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?
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