YOUTH JUSTICE BOARD INITIATIVESIN REDUCING OFFENDING
Rob Allen*, **In my first lecture I hope I gave ap ictu re o f th e syst em a little b it inEngland and changes we have had. Today
I am concentrating on the role that theYouth Justice Board plays in my country.
The Youth Justice Board you willremember was set up by the Crime andDisorder Act, so it has only been going forabout just over two years. And I am goingto say a little bit about the work of theY o uth J us t ice Bo ard a nd p arti cula r
initiatives that have been undertaken to
try to reduce youth crime.
What is the Youth Justice Board? Well,in law it is an executive, nondepartmental public body. Now that is
not very clear, I think. But it means it is
set up by the government, but is not partof the government, it does not belong to agovernment department. But it is one
step removed from the government, I
don’t know if you have these kind of
bodies in your countries, but in Englandw e have a nu mber . An example ofanother body like this would be the paroleboard in our country. It is set up by thegove rnm ent b ut it is no t run b y thegovernment. It has some independence.
And it reports to a minister that is set up
b y the Hom e O ffice. I n Engla nd t hegovernment department is called theHome Office, which is, I guess, like the
Ministry of Justice, and the minister iscalled the Home Secreta ry. We have
* Member of the Youth Justice Board and Directorof the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, London
England** This paper is a transcript of a lecture delivered by
M r. Allen at UNA FEI d uring the 118th
International Training Course.

144

funny words in England for describing
these things. Each government
department has a chief civil servant, andthat is called the permanent secretary,a nd I kn ow som e tim e s w he n th is istranslated by interpreters they translate
it as “eternal typist” fo r pe rm anent
secre ta ry. B ut secre tary me ans tw othings in English, someone who types but
also someone who is at the very top. So
we have the home secretary, who I do notthink does typing.
It is set up by the Home Office, and the
B o a r d c o n si s t s o f 1 2 m e m b e rs , o n echairman, a man called Lord Warner,
who is in the House of Lords, which is thesecond chamber in our parliament, andthere are eleven other members, and I am
one of these members. And they havebeen selected, so I applied to become amember, there was an advertisement in
the newspapers, anybody could apply,
beca use we h ave speci al ru les for
ap p oin tm en ts to bo d ie s like this toprevent the government simply
appointing their friends, otherwise theywould just put their friends on these. I
t hi nk pr o b a b l y t he y a r e m o s t l y t hegovernment’s friends anyway.
My background is in non-governmentalorganizations looking at the government
policy and research. There is on the
Board a chief constable of policing, a
police officer, there is a magistrate, there
is someone who has been a chief
probation officer, someone who has beena director of social services, there is a
doctor, a psychiatrist who is an expert onadolescent mental health. There is only
one person who is a member of the Board

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who has not previously worked in the
youth justice system and he is a man who
was formerly an editor of a newspaper,
the editor of the Times newspaper, and I
think he was appointed because he knows
about the media and public relations, andthis is very im porta nt, to be able tocommunicate the efforts that are being
made by the Youth Justice Board and by
go vernm ent a nd by youth o ffe nding
teams to try to improve public confidence,
beca use I think I said be fore publicconfidence in the system is rather low, so
we need to raise that. So there are 12
members but there is also an executive
staff, there is a chief executive of theBoard and a staff of almost 100 staff who
are involved in doing the work of theBoard.
It has a number of roles which are laid
down in statute, in the law. It has a roleof advising the home secretary, advising
the government about the youth justices y st e m a nd ho w w e l l i t i s d o in g inm e e tin g its o b je c tive o f p r e ve nti ng
offending by young people, and it also hasa specific role in advising aboutstandards, and we will talk a little bitlater in this lecture. In England we havea sy st e m o f n a t io n a l st a n d a r d s f o r
supervision of offenders, and these are
introduced and revised every so often,
and the Youth Justice Board has a role inadvising what the standards should be. It
has a role in monitoring the operation of
the youth justice system . The youth
courts, how they are working, the youth
offending teams, how they are working,and also the se cure acc om m od a tio nestates, the detention facilities. And it
has a role thirdly in developing bestpractice, in identifying and disseminating
w h a t w o r k s i n d e a l in g w it h y o u n g
offenders, so undertaking and funding
research, and then funding programmes
and projects which try to put the research
into action. So it is not simply about doing

