I am departing the YJB with a heavy heart
Howard Williamson
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
At the end of September, my time on the Youth Justice Board (YJB) came to an end.
My departure has signalled the severance of the final link with the original board. I was the first replacement member after being appointed in September 2001. I've served under all five chairs (two of whom were temporarily in charge). I can't thank any of them enough for the learning I gained from serving under them, albeit in very different political times and, inevitably, at different stages in the YJB's evolution.
I'd not been on the board long when the then Prime Minister Tony Blair launched the street robbery initiative. This led to the incarceration of many young people who previously would have received community sentences. One of those sent to custody was Joseph Scholes, who hanged himself some days later. He was one of six boys who died in custody, all but one through self-harm, during my tenure. I can name every one of them and know the precise circumstances of their passing. Their deaths still haunt me. But despite various coroners' reports pointing to deficiencies in the system that we were legally responsible for monitoring, I still struggle to think of ways they could have been avoided.
That has been the tragic downside to my involvement with the YJB. Generally, I have been very proud to have been associated with its work. At times I have been charged by some academic colleagues for colluding with the criminalisation of social welfare, despite the fact I took over the chairing of the YJB's prevention and inclusion committee, which, according to most commentators, has produced something of a sea change in the place of youth crime prevention in the overall system.
In Wales, for which I took a regional responsibility from the start of my appointment, I pressed for a more concerted effort to ensure parallel and equivalent development to what was going on in England. I wasn't concerned about mirror images being produced in the devolved functions of the Welsh Assembly Government but I did press for the youth offending teams in Wales to be operating on a level playing field. Over time the YJB has established with the Welsh Assembly Government a joint Youth Justice Committee for Wales, which given the politics, I'm pleased to have contributed to achieving.
So I leave the board with quite a heavy heart. We failed on some things, and have not made as much progress on other things as we would have liked. But we made other positive things happen for some of our most disadvantaged and difficult young people.
- Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan. Email howard.williamson@haymarket.com.