What should a Labour Government do on Youth Justice?

Reshaping the approach to offending by young people formed an important strand of New Labour’s domestic policy agenda from 1997-2010. This was based on the idea that an effective response to children and young people in trouble can prevent them going on to a life of crime and therefore contribute not only to a safer society but reduced spending on justice and prisons in the long term.

While the national Youth Justice Board (YJB) and local Youth Offending Teams (YOT) are still in place to provide a constructive multi-disciplinary approach to children who offend, services available from police, local authorities and the NHS has been hard hit. The YJB and YOTs need to be relaunched and re-energised if they are to effectively meet the challenges facing an incoming government. The system of closed institutions for the most serious and persistent young offenders has been in crisis for much of the period since 2010 and requires urgent and sustained attention. 

The Labour Party has announced that reforming services for young people will be the focus of a major cross-departmental initiative, Young Futures, if it wins the next election. Key to that will be an investment in the recruitment, retention and capacity building of staff working with young people in trouble, making use of the growing evidence base put together by the Youth Endowment Foundation. Providing opportunities for mentoring and therapeutic work must be as central to any self-styled crackdown as greater enforcement and punishment.

There are six key areas for development

 1) Promoting Best Practice in Prevention and Diversion

The evidence is clear that wherever possible children should be kept out of the formal justice system as much as possible because of the negative impact which arrest, court processing and sentences can have.  There has been a welcome fall in the numbers of entrants to the youth justice system but the way that this has been achieved and the kinds of alternative approaches used in response to youth crime and anti-social behaviour vary enormously across England and Wales. Identifying, promoting, and implementing the most effective forms of diversionary and restorative activity to offer is an important priority. So too is ensuring that practitioners in the police, youth offending services and other agencies are properly trained to deliver these activities.

2) Reducing the time from Arrest to Sentence

One of New Labour’s 1997 pledges was to halve the time from arrest to sentence for persistent young offenders. The target was met by 2001 but delays have crept back into the youth justice process despite the big fall in numbers prosecuted.  While these reflect well known problems in the system as a whole, priority should be given to speeding up cases involving children and young people.

3 Professionalising Youth Justice

Youth Justice suffers from the paradox that crime committed by children is of great political and social concern, yet its practitioners lack professional recognition. This lack of recognition affects their status and identity with other relevant professionals such as teachers and the wider public. To fix this, investment is needed in the provision of appropriate training and skill development and exploration of the scope for professional accreditation or registration.

4 Promoting Relationship Based Practice with young people in trouble

Research on what works in managing children who offend has found an increasing emphasis on the importance of how practitioners work with young people. Child First and Trauma Informed Practice have strong adherents, but a more overarching and comprehensive framework of evidence based practice is needed to engage the range of professions and agencies working with young people in trouble in the community, residential care, and secure settings. Relationship based practice provides such a framework and should be encouraged across the piece. It involves attitudes – such as being open, honest, optimistic, and hopeful – and techniques like motivational interviewing, pro-social modelling and problem solving.

5 Extending the Youth Offending Team approach to Young Adults

Locally based Youth Offending Teams have proved largely effective vehicles for applying multi agency work with children who offend. Inspection reports have been mainly positive in stark contrast to those about probation services. The YOT approach would have value with older teenagers and young adults, who often do not reach adult maturity until their mid-twenties. Piloting the use of youth justice measures with this older cohort should produce better outcomes than interventions led by a probation service still struggling to recover from rapid organisational changes and unsustainable demands .

6 Transforming Training of Staff in the Custodial Estate 

The Chief Inspector prisons recently reported that Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) employ hundreds of staff, yet they barely talk to the boys in their care.  Many young people spend relatively short periods out of their rooms each day. Almost one in five staff have been leaving YOIs. Given the historically low numbers of children and young people in custody, there is scope for a major initiative to improve the education and skills of staff through distance learning supplemented by practical experience. The long awaited Secure School due to open shortly may provide a model for transforming the system as a whole, but we cannot wait for that.