the research and saying, well, this is
w h a t w o r k s , i t i s a b o ut d e ve l o p ing
progra mmes on the ground to try to
prevent offending.
There are two more important roles
that the Board has taken on. The first is
to do with the funding of youth offending
teams. Most of the funds that pay for themembers of the youth offending teams
come from local services. So you willremember I said the youth offending
teams comprise of a police officer, a social
worker, a probation officer, somebody
from health, somebody from education,and there is a manager of the team at the
local level. Now the funds that pay for,the money that pays for these people
comes from these agencies from theirlocal budgets. But the Youth Justice
Board does have some additional funds
that it gives out to youth offending teams
to top up that money, and that enables
the Youth Justice Board to exercise some
control, because we can say, you can havethis money provided that you spend it on
this. Because this is a system which,although it is centrally directed by the
Youth Justice Board, it is locally
implemented. One of the dangers withthat system is that the local agencies dowhat they want to do, they don’t do what
we want to do. So, having some funding
allows some leverage, some ability toc o n t ro l a n d ta r g e t t h e w o r k o f t h eoffending teams particularly, and I willtalk about how we do that later. Also thisrole in funding the secure estates, thedetention facilities, the Youth Justice
Board is responsible for all, now, of the
facilities, we have taken over the budgets
that were previously held by the prison
service and by other parts of the system,
and we administer that.
So, in summary, the Youth Justice
Board provides a leadership role in the
youth justice system. Before the Youth145

RESOURCE MATERIAL SERIES No. 59
Justice Board was created there was noreal focus, or leadership within the youth
justice system, and this was one of the
weaknesses that was identified by theaudit commission, by the auditors thatlooked at the system five years ago, theysaid, this is not really a system at all, it islots of local people doing things, and it
needs something in the center, to drive it,
and this is what the Youth Justice Board
is trying to do.
I will just say a little bit about thevision that the Youth Justice Board has,
what it is trying to achieve. We think, att he Y o u th J us ti c e B o a r d , t ha t i t i simportant that young people are treatedfairly whatever their background in thesystem, this is an important priority. You
may say that should go without saying,that I should not need to say that, ofcourse the justice system should be fair.
But we do have a particular problem in
the United Kingdom, in England andWales, this is a disproportionate use ofcustodial detention for people from racial
minorities. I don’t know how many of you
have been to England and know about thecomposition of the population, but about
5% of the general population in Britain is
made up of racial minorities from AfroCaribbean, South Asia mainly, some fromthe Far East, but the Afro-Caribbean andAsian subcontinent are the main racial
minorities in the U.K., but they are overr e pr e se nte d in the cr im inal ju stic esystem, pa rticula rly amongst young
people. And that is a problem, there has
been some research in the past that hassuggested that the system discriminates
against people of color, in our system,
which is very bad, and we are trying toensure that everything is done to remove
any discrimination of that kind.
The second point is about opportunity.
The philosophy of the Youth J ustice
Board is that young people should be146

given opportunities to contribute, andthat if we do give genuine opportunities
to young people, that is the best way ofkeeping them out of trouble. And it is in a
way what distinguished the youth systemfrom the adult system. We treat youngpe o ple d if fe re ntly b e ca use th ey a reyounger, they have not yet reached theirfull potential, and if we can give them theright opportunities that is an importantpart of helping them develop into lawabiding adults. Having said that, there isa second part of the vision, which is that
we think it should be a matter of shamefor young people if they appear in the
youth court. This concept of shame, I’msure Pam Philips will talk about this in
the context of restorative justice, but I
think on the Youth Justice Board we feel
it is important that young should feelsome shame if they are caught, if they get
into trouble, and are brought to court.
And I think some young people have notre a lly f e lt m u ch sh am e . T he y ha ve
shrugged their shoulders and said, sowhat, it doesn’t really matter.
We need a sy stem, thir dly , t hat
respects the rights of victims, and therights and re sp onsibilities of young
people and their parents when they get
into the criminal justice system, andfinally, a system in which people areproud to work. I think it is fair to say thatthe youth justice system has notparticularly had a high status in oursociety, so it is not a kind of work thatnecessarily has attracted the best people,
peo ple ha ven’t said whe n the y’re a tschool, yes, I really want to work in the
youth justice system, that is what I want
to be when I grow up. So there is an effort
to try and raise the status, to raise theway in which people think about thiswork, because it is important to society as
a whole that people who are engaged intrying to help young people to grow up as
good citizens, that is a very important

