Straw in the Wind?

 

 Probably 25 years ago, I was part of a delegation from NACRO that trooped along to see New Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Jack Straw to discuss his plans for youth justice reform. On his desk, lay a copy of Edwin Schur’s “Radical Non-intervention: Rethinking the Delinquency Problem”. The 1973 text from a doyen of labelling theory wasn’t on the face of it the likeliest inspiration for Straw’s emerging plans to end the excuse culture that he thought dominated responses to children in trouble. So it proved, as at one point he brandished the book as an illustration of everything that was wrong with prevailing orthodoxies in work with  young offenders, where , as he would put it once in government,  “there is no punishment, no chance for them to make amends for their crimes and no action to tackle the cause of their offending”.

I was reminded of the incident when reading the introduction to the latest annual report on youth offending services written by the Chief Inspector of Probation, Justin Russell- who happens to be one of Straw’s erstwhile advisers. Russell also takes a swipe at ‘radical non-interventionism’, arguing that while it may avoid the danger of children becoming labelled as offenders,  it does little to provide them with practical help with their underlying needs and may, in reality, amount to something more like benign neglect, in the absence of any other support in their lives. In asking whether diversion from the youth justice system is always in a child’s best interests, Russell is suggesting that policy and practice have once again lost their way.

Russell seems distinctly lukewarm about the mantra ‘child first, offender second’ which the Youth Justice Board has recently embraced as a guiding principle for practice.  He accepts that each child’s own welfare and experience of trauma must be addressed but worries that Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) are losing sight of the second part of the formulation and paying inadequate attention to the risks children can present to other people including their own families. Russell thinks this is more likely to happen when YOTs “become completely subsumed within children’s services departments and lose their separate identity”.

Four years ago, in his youth justice review Charlie Taylor-subsequently YJB Chair and now Chief Inspector of Prisons- took a different view. He was worried that YOTs were too often in a separate silo, unable to get necessary social care, education, housing or health services for children who needed them.  He wanted the requirement for local authorities to establish a YOT to be removed. That recommendation wasn’t accepted, and efforts to integrate youth justice into wider children’s services have had mixed results at best. But is that because the model is flawed, poorly implemented or inadequately resourced?

By suggesting that diversion has gone too far and children's needs are being prioritised over public protection, Russell has reignited an age old debate about the best way to tackle youth crime.  It’s common ground that many of the children who commit offences need a wide range of assistance if they are to achieve their potential. Scholars and policymakers have long disagreed at what stage in their lives and on what basis such help should best be provided -whether as part of the justice system or outside it for example.   

 If it’s a question of help such as speech and language support, mental health treatment or employment training, I wonder about the significance of such disagreements – not least to young people themselves. One of Schur’s surely correct prescriptions is that we must take young people themselves more seriously.

Another of Schur's insights is that some of the most valuable policies for dealing with delinquency are not necessarily those designated as delinquency policies. He is right if he means that ideally, children should have their needs assessed and addressed with as little stigmatising involvement in criminal justice as possible. But in the real world some specific focus on children who harm others sometimes seriously and persistently is surely not unreasonable.  Determining where its limits lie has always been the problem.  

Our absurdly low age of criminal responsibility notwithstanding, the last decade has seen the formal youth justice system doing less and less with fewer and fewer children. In many respects that's a good thing. But it's arguably disclosed a deepening reservoir of unmet need.        

In terms of future directions for youth justice, could Russell’s intervention be a straw in the wind?