After years of being constantly maligned, the youth justice system in England and Wales might just have something to shout about. The number of first-time entrants to the system is down 18 per cent year-on-year to 72,004. What's more, the youth prison population has dropped by nearly 400 in the past year to stand at 2,556 as of September, a fall of 13 per cent.
Such progress can be credited to schemes that prevent young people from offending in the first place. The Youth Justice Board (YJB) administers a range of targeted youth crime prevention programmes, which work with around 20,000 young people in the country deemed to be among the most at risk of offending. For 2009/10, the government has provided £33m, funnelled through the YJB, for local youth offending teams (YOTs) to run these programmes.
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