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role in society, and we are trying to makethe system one in which people are proud
to work. And also, we are trying to ensurethat people who work in the youth justicesy ste m se e th e ne e d f o r w o rk ing in
partnerships w ith other parts of thesocial policy system. Because, and this isa theme that I will refer to, I think on theYouth Justice Board, we think that theyouth justice system on its own will notachieve the prevention of offending, evenwith the multidisciplinary team, it isabout other parts of social policy giving ahigher priority to young offenders thanthey have in the past.
Just the aims of the Youth Justice
Board, these echo very much the aims of
the system I talked about on Tuesday.
Reducing crime by young people, we want
to see fewer young people getting into
trouble in the first place, we want to see
f e w e r o f f en ce s co m m itt ed b y yo u ng
offenders when they do commit crime,
and we want to see a reduction in theseriousness of crime by young people.
And a reduction of frequency. So it is areduction all the way along the line. We
want to reduce the need to use the youth
courts, and the number of young people
who acquire a conviction in the youth
court. We want to reduce if we can theuse of penal institutions, and we want toimprove regimes, activities that go on insecure facilities, the detention centers.
How are we going to achieve this? Well,
I talked about the philosophy on Tuesdayof early intervention in the lives of young
people, so I won’t about that again. What
I want to talk more about is how in apractical way we will do this. First of all,we need to ensure that the local services
are strong, and do work at a high quality
with young people. As I mentioned, youth
offending teams are local. What the law
requires, it requires each area to have ayouth offending team, and above theyouth offending team there is what iscalled a steering group, a youth justicesteering group in every local area. And onthat steering group should be the chief
officers of all of the agencies which are
involved, so the chief of police, the chiefprob atio n officer, the chie f of so cia lservices, somebody senior in the healthdepartment, and they will meet every
three months or six months to discuss
youth justice issues in their area. And we
think it’s very imp orta nt tha t thosesteering groups have the senior people,
there is a great danger that the chief
probation officer will say, “oh, I’m to busy
to go to this meeting on youth crime”, andsend somebody more junior to him/her,but we like the people to be involved in
the steering group who are as senior as
possible, and our recommendation is thatit should be chaired by the chief executiveof the city or the chief executive of thearea. Now of course the chief executive isa very busy person, and he may say, “I
have no proper time, you may be very
concerned about youth crime but I havelots of other issues in my city that I haveto worry about.” But from the Youth
Justice Board point of view we try to getsenior representation in the steeringgroup because that ensures proper local
investment in the local youth offending
teams.
One consequence of that is that we
think it is important to intervene strongly
where local agencies are failing, where
the quality and standards of services foryoung offenders are not good. We think
we need to intervene strongly. Now you
may say what does “intervene strongly”
mean? And I think I will talk a little
about this later, but I think ourphilosophy is, what we say in English,
carrot and stick. I don’t know if thatmakes se nse, I think it is if you aredealing with a donkey or a horse, youoffer them a carrot to try and get them to147

RESOURCE MATERIAL SERIES No. 59
do something, and if that doesn’t work
you hit them with a stick. So it is ac o m b in a tio n of e nc o ur a g em en t a n dresources and help and support, but also
saying if you do not do this we will takesome more severe action. And one way of
doing this, which is quite popular in someareas of public services, is to publish aleague table, a table of performance bydifferent agencies. They have introduced
this with scho ols in m y c ountr y, b y
examination results, so schools that are
doing very well are top of the league
table, and everybody can say, oh, that is agood school, that is the head teacher, thatis very good, those are the tops of them,
they say, well that is not very good. And
that is kind of a sham ing p rocess, I
suppose. It is not very popular with theschools. We have not done this yet withyouth offending teams, but it is one of thepossibilities that we would say, if we needto do that we would produce a table whichis comparing the performance of different
youth offending teams.
Finally, about achieving the aims, it is
imp ortant to co ordina te ap proa ches
across government, because obviously
there are other government ministries
and departments who are doing work invery closely related areas, particularly
education, but also the department ofhealth, which is responsible for welfare
a nd so ci al se rv ice s . W e h a ve h a d aprogramme of devolution of power in mycountry, so in Wales, which is part ofEngland and Wales, there is a separate
assembly now which has responsibility
for social services and public services in
Wales. So part of the role of the Youth
Justice Board is to be a champion withingovernment, although we are not part ofgovernment, to try to get these othergovernment departments to keep young
offenders and youth crime as a priority.
So those are the main ways in which wetry to achieve them.

148

What I want to talk about now are thespecific initiatives that we haveundertaken over the last two or three
years in the Youth Justice Board. And thefirst things I will talk about are thespecific projects and programmes that wehave set up in local areas. Before I give
specific examples I just want to mention
three or four things that are common tothese different programmes, in terms of
how we have administered, how we haverun these programmes. The first is thatgenerally-speaking, the funding that wegive is for three years only initially, andlocal agencies, youth offending teams
have to bid for the money. So the Youth
Justice Board sets aside some money andsays, we are going to make 15 million
po un ds a va i l a b le fo r t hese kind s o f
p ro g ra m m e s a n d th e n in vit e s lo c a lagencies to say what sort of programme
they want to set up, and effectively there
is a co mpetition, beca use we have alimited amount of money, we cannot fundevery area for every project. So we held akind of competition and judged the best
projects. We will sometimes require what
we call m atche d funding, so we will
require local agencies to put some funds
in alongside the central funding. So, forexample, the first funding initiative weran was for bail support and supervision
programmes for young people awaiting
trial. Special projects to try and ensurethat they did not commit crimes while
they were on bail and that they appearedin court when they were supposed to andso on. And we gave 90% in the first yearof the funding, 60% in the second year,
30 % in the third ye ar, a nd the n thecentral funding stopped. Because the idea
is that the local agencies assume
re sponsibility for funding the
programmes after the central money
finishes. This is quite common in funding
as in development and things like this. So
sometimes we would require local money.
We would always require commitment

