- More than one in four of all teenagers - about 1.25 million
of all young people - have committed a criminal offence in the last 12
months, according to a draft official report on youth justice seen by the
Guardian.
-
- Juvenile crime is now estimated by the Audit Commission
to cost the economy more than £10bn a year and accounts for nearly
a fifth of the total annual cost of crime.
-
- The yet to be published report into the youth justice
system says the number of known juvenile offenders has actually fallen
since a peak in 1992 alongside the drop in overall recorded crime.
-
- But it warns that the number of juveniles cautioned or
convicted for violence, drug offences and robbery has risen and the number
locked away in secure facilities increased steadily during the 1990s before
beginning to level off.
-
- A draft copy of a separate report on youth justice from
the National Audit Office (NAO), Whitehall's spending watchdog, also seen
by the Guardian, warns that some youth jails are failing to provide education
and other programmes for those in their care.
-
- The unpublished NAO report goes on to say that children
who are getting some kind of education while they are locked away are only
able to continue it when they leave custody in very few areas. The official
report identifies this as one of the main reasons why 84% of young offenders
released from detention reoffend within two years.
-
- The NAO report says the latest unpublished juvenile crime
figures show that 268,500 young people aged 10 to 17 in England and Wales
were arrested in 2002/03 - about 5% of their age group. This is more than
twice the 2.4% arrest rate for the adult population.
-
- The courts in England and Wales last year sentenced 93,200
young offenders, of whom 64% received a community sentence, 7% were sent
to custody and the remainder were fined or discharged.
-
- The Audit Commission inquiry was designed as a follow-up
to its 1996 report, Misspent Youth, which found that the existing system
for dealing with youth crime was inefficient and expensive, and that services
were failing both young offenders and their victims.
-
- In response, the government set up the youth justice
board in 1998 and a network of youth offending teams to work with juvenile
offenders across England and Wales. Ministers also promised to halve the
time taken by the courts to deal with young offenders from 142 days to
71 days or fewer. This pledge was met in July 2001.
-
- A draft preface to the Audit Commission's report says
its research found that five years later "the new arrangements are
a significant improvement and a good model for delivering public services"
with the youth offending teams critical to their effectiveness.
-
- But it also concludes that resources need to be redistributed
to focus more on serious and persistent young offenders and that the confidence
of the courts and the public in alternatives to custody needs to be improved.
-
- The draft Audit Commission report also concludes that
schools need to play a more central role in preventing youth offending.
-
- The NAO report reaches similar conclusions and highlights
recent research which suggests 60% of children excluded from school committed
an offence last year, compared with 26% of children at school.
-
- It also concludes that the youth justice board (YJB)
has made good progress and is beginning to have an impact on reoffending
rates.
-
- But it says it will have to improve the credibility of
higher tariff community sentences for juveniles, which have a reoffending
rate of around 60%, if it is to persuade the courts to reduce the number
of young people placed in custody.
-
- "Even a small shift in numbers could release significant
resources for prevention work and improving the quality of both community
sentences and custodial programmes provided," says the draft NAO report.
-
- It says that the courts have welcomed the introduction
of a new higher tariff community sentence - the intensive supervision and
surveillance programme - but some areas have reported high breach rates
with some young offenders being re-sentenced to custody. It also warns
it is being used instead of existing community penalties rather than as
an alternative to prison.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,2763,1116171,00.html
|
