They follow the announcement of the expansion of a scheme that gets young people at risk of offending to sign good behaviour contracts. Or "Tearaways as young as 10 are to be targeted with 'baby Asbos'," as The Daily Telegraph puts it. But it's the DNA issue that's got people quivering with indignation.
"If children are to be identified as the criminals of the future before they've even broken the law, are we not sentencing them to a life of crime, writing them off?" writes Bournemouth Echo columnist Nick Churchill. Deborah Orr, writing in The Independent, questions the effectiveness of "early intervention" measures, which "so often seem to exacerbate rather than prevent the very behaviour being targeted" or speed up a child's progression to jail. "What has to be addressed is why there is so little institutional support between mainstream education and criminal incarceration. Until that gap has been suitably bridged, there doesn't seem much point in throwing money at DNA databases," she concludes.
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