No five individuals could have been more different but, as heads of the Youth Justice Board (YJB) for England and Wales, they argued for, defended and advanced the quality of the youth justice system. They did so in the interests of both the young people who passed through it and a wider society that was increasingly bombarded by both the media and politicians with stories of yobs, hoodies, knife crime and anti-social behaviour.
Some of these issues were real, but much was either illusionary or exaggerated. Whatever the "facts", this placed the YJB's claims to have slowed-down entry into the justice system and reduced levels and severity of youth offending into some doubt. It was always vulnerable to allegations of spin but rarely gained credit for its achievements.
Time is up
The YJB will disappear in the bonfire of the quangos announced last week. Its obituaries will be mixed. Some will proclaim that its blend of political influence and distribution of resources transformed the processes and provision for young offenders. Others will cry "good riddance" for its apparent acquiescence to the criminalisation of children, through Asbos and police targets, and its failure to strengthen alternatives to custody.
The story is certainly very mixed. The YJB had to carve itself a path between correctional and children's services. Some academics may attack it for contributing to the criminalisation of social welfare; I would argue that it endeavoured to promote the "welfarisation" of criminality. But it could never shout about that too much, because criminal justice resources were not intended to bolster the deficiencies of wider health, education and social services for children.
The YJB often just had to take the criticism from both sides, without being able or willing to defend itself. Instead, it tried to steer a path based on reasonably established evidence about what worked best in supporting young people at risk, or already offending, in order to strengthen and encourage them to take more constructive directions in their lives. Slowly it built alliances with many partners, persuading them of the benefits of the initiatives it was taking. Now, of course, these alliances and progress will be lost, or will have to be re-constructed once again.
I was proud to serve on the board for just over seven years, between 2001 and 2008. Major achievements were the development of prevention work; the engagement of volunteers; respect and recognition of victims through restorative justice processes; and, latterly, some progress in resettlement. Regrets include the failure to radically improve those wider interventions that offer the greatest prospect of reducing or preventing re-offending: education, training and employment; health care, especially around substance misuse and mental health; and housing.
These are challenges that will not go away soon. Indeed, even the modest progress made by the YJB and youth offending teams on these fronts is likely to be reversed as public services contract and funding is cut.
In the face of these challenges, more creative, purposeful, community-based and cheaper alternatives to the YJB never really got beyond the drawing board. The one exception was the Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme, but headline re-conviction rates meant that it lost political support, even though up-close, the detail showed that those who re-offended tended to commit fewer and less serious offences than their counterparts in custody, for a quarter of the cost of the YJB.
Of course, I am especially happy about the situation in Wales, where there was a steady harmonisation of the work of the YJB, in relation to that of the Welsh Assembly Government. Both parties drew on their respective strengths and honoured each other's boundaries in order to produce a particularly positive variant of youth justice practice - with a stronger emphasis on prevention and less obsession with antisocial behaviour and reliance on custodial sentences. Encouraging dialogue between all stakeholders, within an essentially co-managed system, is, in my view, a model to be emulated.
Improving troubled lives
I was never completely persuaded of the case for the scaled approach and the Youth Rehabilitation Order. The ghosts of the 1970s and the execution of an unjust "administrative" justice were always on my mind. But this was where the YJB was going by the time my term of office expired. Regrettably, it had already exhausted much of its political support. And the youth justice field was no longer so sure of the power of its champion.
Somebody once said that the YJB was "overspun and undersung". Having been involved with youth crime and justice all my life, and having seen it from all sides (except inside), I know the effect it can have on the lives of some of our most troubled and troublesome young people. The board and its staff were exceptionally committed to this task. I will mourn its passing and ponder about exactly who will take up the baton following its demise, and how effectively this will be done.
Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan and a former member of the Youth Justice Board.
