Make Justice Work

As we move into the party political gamesmanship which inevitably comes with a general election, criminal justice yet again will be used as a political football. Despite what politicians say behind closed doors - that is, in general they would agree with most of us who say we are locking up too many low level offenders and it is costing too much - I doubt they will see any votes in saying any of that in public. Yet it was interesting hearing Alan Duncan at the Clinks AGM recently talk of tackling "corrosive headlines" and the lack of cross party consensus in criminal justice - the two very real enemies in our battle to create a sensible criminal justice system. Perhaps we can all help him to tackle these corrosive headlines so that we can begin to breakdown the negative backlash caused by some of the ludicrous headlines which then hinder our ability to put in place real and lasting crime solutions.

Make Justice Work is a new media campaign focused on improving the public's understanding of the huge cost and ineffectiveness involved in locking up low level offenders for short sentences and the benefits of good community sentences which can reduce offending as well as addressing the reasons behind that offending. But critically the public will only be convinced if we can show them what works in the community.

I have just spent the most amazing two days with Youth at Risk, not only observing the experiences of the young people on their programme but also going through some of the processes ourselves. It has been one of the most rigorous experiences I have had in a long time and I defy anyone to suggest that addressing entrenched behaviours and attitudes is easy or unchallenging I have no doubt that most of them would have preferred a few weeks in prison. But sharing just a small part of these young people's transformation was a real wake-up call for those of us touching their experience. We all knew about Youth at Risk and the great work they do - but classically, seeing is believing.

There is so much good going on in our society around supporting young people like those at Youth at Risk. We really should be making sure that those outside the sector get a glimpse into this world. Only then will people's eyes be opened to the possibilities and opportunities available to young people by such programmes in the community.

Roma Hooper
Director
Make Justice Work

Barnardo's

The rise in the prison population since Labour came to power in 1997 has been dramatic, with a third more people behind bars. But there has been an even more startling rise in the number of very young children imprisoned. In the decade from 1996 the use of custody for 10 to 14 year olds increased by a staggering 400%. England and Wales now stand out almost alone in Western society in routinely incarcerating large numbers of young children who offend.

The law is clear that children should only be sent to prison if their offending has been grave or both serious and persistent. Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, has further asserted that children as young as 12, 13 and 14 should only ever be incarcerated when it is the only way to protect the public. So are the teenagers being sent to custody guilty of grave crimes or of serious and persistent offending? Are they all violent? Do they pose an unmanageable risk to the public? In fact, research by Barnardo’s published last year (Locking up or giving up?) shows that many of them are neither violent nor dangerous. They have been found guilty of non-violent offences and some are guilty only of summary offences, the least serious on the statute book and those which, in the case of adults, are rarely punished by imprisonment.

Barnardo’s examined 214 cases of children under 15 who had been sentenced to custody but had not committed grave crimes or been given extended sentences for serious offending. We found that one in five was in prison for breach of a community sanction and nearly a third had not committed a serious or violent offence. Overall, 35 per cent of the sample did not appear to meet the custody threshold as set out in legislation. This clearly demonstrates that the government’s intention of making custody for young children genuinely a last resort is not reflected in sentencing practice.

When we looked at the life circumstances of the children it was depressingly clear that those who end up in custody are almost always those most failed by our welfare and education systems. Half had experienced some form of abuse, one in five were living in care,16 per cent had special educational needs and 8 per cent had attempted suicide at some point in their young lives.
If these children had been given the support they needed earlier in their lives there is every reason to believe that they would not have ended up in prison. Instead they are more likely to be written off by the age of 14, failed by mainstream services when it really matters.
Using custody for children who have not committed grave and serious crimes is costly and ineffective. They do not pose a danger to the public, if anything they are a greater danger to themselves than anybody else. Can anyone really believe that we need to lock so many of them away?

Enver Solomon
Barnardo’s
Assistant Director, Policy

The solutions are already out there

The media coverage of the Doncaster boys who abused two other children has drawn vast and varied comment – but most of it has one thing in common - the need to blame. It has to be someone’s fault, the reasoning goes, so let’s find who it is and then we can all rest. Some are blaming the social workers, others the parents, then we have the politicians- they must have something to do with it, or maybe it was the Mayor for appointing a pie man to run its children’s services.

But when the blood letting is over, when anger has subsided, will we be left with a sustained desired to really understand the problem and in doing so find a solution?

Thankfully the media is moving on from simply demonising the two perpetrators of these appalling crimes. There is at last a willingness to ask why did these boys turn out like this? Research is revealing that neglected children have not had the nurturing experiences needed for areas of the brain to develop that enable them to control their emotions and behaviour. But then doesn’t it make sense that if a child is brought up with little care or respect, they may not know how to care or respect others. If they have been treated more like a thing than a human being, it seems fairly obvious that they may have learned to treat others as things rather than human beings. And if they are shouted at, abused, and their feelings ignored, they may become adept at shouting, fighting, abusing and disregarding the feelings of others. A little reflection and a desire to understand leads anyone to these conclusions.

