AOPM Annual Conference - Plenary

Now entering the fourth year of operations, AOPM has become the driving force supporting volunteer Panel Members to achieve a sense of national identity and shared purpose.

We represent the community practitioners of a reintegrative approach to youth offending, on the basis that it is more likely to promote mutual respect, produce a meaningful dialogue and give young people a voice.

We continue to advocate restorative approaches to children in trouble with the law through panel meetings delivering support services and community sentences where, through willing participation, victims effectively become the jury and ensure that amends are made.

As representatives of civil society in the criminal justice system, we are keen to see greater integration of resources between the voluntary, third and statutory sectors towards a different direction for children caught up in criminality, but who are the most deprived and marginalised in our communities.

In Scotland’s Children’s Hearings system community volunteers meet with young people involved in crime - without the benefit of a prior criminal record – in order to nip offending behaviour in the bud. A criminal conviction is the major drawback of Referral Orders which, although spent on completion, is revealed through CRB checks to the detriment of future employment. (In the year to September 2009 over 125,000 CRB checks were made on under 18’s).

Moreover, a discretionary ‘Custody Threshold’ has meant that many young people, who pleaded guilty to a first time offence, were sent to jail instead of receiving a Referral Order. Although statistics of such sentences are not available from the YJB, a recent Barnardo’s report revealed that 95% of children incarcerated in 2006/07 had not committed a grave or serious offence, and 82% had not committed a violent offence against another person.

We therefore welcome the new measures from the Sentencing Guidelines Council that Referral Orders up to 12 months are mandatory for first time entrants pleading guilty to low level crimes, and that a court must state reasons why a community sanction is inappropriate when a custodial sentence is imposed. We also share the newly stated aim of the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) to reduce criminalisation of young people, and continue to advocate that when issued alongside the Referral Order, Compensation Orders become spent on completion instead of after 30 months.

The Scottish tribunal model was adopted in Guernsey in 2009 and victims’ high involvement and satisfaction with the Northern Ireland system is in marked contrast with the present lack of involvement of victims in referral panels.

Despite the statutory basis of Panel Members’ role as practitioners of restorative justice, many of us long to see the day when the victims of young people’s crime routinely attend panel meetings, albeit inwardly apprehensive as to our ability to mediate effectively. Doubts arise from lack of RJ training and resources for volunteers, which AOPM has strived to redress since inception.

Following consultation on revised National Occupation Standards in RJ, Skills for Justice, the RJC and NPIA jointly launched the framework for a new qualification on 1st April 2010, open equally to employees and volunteers.
This represents immense progress and is a welcome commitment from government to the volunteer and third sector workforce (amounting to some 6million individuals), who service our most vulnerable young people. In addition, the YJB’s online college at the Open University is now accessible to volunteers, with easy access to learning materials for improving standards and consistency in youth offending panels.

In recent years, the increasing move away from local youth courts to a much more centralised system has meant that trial and sentencing of young people in courts can be outside their town, borough or county, whilst their schools, homes or care homes are no longer places of safety. At the same time the media-driven solution to youth crime is to remove young offenders out of sight and out of mind, leaving unaddressed their atrophied lives and collateral damage to victims and communities.

In marked contrast Panels lie at the heart of communities, enabling greater local accountability for those who commit crime in their youth, but statistically more often than not, will go on to live decent, law-abiding lives.

Neither a court of law nor a local authority committee, Panels provide local and accountable youth justice services to drive the changes so desperately needed by volatile young people, often struggling with literacy and communications deficits at a defining stage of their lives.

We look forward to a wider and increasingly effective role for Panel Members.

Sandra Beeton
http://www.aopm.co.uk
June 2010

Association of Panel Members

From 1909 until 2001, the primary role for community participation in the youth justice system has been as volunteer magistrates delivering summary justice to young people, with the ultimate sanction of imprisonment to teach lessons which - somehow- prevent their future offending. Youth Offending Panels are now in their 10th year of operating through directly engaging community volunteers in the rehabilitation of young people pleading guilty to behaviour which cross the boundaries of criminality, through Referral Orders delivering restorative justice.

The revised system, designed to deliver support services at one-stop-shops provided by newly-configured Youth Offending Teams, was greeted with euphoria and led to description of Panels by the then Youth Justice Board Chair, Rod Morgan, as the jewel in the crown. Yet the criminal justice floodgate was opened to children aged from 11, with the decade depicted as a crime-wave committed by ‘feral’ teenagers, and Panels confined to the backwaters as a ‘soft’ or superfluous diversion from jails accommodating up to 3000 under-18’s, to receive their just desserts.

Whilst conventional wisdom attributes children’s crime to moral deficits, easily remedied by the short, sharp shock of being ‘sent-down’, Community Panel Members recognise that behind the court orders lie stories of disastrous role models, unfulfilled potential, and institutional failures - only to be compounded through incarceration. We seek to challenge these children’s behaviour by ensuring that victims become the jury and amends are made; by agreeing contracts to engage support services to ensure that contextual factors which led to the crime are addressed. Yet despite an alarming reoffending rate for custodial sentences (75%) the community justice epitomized in Panel Members faces a constant challenge to increase magistrates’ confidence in community sentences - perceived as only applicable to trivial crimes, despite the lowest reoffending rate of all community sentences (45%).

This topsy-turvy position has finally been highlighted in recent excellent work by penal reformers, with sentencers’ confidence in custody being questioned by policy makers at all levels. Not least all 4 Children’s Commissioners, responsible for upholding the Human Rights of children in the United Kingdom. The economics of incarcerating young people (£325m) when weighed against an average 75% risk of re-offending upon release, simply don’t make sense.

At the community level, the Association of Panel Members (AOPM) has become an apologist for Restorative Youth Justice. With few resources other than the goodwill of volunteers, we beat the drum in favour of victim participation in solutions to the harm caused by young people in our communities; in favour of interventions targeted towards the social, emotional and behavioural deficits which disproportionately affect these children. And we are very reluctant witnesses to the sheer numbers of young people left behind by the education system, only to resurface in the custody suite.

Panel Members understand the ability of young people to come good in time with patient, affirming (but not condoning) adult support, as opposed to condemnation. We want to celebrate the sheer guts and determination it takes for young people, who went off the rails, to get back on track working with YOTs in partnership with members of their community. As volunteers, Panel Members are disinterested, dispassionate and freethinking participants in the complex process of corporate parenting, who know that our role is challenging to entrenched traditions. We are therefore a wild card in the pack, which sometimes renders our partnerships unstable. By keeping sight of the goal, we help children to move away from the so-called revolving door, by delivering the urban equivalent of the African saying; ‘It takes a whole village to raise a child.’

Baroness Neuberger’s 2009 review of volunteering in the criminal justice system provides the last word:
"A lack of investment in volunteer management inevitably results in volunteers having a bad experience. During the course of my research I have come across many cases of volunteers who have had a negative experience, as a direct result of poor investment in their management. This is more common where a statutory volunteer role is new, for instance in the case of panel members on Youth Offending Teams. The agency is still adapting to these changes and a supportive culture is still being developed. The Youth Justice Board has worked on a number of initiatives to support best practice in managing volunteers. Nevertheless, Government should be taking this very seriously if they wish Panel Members to stay and play a key role."

Sandra Beeton
Chair
Association of Panel Members (AOPM)