Can we succeed in breaking the cycle of youth offending?

For authorities across the country, the New Year has brought heightened focus on reversing the growing number of 10- to 17-year-olds who reoffend within 12 months of being cautioned, receiving a community order or completing a custodial sentence.

While first time offender rates continue to fall, recidivism in this age group climbed to 35.9 per cent in 2011 – the highest level recorded in a decade.

The government’s plan to build a secure college in Leicestershire for young offenders has sparked a great deal of media attention in recent weeks. Due to open in 2017, the facility is designed to help ensure that this vulnerable group gain qualifications and skills that will improve their chances of finding work and prevent them from returning to past patterns of criminal behaviour.

Many of you working in youth justice will be keen to see how effective this approach proves to be in bringing reoffending rates down.

One size won’t fit all

While improving access to quality education is essential to tackling the problem, there are a myriad of issues that can contribute to a young person becoming trapped on a treadmill of criminality.

I wonder if any of you caught Radio 4’s thought for the day on 20 January. During the broadcast, Canon Dr Alan Billings spoke of one young man from a troubled background that he had come into contact with who had a long history of petty crime. The offender revealed that in his view, the most important experience he had that could help him change his life was when a prison guard taught him how to use a knife and fork.

I think this really illustrates that the support young people need to escape from the downward spiral of repeat offending is not always clear cut – and crucially, the right help needs to be put in place well before a child first enters the youth justice system.  

Information can change lives

As part of the broader drive to cut youth crime, the government has called on police and crime commissioners (PCCs) to become champions of early intervention in their areas. To succeed, PCCs will need to understand what issues are affecting their own communities and ensure problems are addressed earlier.

Historical data on young offenders from schools and other services is already being used in many authorities to identify some of the key early indicators of future criminality – these can include a combination of poor school attendance or exclusion to special educational needs and even frequent changes of address.

Council staff can use this information to highlight those children whose background and circumstances put them at greater risk of following a pathway into crime. Giving youth offending teams easy access to this insight can support them in putting effective early intervention measures in place to keep children from entering the youth justice system in the first place, as well as helping to tackle repeat offending.

Youth offending teams could be automatically alerted if an event occurs in a child’s life that moves them up the “at risk” list too, such as a sudden and unexplained period of absence from school or a child who has moved house for the fourth time in a year, for example. Action can then be taken quickly to provide any help that is required to the young person and their family.

Working together, authorities and youth justice teams can spark the real shift that is needed to ensure young people who might potentially find themselves entrenched in a life of crime get the opportunity of a much brighter future.  

Phil Neal is managing director at Capita Children’s Services