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?

 

Same Old, Same Old?

 

There are some useful if narrow recommendations in the first part of the Justice Committee report on children in custody published today. Ensuring those who turn 18 while waiting for a court date should be sentenced as children rather than adults, and providing “intermediaries” to help vulnerable child defendants participate in court hearings, are long overdue. But well done to those who have lobbied for the changes.

It’s been obvious for a while too that the MOJ and YJB need to get a better handle on the various out of court measures which are used for most children in trouble -by better data collection, evaluation and a funding review.  

There is likely to be less consensus about the merits of direct recruitment to the youth magistracy so JP’s can specialise in youth court work from the outset. And whether to make Youth Rehabilitation Orders available for first time offenders at risk of custody could divide youth justice specialists. But the inquiry deserves credit for bringing these matters to attention.

On some of the bigger questions the report is disappointing. MPs want to know what resource has been allocated by the MoJ to addressing racial disproportionality. Given the significance of the issue, why didn’t they simply ask ministers and officials during the inquiry? Or about the court backlog or what’s being done to support participants in remote hearings- both subjects on which the Committee now want information.  

On three substantive questions the Committee has held its fire. They like the idea of a “feedback loop” between the Youth Court, Youth Offending Teams and the young person which may help improve transparency and support rehabilitation. But they recommend only “a review of current sentencing options, with a view to introducing it”. Four years ago, Charlie Taylor’s Youth Justice Review worried that “magistrates can play little or no role in overseeing a child’s progress against the sentence they have passed.” The MoJ rejected his radical proposals for fixing that but promised to explore ways to strengthen courts’ involvement with children they sentence. Something more than another review is needed if anything much is to happen on this front.

That’s even more true in respect of the minimum age of criminal responsibility. Despite England and Wales’s status as an international outlier, the Committee “are not persuaded that it should be immediately increased” from 10. Presumably agreement among the members could be reached only on the weasel words “we consider there is a case for reviewing the age of criminal responsibility”. This seems to fly in the face of the evidence they received. The report claims that “there are …. many organisations and individuals who do not think the age should be increased”. It mentions only one, the MOJ, which it then asks to conduct the review. The Committee does recommend that if the review concludes that the age of 10 should stay, “the Ministry set out the evidence and reasoning to justify it”. But the long grass beckons for this one too.  

As for the headline finding – that meeting the complex needs facing children in youth justice requires a “whole system approach” involving educational, psychological and social services- there are not much more than warm words. Of course, they are the right words, but finding the best ways of delivering these services to the right children, at the best time, and at the necessary scale are not at all straightforward and need much more consideration. 

Perhaps the second report will provide it.