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UK YOUTH JUSTICE
Society closes the book and the jail doors on the ASBO
generation.
Named, shamed, detained and forgotten
Who speaks for the hundreds of children held in
Britain’s overcrowded juvenile jails? Not the Labour government, argues
youth offenders’ panel member Jason Pollard, who fears state policy
fails both the kids and the communities they come from.
In August 2006 Rod Morgan, head of the Youth Justice
Board, warned that prisons for 10 – 17 year olds were nearing
operational capacity. Britain currently has some of the highest numbers
of young people in custody in Europe, and at any time the juvenile
estate holds over 2,500 juvenile offenders.
Nearly 7,000 young people under 18 pass through the
juvenile prison system each year. Does this warning mean that it is now
time, nine years after New Labour came to power, to reassess the
government’s approach to youth justice and the continued incarceration
of ever higher numbers of under-18s?
New Labour’s approach to youth justice has been driven
by an overarching ideological commitment to the community as the basic
unit of society. Young people, as part of the community, have been
encouraged to assume greater responsibilities for their actions (10 to
14 year olds have actually been forced to accept this with the abolition
of the presumption of doli incapax, the idea that children in this age
group cannot automatically be held criminally responsible for their
actions).
But the process of creating stronger and more robust
communities demanded an ‘other’ against which to define itself.
Increasingly, it is the behaviour of young people that has provided this
measure, and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and other community measures
issued in by The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 have allowed the
progressive targeting of young people as an easy and highly visible
group in society.
Does the recent warning by the Youth Justice Board
indicate that the New Labour attempt to combat youth offending has
failed? After all, in the same period that young people have been
increasingly vilified as a group the government has been seeking to
provide increased opportunities for them within the community.
Since 1998 the government has made much of the
joined-up approach to the reform of children’s services, notably through
the Sure Start programme, Every Child Matters, and last year’s Youth
Matters white paper with its offer of incentivised opportunity cards for
good behaviour.
If these programmes have increased opportunities for
socially excluded young people, why has the past decade seen a 20 per
cent rise in the number of 15 to 17 year olds (the age group most
represented) in some form of custody, and why does the juvenile prison
estate currently hold, on average, around 2,500 young people at any one
time? There are several reasons, each of which point to confusion in the
government’s approach towards both community renewal and the inclusivity
of vulnerable groups within it.
At least one reason is the failure of children’s
agencies to practice a joined-up approach to the delivery of services to
young people. Young offenders who end up in custody are still
characterised by experiences of education failure, truancy, substance
abuse and mental health issues.
A Prisons Inspectorate (HMIP) study in 2002 found that
86% of ‘trainees’ in Youth Offending Institutions had a history of
truancy and over half had left school by the age of 14 – just under a
third before they were 13. Many young people, once outside of the
nominal supervision of schools fall between gaps in service provision as
agencies fail to agree joint working practices despite efforts in the
Every Child matters programme to prevent this.
A key issue is resources, and anecdotal evidence from
youth offending teams reveals how many social service departments close
their files on a young person at entry into the criminal justice system
rather than work with the other agencies involved – precisely at the
point that continuity of contact with youth workers is most needed by a
young person.
In part, the government’s attempts to strengthen
communities relies on handing over to communities the decision about
where the threshold of acceptable behaviour lies, trading on the
subjective definition of ‘Anti-Social Behaviour’ in the Crime and
Disorder Act 1998 as that ‘likely to cause harassment, alarm or
distress’.
Paradoxically, allowing local communities to define
what types of behaviour affects them works against the government’s own
aspirations for community cohesion since many young people are targeted
for non-criminal behaviour such as ‘hanging around’ in groups, while
those who need support to compensate for inadequate parenting are simply
criminalised instead.
While the use of ASBOs is meant to provide a set of
boundaries otherwise lacking in a young persons life, without adequate
support for many this becomes the first step into the criminal justice
system. Although a civil order, breach of an ASBO is a criminal offence,
and according to the Home Office figures in 2003 47 per cent of orders
issued to young people aged 10–17 were breached on one or more occasion.
Are communities therefore unwittingly setting young
people up to fail? By 2003 30 young people under-18 received custodial
sentences for breaching the terms of their ASBO, and a further 179 for
committing a crime whilst on an order. Many young people because of
their immaturity, disrupted lives, or mental health problems are simply
unable to comply - witness one young Tourettes sufferer in Manchester
given an ASBO ordering him, among other things, not to swear in public.
It is a tragedy that many of the young people
sentenced to custody are those who are least able to benefit from the
current levels of support available in the penal estate. Educational
failure amongst young offenders is only one of the challenges, and
without addressing this the governments aims of rehabilitating young
people to engage within communities will fail.
Current levels of education provision are inadequate
to help the estimated 25 per cent of young people in the youth justice
system with a Special Educational Need with some Youth Offending
Institutions offering only six hours on average of education to young
people, (the recommended for normal ability children is 15).
According to an HMIP report young people in custody
are also more likely to have reading and writing abilities below their
actual age - 60% of young people in one study demonstrating ability
below that of level 1in the National Curriculum.
What makes the governments current attitude towards
young offenders particularly perverse is the fact that many do not want
to embark on a pattern of repeat offending and reconviction.
A 2002 Home Office survey of juvenile offenders that
found 45% of young offenders considered it likely that they would end up
back in prison by the time they were 25. The reality is much worse -
according to the youth justice charity NACRO only four per cent aren’t
back within two years of release.
Jason Pollard
19 September 2006
http://www.indexonline.org/en/news/articles/2006/3/britain-society-closes-the-book-and-the-jail.shtml
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