr Hitchcock laments, "no connection to the crime", and thus no reforming effect.

The whole lengthy process, which so often has so few beneficial results, convinces many officers that putting a child through the courts is futile. DAC Hitchcock hopes to change the procedures so cases can be resolved in the courts not within months, but within three days of arrest. Naturally, he faces staunch opposition from lawyers, who insist that this will lead to terrible injustices (and who will, entirely coincidentally, lose a considerable amount of income should a faster form of justice become the norm).

Lack of "follow through" infects the whole system. A recent study of street robbers, all of whom were in prison and most under 24, found that more than 80 per cent had been arrested at least 10 times before they landed in prison, and a third had been arrested more than 50 times. Any system that apprehends a young thug 50 times before it actually takes any decisive action against him is not simply going to fail to reform him, it is going to encourage him to follow, and intensify, his criminal ways. And that is precisely what happens.

The "intensive surveillance and supervision" programme, specially designed to reform youngsters who have demonstrated their dedication to offending, has a staggeringly high reoffending rate: more than 90 per cent are reconvicted while they are actually on it. Peter Williams, for example, had convictions for theft, sexual assault and burglary when he was put on the scheme. Almost immediately he missed appointments with his supervisors and broke his curfew. What actions did the officials supervising him take as a consequence? None. Williams was supposed to wear a tag. He took it off. His supervisors ignored that as well. Ignored by those who were supposed to be reforming him, Williams' criminality escalated. His next escapade was to murder Marion Bates during a bungled raid on a Nottingham jewellers.

When the report into Williams's case pointed out these facts, Nottingham's Youth Offending Team reacted by insisting that its record was "no worse than any other Youth Offending Team" in England. That tells you all you need to know about the dismal standards which prevail in the sector.

The abysmal performance of staff only partly explains the failure of schemes to cut youth crime. There is evidence that a hard core of juveniles will be resistant to every attempt to change their behaviour. In effect, they are made that way: genes and environment have combined to make them lack the inhibitions and the conscience that youngsters normally develop as they grow into adulthood. With these unlovely individuals, all that can be done to protect the public from their crimes is to detain them in secure accommodation. Even the best, most effective rehabilitation service in the world would have no effect.

We do not, however, have the best and most effective rehabilitation service in the world. And the evidence of a genetically determined, irredeemable hard core of juvenile criminals is not yet conclusive. For the moment, the fundamental problem is that the Government's schemes do not, in practice, do anything that will change young criminals until it is too late. One of the most familiar facts about rehabilitation is that it has diminishing returns: the best way to reform a juvenile criminal is to intervene decisively after his first offence. It is not to wait until the 50th, or until he kills or maims someone. Unfortunately, waiting until then is too often what the authorities do. Thousands of juveniles avoid confronting their criminality until it is too embedded to remove.

As a consequence, I am not sure which brings me closer to despair: the vicious criminality of some youngsters, or the inability of government officials even to attempt the only kind of intervention that has a chance of being effective.

Alasdair Palmer
10 December 2006

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