It has targeted funding on grassroots community organisations to support young people at risk of youth violence, set out plans to introduce tougher penalties for those convicted of the most serious offences, and pushed ahead with work to develop England’s first secure school – a model it hopes will become the future of the youth secure estate.
It has done this in response to rising concerns about violent crime perpetrated by and against young people and the role played by organised criminal gangs in grooming vulnerable children into county lines drug dealing. Meanwhile, the levels of young offenders in the secure estate remains historically low, yet those who serve time in custody often reoffend suggesting the system is struggling to rehabilitate them.
The introduction of a “child first” model for all youth justice services, changes to the use of restraint on children in custody which will make it a very rare exception, and prioritising work to tackle the disproportionately high number of black boys in the justice system are all encouraging recent developments.
The Covid-19 pandemic has inevitably impacted the youth justice system: courts closed during the first lockdown causing a delay in cases being dealt with, youth offending services were unable to meet young people they were working with in the community face to face, vulnerable children were targeted by criminal gangs when schools were closed, and those in custody were unable to receive visits nor participate in education for months. What the long-term impact of Covid is on the youth justice system will become clearer over the coming year.
Trends in offending
The Crime Survey for England and Wales is regarded as a good indicator of personal and household crime because the number of respondents is sufficiently large – currently around 35,000 households – to ensure that the experiences of victimisation elicited in the interviews can be considered representative of the wider population. The survey indicates that offences against people aged 16 and over fell nine per cent in the 12 months to December 2019, the lowest level for nearly 40 years. This was the trend across all types of offences measured by the survey.
The survey has only recently collected data on the victimisation of children below the age of 16, and the period of measurement and type of question asked has changed over the past two years. Despite this, the number of crimes experienced by children aged 10-15 fell by more than 40 per cent between 2009 and 2019.
The Crime Survey for England and Wales also shows that perceptions among the public of the extent of antisocial behaviour by young people has also fallen two-fold over the past two decades.
“Public perceptions of the extent to which ‘people using or dealing drugs’, ‘teenagers hanging around on the streets’ and ‘vandalism, graffiti and other deliberate damage to property’, is ‘a fairly/big problem in their area’ have all fallen sharply in recent years,” says Tim Bateman from the University of Bedfordshire.
The data collected by the survey gives no information about perpetrators, but, as Bateman writes in The State of Youth Justice 2020, “it might be thought that the clear decline in recorded victimisation since the mid-1990s provides grounds for concluding that youth crime is likely to have fallen”.
This decline is borne out by youth justice statistics for England and Wales, published in January 2020 and covering the 12-month period from April 2018 to March 2019. These show there had been double-digit falls in first time entrants to the youth justice system, as well as the number of cautions and sentences handed out. And despite the widespread concern about youth knife crime, the number of offences involving a knife or offensive weapon committed by children also decreased over that period – although there had been four year-on-year increases between 2014-18 (see graphics).
Children accounted for 11 per cent of all first-time entrants (FTE) to the criminal justice system in the year ending March 2019, compared with 28 per cent 10 years ago. Most of these young people receive a caution, however, this proportion has fallen from 90 per cent in the year ending March 2009, to 55 per cent in the year ending March 2019. The number of FTEs receiving a court sentence has also consistently fallen.
The statistics show the most common offences committed by 10-17 year old FTEs were summary offences excluding motoring. This offence type made up nearly one third (around 3,700) of all offences committed by FTEs and includes lower level offences such as common assault and criminal damage. Possession of weapon offences were the next most common and made up 16 per cent of all offences committed by FTEs, a proportion which has been increasing over the last 10 years.
In the year ending March 2019, there were fewer offences committed by FTEs for all offence groups compared with 10 years ago. However, in the latest year, there was a slight increase in the number of FTEs committing possession of weapons offences. The offence groups that have seen the largest percentage point rises compared with a decade ago are:
- Possession of weapons offences, increasing by 13 percentage points to 16 per cent;
- Drug offences increasing by four percentage points to 12 per cent;
- Violence against the person which also increased by four percentage points to nine per cent.
In the year ending March 2019, there were around 27,700 caution or sentencing occasions of children; 43 per cent of these were first caution or sentencing occasions and 57 per cent were further occasions. The numbers of first and further caution or sentencing occasions have both decreased over the last 10 years.
Despite the media portrayal of young offenders as getting ever younger, the average age of first-time entrants to the youth justice system rose from 14.7 to 15.3 years in 2019. In total, 29 per cent of FTEs are aged 10-14 years old and 71 per cent aged 15-17.
There have always been more boys than girls who are FTEs to the system. In the year ending March 2019, boys comprised four out of five of the total, while making up half of the general 10- 17-year-old population. The number of FTEs has fallen for both boys and girls over the last decade, with the larger percentage decrease seen in girls – a 92 per cent reduction compared with 82 per cent for boys.