So we trace the problem back one generation, and find that the parents of these anti-social children were neglectful – but then how did the parents become so dysfunctional? If we use the same reasoning we find two grown people who may well have been damaged from their own neglected childhood. It seems to me that if your aim is just to find someone to blame, you will always get the satisfaction you seek. But you may not find the solution. The solution lies in our willingness to understand, and to exercise one or our greatest human assets – empathy. When I worked with children in care 30 years ago, as a residential care worker – at first, try as I might, I couldn’t stop being judgemental of the children’s bad behaviour, until I got to know the home life they had come from – and then I couldn’t help wondering how I would have turned out if I had been through these young peoples experience of life. I thought about it for a while over cups of tea, on long drives or bracing walks and I came to my conclusion: taking into account my ability to get very angry about injustice and any form of parental heavy-handedness, I think my behaviour would have been much worse than the children I was working with. If you were to reflect on this same question, if you were to imagine yourself brought up in a chaotic, neglectful and violent household, how do you think you would have turned out?

Look at the pattern – as a group, offenders have lower literacy levels, and poor mood control leading to anger management problems than the rest of the population. Neglectful upbringing commonly leads to impaired brain functioning that results in poor mood control affecting the ability to concentrate in school, self-modify behaviour or develop empathy – which wrecks the ability to do well in life and have good relationships. Children who suffer abuse or neglect in childhood are more likely to become offenders. Some believe that neglect and abuse damages a child early and permanently. Yes, there are windows of time in our development that are primed for us to absorb deeply and become imprinted by our environment – for good or bad. But research also suggests the brain is much more plastic than we ever thought and has vast capacity to learn, unlearn and move on. Some may need more patience and support than others, but people can move on and grow. It all depends how far we are prepared to go to understand and help those whose life experience has been so much less fortunate than our own. At any point we can fall back on the short-lived satisfaction of judging others or we can take time to reflect a little, try to understand, put ourselves in another’s shoes.

And where will all this compassion lead? There is always the worry that if we reduce in any way the punishment we meter out for criminal behaviour there won’t be any discouragement for crime. But if we really want to cure the problem, perhaps its time to look around and see that we already have some exceptional resources – people Like Camilla Batmanghelidjh, founder of the Kids Company. Or Maura Jackson, who has worked to create turn-around environments to help women reduce re-offending through Home Office initiatives. Or Dan Hughes who has done so much to create successful therapeutic approaches for neglected children. There are other grass roots workers doing exceptional work in Youth Offending teams – like Denbigh in North Wales – or Parent Support Advisors self organising to set up innovative groups to help failing children – like the team in Somerset. Or staff in Family Intervention Projects around the UK. Just browse the coalition members on this site and see how much commitment and compassion there is out there making a difference. Not to mention the innovative prison workers, social workers, chaplains and volunteers who are quietly doing amazing work unknown to the rest of us, day after day helping to turn peoples lives around. There may not presently be enough of these people, but they are there.

If politicians and media focussed their attention on seeking out these innovators in social care and therapeutic interventions, it wouldn’t take too long to find what works and how best to train practitioners in these approaches. The solutions are already out there. Granted, the scale of the problem is large and has probably been steadily building for generations. But the very existence of innovative workers who know how to effect lasting change in people who have been given up on by the rest of society gives us reason to be very optimistic.

Wendy Marshall
Co-founder
Hope Mountain

The Youth Crime Arms Race

Politicians from all parties are engaged in an arms race of rhetoric in relation to their approach to children in contact with the criminal justice system. The media fuels the arms race with sensationalist headlines: ‘yobs’, ‘asbo kids’, ‘monsters’ and ‘evil’ have become common place, encouraging a vicious cycle in which politicians find themselves locked into increasing the punitive stakes to satisfy the appetites of the media and populist opinion.

The increasingly punitive approach that has emerged over the last 20 years, whether it be in creating more crimes, creating longer sentences, or reducing the quality of type of prison that children are sent to, have left our society in a position where we are spending £415 million a year on incarcerating children in prisons that do not work – a shocking 75% of children reoffend within a year of being released, higher than any other age group in prison.

Behind the headlines and political rhetoric lie the facts of who these children are. 71% of children in custody have been involved with or in the care of social services; 2 out of 5 girls and 1 out of 4 boys have suffered violence at home; 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 20 boys have suffered sexual abuse. Educational, behavioural and mental health problems are rife – 85% show signs of a personality disorder. The prevalence of depression, self harm and suicide is higher amongst incarcerated children that any other sector in our society – 89% of girls in our prisons deliberately self-harm and children in custody are 18 times more prone to take their own life than children of the same age in the community.

