OPINION: Editorial - Let the Youth Justice Board do its job

Not that they were given much of a chance. Top of the front page in The Times was 'Emergency deal to build new jails as police cells overflow'. Where the youth crime figures were reported, it was on inside pages, small, and gave as much prominence to accusations by the Tories and Lib Dems that the figures had been massaged.

They had been massaged. All statistics undergo a certain amount of adjustment to ensure you end up comparing like with like. And although the process itself is complicated, it does not take much to grasp in principle what had been done to the youth crime figures, and why. One of the big changes in youth justice is the fact that the average time taken from arrest to conviction has been more than halved for juvenile offenders. Young people are going through the system more quickly, which means that if you compared the rates of reoffending in 1997 and 2001 then this speeding up would make the figures look much less exciting. So this is the main factor taken into account in producing what the Home Office calls an "adjusted predicted reconviction rate" for 1997, with which the 2001 figures were then compared.