Over the past decade, the proportion of FTEs who are white has fallen from 85 to 75 per cent, with a corresponding rise in the proportion of FTEs of black and Asian heritage – from eight to 16 per cent for the former and from five to seven per cent for the latter.
Sentencing and prevention
There were around 19,300 occasions where children were sentenced in the year to March 2019, a fall of 19 per cent compared with the previous year and 78 per cent lower than a decade earlier.
The average custodial sentence length for all offences has increased by six months over the last 10 years from 11.4 to 17.7 months, which could indicate the seriousness of offences courts are dealing with are increasing. This rise has been driven by an increase in length of sentence given for “indictable offences” – serious cases sent to the crown court to be heard – with the pace of growth picking up over the past year, from 16.7 to 18.8 months.
However, there has been little change in the proportion of children sentenced to custody over the decade and the proportion given community sentences has dropped only slightly from 68 per cent in 2009 to 66 per cent in 2019. According to MoJ data, the proportion of children sentenced at crown court has also remained stable at four per cent since 2012. MoJ data also shows that in 2019, 971 children appeared at crown court for trial, 31 per cent of whom received long-term detention for grave crimes, 13 per cent a training order and 44 per cent a non-custodial sentence.
There is a wide consensus across the youth justice sector that the crown court remains an inappropriate setting for those below the age of 18 years. The National Association for Youth Justice (NAYJ) considers that children should never appear in the crown court. In his State of Youth Justice report, Bateman highlights Sentencing Council guidelines published in 2017 that state crown court “should be reserved for the most serious cases” but that “the data suggests this prescription is routinely ignored”.
Bateman says the revised Sentencing Council guidance on the overarching principles for sentencing children constitutes a “significant advance” over the previous edition published in 2009, with its use of the terms “children” and “young people” as opposed to “youth” and “young offenders”, and the NAYJ says the revised terminology has the potential to send the message that children should be understood as “children first”.
A recent study of youth court practice by the Centre for Justice Innovation also highlighted lengthy delays in children coming to court: in the three fieldwork sites, cases took an average of 188 days from offence to completion compared with 150 days five years ago. Research by Hunter (2020) also highlights that more serious offences were typically taking more than a year. “These are periods during which children have the weight of the case hanging over them, and they are not able to get on with their lives,” explains Bateman.
In late summer, the government set out its roadmap to reform the justice system in a white paper, A Smarter Approach to Sentencing. The general thrust of the paper is for longer sentences for children convicted of serious crimes, and greater monitoring for those living in the community on licence.
The paper states that it is important that custodial sentences reflect the seriousness of their offending “for the very small number of children for whom custody is necessary”. It adds that reform is necessary to improve the “coherence” of sentences and ensure that courts “have the tools they need to pass appropriate sentences that properly reflect the seriousness of offending”.
The white paper, which is expected to be taken forward in legislation published in 2021, states that courts will have the tools to deliver “stronger high-end community sentences” so that supervision is more effective. It proposes to make greater provision in youth rehabilitation orders (YRO) for location monitoring and for flexibility around curfews; and pilot extended duration and mandatory location monitoring within the most intensive current community sentence.
It also aims to reduce use of remand for young people, which MoJ data shows has risen in the past two years. There was an average monthly population of just over 240 children remanded in youth custody at any one time in the year ending March 2019, a 12 per cent increase compared with the previous year, which is the second consecutive year-on-year rise following eight years of decreases. Two-thirds of children held on remand do not go on to receive a custodial sentence.
Children’s services and youth justice leaders have raised concerns about some of the measures in the white paper for being overly punitive and lacking a preventative focus (see ADCS view). The proposed expansion of location monitoring through YROs is likely to concern many youth justice campaigners – supervision already accounts for a third of all YRO conditions, electronic monitoring 14 per cent and curfews 13 per cent. “The NAYJ views with disquiet such an extensive use of orders that require children to stay at their place of residence, enforced through electronic tagging,” states Bateman.
Youth secure estate
In the year ending March 2019, there was an average of just under 860 children in custody at any one time. This was a four per cent fall compared with the year before, continuing the long-term decline over the past decade. Nearly three-quarters of children in custody were held in one of the five young offender institutions (YOI) in England and Wales, 17 per cent were in the three secure training centres (STC) and one in 10 children were living in the eight secure children’s homes (SCH). The population of the youth secure estate has fallen by around 70 per cent over the past decade.
There has been a continued increase in the number and proportion of children in youth custody for violence against the person offences, most notably in the latest year, in which this offence group accounts for 51 per cent of the youth custody population. The proportion of children in custody for robbery meanwhile has halved to 15 per cent over the last five years.
White children now make up half of the youth custody population, having fallen from 71 per cent in 2009, while the proportion of children from a black ethnic background has increased to 28 per cent.
