UK
The youth crime action plan provides a tentative basis for reform, but fails to recognise how the state has failed young people
The state is a problem parent
The new youth crime action plan provides a tentative basis for reform of the youth justice system. It highlights ways in which the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Ministry of Justice can work together to intervene early, deal with unacceptable behaviour and break the cycle of offending. Importantly it places much preventative work where it belongs – in families, schools and youth work, although it could make a greater call on health services. It recognises that while 14% of adults become victims of crime each year, for children and young people, this figure rises to a shocking 34%. For the first time, this plan spells out how the government will respond to, and support, young crime victims.
The plan reveals that some children are very much more at risk than others of getting into serious trouble. Children who experience maltreatment in their early years and those growing up in poverty are at greater risk, as are many with mental health needs or learning disabilities. So it makes sense to concentrate on the estimated 110,000 families in need of significant support. How best to do so remains in debate.
Despite knowing that over a third of people in the prison system have been in local authority care as a child, the plan pays scant attention to the state itself as a problem parent. It lacks adequate measures to prevent some of our most vulnerable children, many of who will already have suffered family breakdown, abuse and neglect, from making the dreary journey from children's home to a corrosive young offender institution.
As we make clear in the Prison Reform Trust briefing, Criminal Damage (pdf), there are ways to avoid confirming a young offender in a criminal career. One is for local authorities to carry budgetary responsibility for youth custody and so provide greater incentives for preventative work and proper supervision and support in the community. Intensive fostering is commended in the plan but disappointingly remains underfunded. As things stand, it is far too easy for local authorities to wash their hand of responsibility for children in trouble only to have to pick up the tab once again when they return to their communities a few months later as ex-prisoners.
There are other contradictions and omissions. Ill-formed ideas about "naming and shaming" more young offenders collide with a sensible commitment to support young people leaving prison by enabling them to return to a home and job in their community – rather than face becoming homeless, unemployed, highly visible "outlaws" at high risk of a return to crime. While the plan talks of engaging local employers in the process of resettlement, these efforts risk being cancelled out by the government's failure to amend the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (1974). This act makes it almost impossible for ex-prisoners to obtain work by demanding disproportionately long periods of disclosure of a criminal conviction. Currently, a prison sentence of six months or less must be disclosed to a prospective employer for seven years after release, three and a half years for under-18s. This is despite the government's own enlightened "Breaking the Circle" plan, produced in 2002, to develop a fairer system for disclosure and specifically to wipe the slate clean for young people jailed for petty, non-violent offences.
Some things are too important to argue about. The facts that almost 94,000 children entered the youth justice system in England and Wales for the first time last year, that the number of children in prison has more than doubled in just over a decade and that we lock up far more children at a far younger age than any other country in western Europe are all matters for national shame. How to reduce youth crime and help young people out of trouble ought to be top priorities for all political parties. Instead, the adversarial climate of political debate leads to the kind of taunting and exchange of abuse in the House of Commons earlier this week that does nothing to show youngsters how to avoid antisocial behaviour. We need our political leaders to reach a grown-up consensus on reducing youth crime and reducing the number of children in prison, and to stick to it.
Juliet Lyon
17 July 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/17/prisonsandprobation.youthjustice