Children in prison are the product of chaos, neglect and abuse, but rather than help these children we incarcerate them, locking them away with the problems in our society we would rather not face. To continue the rhetoric arms race is both nonsensical and irresponsible. It damages these children further at an extraordinary cost to the tax payer. But it is easier to separate these children from the rest of us, to point the finger of blame and label them as an ‘other’ than to take responsibility that it is our society and its failings that has made them who they are.

Andrew Neilson
Assistant Director
the Howard League for Penal Reform

Why did we commission “the Fear Factory”?

With funding from The Nationwide Foundation, three Third Sector agencies came together to commission this film, Safer Wales Ltd, Construction Youth Trust and Addaction. We all work intensively with young people who are either offenders or at risk of offending, to break the cycles of vulnerabilities, and prevent re-offending.

Frustration with External Factors
We have become, over the past 15 years or so, increasingly frustrated with the external factors which work against us and the young people themselves. In particular with how they are viewed, and treated, both within the criminal justice system, and also to some extent in schools, or in the care system, and in particular by the media, which we feel has a lot to answer for in perpetuating stereotypes and demonising young people, lessening their chances of exiting from the dire circumstances some of them find themselves in.

Wake Up Call – we need a Cross-Party Solution
We want the film, to be a wake-up call – to politicians, colleagues in the Third, Public and Private sectors who work in this field, and to the media. We want to ask you to join this coalition to develop and commit to a realistic and practical way forward on youth justice; and reject a system in which young people and crime are used as pawns to sell papers or to attract votes.

We want all of our politicians to work on a cross-party solution, and deal with the issue with proper long term planning, policy and delivery, and evaluation over a longer period.

Young people are entering the criminal justice system at younger and younger ages. We need to be asking the question why? Where are we failing them so badly that no one seems to be picking up the signs early enough to prevent this?

“Somewhere to go and something to do”
Consultation with young people who are “hanging around” on the streets, consistently shows the same result. They want somewhere to go, and something to do. It’s not rocket science. Too often, the same level of short-sightedness results in money being spent on practical measures that can end up alienating the young people even more – costly resources such as CCTV cameras and alley-gating schemes, please the electorate and meet short term community safety targets, whilst longer term or more creative solutions like more detached youth services and facilities, or, for example, the community (weekend, evening and school holiday) use of schools, are often talked about, but not delivered.

“All I wanted was an adult to talk to......................”
Many agencies in the Third Sector, including Safer Wales, find themselves delivering programmes to prevent “re-offending”, and we know that mentoring or other support schemes, and other interventions – if they are engaged with on a voluntary basis and occur at the right time – can make a huge difference to offending or reoffending behaviour. But the question we should be asking ourselves is why do these schemes need to exist? – Why are these young people getting into offending behaviour in the first place? – How is it that we have not effectively tackled and managed risk factors and vulnerabilities evidenced over 10 years ago - what have we really done to tackle poor literacy, poor parenting, low educational achievement, mental health issues, child abuse and plain old poverty?

Short-termist thinking doesn’t work...
The answer is that much has been done – but most of it in short term bursts, measured over 2 – 3 years. Partly this is because much new work is done with grant funding, which has a shelf life of 3 years at best. Partly, it is to do with performance reporting within agencies and with grant funders; targets (again annual or 2 – 3 year at most, coinciding with the electoral cycles), often related to what both local and national politicians want to demonstrate they have done on crime and disorder, to the electorate. It is also partly to do with the fact that some local CJS partners (the police and the CPS for example) may have centrally set annual targets which pro-actively ensure that more incidents are recorded and more young people are charged, and so, whilst they are all members of crime and disorder partnerships or other statutory partnerships, such as those which concern children and young people, they are constrained in their action, and there is no incentive to undertake things in a different fashion.

These things reflect the fact that no guidance over the past 30 years has taken into account the basic fact that if you want to prevent youth offending, you have to analyse plan and evaluate in a continuous process, long term, at least for a 5 – 10 year period. For example a literacy or vocational skill initiative which is undertaken in one year may support more 13 year olds to stay in school, which could impact on youth offending figures in 5 years time. Practically speaking this is about the years in which a young person may be most vulnerable to criminality – age 10 –20. The wider picture, tackling poverty and poor parenting, health issues etc – starts in early years and could go right through to age 25.

Join the coalition...
We want national and local politicians to work with us on these issues, and not put obstacles in the way; we want national and local media to stop stereotyping and demonising young people.

We need to act on this issue – TOGETHER and NOW – I appeal to my colleagues in the Third sector and elsewhere – sign up to the Coalition, and let’s start getting this right. We are delighted that so many organisations have already signed up to the coalition and hope many more will do the same.

Barbara Natasegara MBE
Chief Executive
Safer Wales Ltd