Not only are courts handing out longer sentences, but the time children spend in secure settings is also increasing – the median number of nights spent in youth custody per custodial episode was 91 nights in the year ending March 2019, a rise of four nights; while the proportion of custodial episodes lasting more than one year rose from eight to 11 per cent of the total.
MoJ data shows that children who spend time in custody are most likely to reoffend. While the overall reoffending rate was 38 per cent, a fall of 2.5 percentage points, for children in custody the rate was 69 per cent in the year to March 2018, a 4.7 percentage point rise on the year before.
This stubbornly high reoffending rate for young people that leave custody is a key factor behind the creation of the country’s first secure school, set to open in December 2022 on the site of the former Medway STC. Charity Oasis will run the secure school on behalf of the MoJ, providing a “vision focused on restoration rather than retribution, and creating a safe environment with a holistic approach to education, care and health, including mental health”, says Oasis founder Steve Chalke. The MoJ has already spent more than £20m on the scheme, which is two years behind schedule, and ministers hope that if successful it will provide the future model for all secure juvenile provision.
Conditions in the secure estate have been particularly challenging during Covid, but even before then there were worrying signs of a system under pressure. Restrictive physical interventions increased 16 per cent in the year to March 2019 and the number of self-harm incidents also rose three per cent – both reached a five-year high.
An independent review of pain-inducing techniques in the youth secure estate by former YJB chair Charlie Taylor, published in June, highlighted how he “frequently witnessed…the overuse of painful techniques” by staff in YOIs, STCs and SCHs. He concluded that a key reason for this overuse was the inclusion of painful techniques in officers’ training programme. Taylor’s 15 recommendations – which were accepted in part or wholly by the government – include the removal of painful techniques from officers’ training programme and that staff receive better training in behaviour management. However, he stopped short of recommending an outright ban on the use of pain – allowing it to be used to prevent serious physical harm to a child or adult – and instead calls for the creation of an independent panel to review incidents where pain-inducing techniques have been used.
Improving the conflict management and de-escalation skills of staff is also a key element of the fast-track training programme for youth justice officers, Unlocked Graduates. Around 20 graduates are now working in Cookham Wood and Feltham YOIs, with the scheme set to be expanded further. Meanwhile, youth work organisation Kinetic is also working with Feltham YOI staff to train them in youth work techniques to improve relationships between officers and young people (see expert view).
Tackling disproportionality
The Black Lives Matter global protests that exploded in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in the US are a timely reminder that criminal justice systems are disproportionately populated by people from ethnic minority backgrounds.
David Lammy MP’s 2017 independent review of the treatment of, and outcomes for, BAME individuals within the criminal justice system, noted that much more could be done to ensure equality of treatment within it. Lammy’s biggest concern lay with the youth justice system. While 18 per cent of the 10-17 population come from a minority ethnic background 27 per cent of children cautioned or convicted in 2019 were of BAME origin – a rise from 14 per cent in 2010.
Social inequalities – BAME children are proportionally more likely to be in receipt of free school meals and live in poverty households – is a factor in disproportionality in the criminal justice system, says Bateman, but this does not explain why, for example, in 2019, black people were subject to stop and search at almost 10-times the rate for the white population according to Home Office data.
The faster decline in white first-time entrants to the youth justice system than their BAME contemporaries suggests diversion work has benefitted the former group more than the latter, explains Bateman.
An issue of further concern is that over-representation increases in line with the intensity of youth justice intervention: BAME children who enter the system are more likely to receive harsher levels of punishment – for example, in 2019, BAME children comprised 26 per cent of children receiving a formal youth justice sanction but accounted for 35 per cent of those convicted, indicating that they were less likely to be cautioned; while 42 per cent who received a custodial sentence in 2019 were from a BAME background.
Black young males were almost 60 per cent more likely than white boys to be committed to the crown court; Asian boys were nearly 2.5 times more likely to be tried there than white young males. Black boys proceeded against in the youth court were less likely to be found guilty but, if convicted, were significantly more likely to be sentenced to custody. BAME children tried in the crown court were significantly more likely to plead not guilty but rates of imprisonment were broadly comparable to those for white children.
“The disproportionality shown in data for long-term sentences of imprisonment would appear to be largely a function of the decision as to where the case should be tried,” says Bateman.
He adds that the “widespread, longstanding and deep rooted” nature of disproportionality makes it challenging to find effective strategies to reduce it. However, a number of youth offending services have been praised by HM Inspectorate of Probation for their work tackling disproportionality (see practice example).
Bateman also advocates system reforms that would facilitate increased decriminalisation of BAME children, such as removing an admission of guilt as a requirement of diversion. This is an approach that has borne dividends in a pilot scheme being run by the Metropolitan Police in Hackney (see practice example).
Tackling disproportionality is also one of the priorities for the YJB, an issue being led by its new chair Keith Fraser. He is also keen to embed a “child first” approach across the system, that upholds children’s rights, supports them to reach their potential, is committed to inclusion and participation, and keeps children safe.
“This does not equate to being ‘soft on crime’,” he says. “It means that we do what we know works to help children escape the dead-end cycle of reoffending and positively contribute to society instead.” Such an approach could turn the tide on reoffending and disproportionality in the system.
ADCS VIEW
WE NEED A RENEWED FOCUS AND INVESTMENT IN TACKLING THE ROOT CAUSES OF OFFENDING BEHAVIOURS
By Jenny Coles, ADCS president 2020/21
The Ministry of Justice recently published a new white paper on sentencing reform. Although the bulk of the plans relate to the adult criminal justice system, it does deal with children and young people in conflict with the law. There are some welcome proposals, including reducing the length of time some young people must disclose details of their offending to prospective employers and promoting greater use of community resolutions plus a renewed focus on legal thresholds for the use of remand. Rising remands have been a source of concern for some time, particularly when so few go on to get a custodial sentence. The pandemic has slowed down the courts meaning more young people are finding themselves on remand for longer with variously restricted visits and changes to daily regimes.
ADCS believes supporting children and young people earlier is critical to shift the dial but this was largely unremarked upon in the paper. New investment will be required. Without this, and a renewed focus on tackling the root causes of offending behaviours, such as poor mental health and low educational attainment, the progress we have made over the last decade, will stall.
In so many ways there is much the adult system could learn from our approaches to youth justice, especially in diverting children and young people away from the criminal justice system, but not everything is going in the right direction. At 10 years old, our age of criminal responsibility is among the lowest in the world, too many young people go on to reoffend upon release from custody and levels of violence, including self-harm, in the secure estate are increasing. Similarly, the cohort we’re working with is getting older and is more likely to have committed higher tariff crimes. This requires new thinking. ADCS members believe that the youth justice system should be more closely aligned to existing infrastructure and accepted practices in children’s services. Reforms have been in train for several years but can we really say that the experiences of children and young people have been transformed?
For those who end up in custody, better support during their sentence as well as ongoing support to help them resettle into their communities and break the cycle of reoffending is key. Education is a gateway to long-term employment and training, so too is meeting children’s health and welfare needs. Here the white paper echoes many of Charlie Taylor’s key themes and messages from his 2016 report, such as the creation of secure schools.
The paper also recognises the distinct and unique needs of children yet the government’s plans to amend provisions on minimum terms and reviews, and release points for under-18s sentenced for committing the most serious offences will more closely align the youth and adult justice systems. We must not allow offending behaviours to blind us to children and young people’s underlying needs, their vulnerabilities or their capacity for change.
VIEW FROM INSIDE CUSTODY
YOUTH WORK METHODS CAN BE INVALUABLE IN SECURE SETTINGS
By Esther Horner, director of policy and performance, Kinetic Youth
Kinetic Youth have been delivering high-quality youth work services to children and young people in secure settings for more than 10 years. We have always tried to initiate and deliver innovative approaches to youth work and work alongside our colleagues to ensure young people have access to services that are best placed for them to achieve. One of the areas we have strived to influence is that of building better, stronger and more effective relationships between children and young people and the staff that are there to protect them. Our annual impact reports highlight the positive results that youth work can have over other professions in this arena, with lower levels of serious incidents, negative behaviours and non-engagement, alongside higher levels of attainment, emotional wellbeing and active participation. We have always felt that youth work has a huge part to play in the design and development of youth justice services moving forward.
During Covid-19, Kinetic Youth maintained face-to-face delivery in the majority of sites; in some we were at points the only agency still delivering. At Feltham YOI, they recognised the importance of this. Deputy governor Michael Woodbine approached us and asked how the establishment could work alongside our staff to not only increase services for young people to engage in but to also upskill their workforce and improve quality of delivery.
The establishment funded a three-month secondment of six officers to undertake their Level 2 Award in Youth Work and deliver services to young people as youth workers and not prison officers. All seconded personnel swapped uniforms for the duration and were supported on site with tutorials, supervisions and team reflections.
The results were excellent, initial outcome data suggested that not only were the young people positive about the scheme, but the seconded officers were also able to identify new skills that they felt enhanced their delivery as an officer once they returned to their roles. One officer remains a part of the Kinetic team full time for the foreseeable future.
We are working alongside the establishment to find a way of running a second cohort. The barriers are set around officer availability and finances. However, we believe that Feltham YOI has a strong, progressive senior management team, who recognise the positive impact that this pilot has had in the establishment and will work to find a solution to ensure a second cohort of willing officers can take part in future training initiatives.
Meanwhile, at Kinetic Youth we remain focused on finding the funding to roll this scheme out across the secure estate and continue to evidence the invaluable role that youth work methodologies can have in secure settings.