118TH INTERNATIONAL TRAINING COURSE
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f ro m the lo ca l a ge nc ie s t o f un d th e
programmes after three years, provided
that they work. Obviously if the projects
are not very successful then the local
agencies might say, we do not want towaste our money on this.
I mentioned the intensive supervision
programmes, and I’ll say a bit more about
those. We are funding, we are giving the
who le of the money for thosep r o g r a m m e s , b u t w e a r e s a y in g t oagencies that if they prove successful
then they must continue after three years
to fund those. They have to fund them if
it works, so we need to know whether
these projects work, so we are insistingon all of the projects that there is someindependent evaluation of the impact ofthe project, each project has to have an
evaluator, so it m ight be a local
university. Our bail support andsupervision programme is funding 170
projects, we at the Youth Justice Board
have an evaluator to see whether that
programme overall is having the impactthat we wanted.
F ina lly, we ha ve a lways p rovide dtechnical assistance to these projects by,what we call national supporters. So wehave a contract with an organization,
maybe a university, or an NG O, or a
private consultancy company, and theidea that they are expert organizations,they help to ensure that the projects that
we are paying for start on time, workwith the right children, that the money is
not used for other things to try and keepthese projects on course, because
sometimes if in the center you give moneyout, they say, thank you very much, andthey go and spend it on something else,
which is not really what you want themto do. So we have the evaluators, but wealso have national supporters, and thenational supporters also do provide sometec hnic al he lp f or pro gra mm es tha t

require some specific input like some of
the restorative justice programmes, orsome of the cognitive behavioral
programmes when there is some clear
work to train the staff to do things in theright way, that is the role the national
supporters play. In com bination themoney on the evaluation and the national
support is about 10% of each programme
which is spent on this, which we thinkmight be quite high. If you have a block ofmoney for an initiative, we say about 10%
could be spent on making sure the projectworks and measuring it. I think that isabout right, because you are trying to get
the b est use o f the m one y f o r the seinitiatives.
The first sort of project I am talking
about are prevention projects. Although
we are called the Youth Justice Board, weare interested in preventing young people
from getting into crime in the first place
as well. And I thought it was aninteresting discussion yesterday in thereport of group 1, M r. K itada talked
about the fact that it is important for the
deliberations to concentrate on the rolethat the police and probation andprosecutors and prisons and so on playwith prevention. B ut I think it isin te r e s t in g i n m y c o un t ry w e h a v e
som eth in g ca lled th e Youth Justice
Board, but it is very much interested inprevention and some of the projects thatw e f u nd a r e d e sig ne d t o w o r k w ith
children who have not yet been in trouble
at all. So youth inclusion, we have funded
70 projects across England and Wales,
and the idea is that they identify 50
children age 13 to 16 who are most at riskof getting into trouble. These projects are
all in high-crime areas. When I said we
ha d a competition for funds, and w einvited people to apply, sometimes weonly invite certain neighborhoods toapply, targeted initiatives on high-crime
areas, and youth inclusion is just in the149

RESOURCE MATERIAL SERIES No. 59
worst areas. So basically the projects
involve a coordinator who identifies these
50 children, this is the ideal model, andthe way they identify is by talking to thepolice, by talking to social services about
youngsters with family problems, talk to
education about children who are notdoing well at school, and often these willbe the same children who show up on thelists of these agencies. In lots of areas,
everybod y w ill know tha t it is thesechildren who are the ones who are verym u c h a t r is k , o f t e n t h e y w i ll h a v ebrothers who are already in the system,
although not always, and that is one
intere sting question from thecriminological research, why sometimes
in families you have some children who
get into trouble and others who do not.
But, the idea then with these 50 children
is to set up an individual programme forthem which tries to make sure that they
do go to school, that they are getting thebest out of education, that they haves o m e c o n s t r u c t e d a c ti v i t i e s i n t h eevenings, if necessary they have family
counseling and help and so on. So it istrying to nurture, trying to help thosechildren that have been identified.
The second kind of project, calle d
S p la sh , th a t g r e w o u t o f t he y o u thinclusion project, programme, though
there are now 150 Splash projects, andthese are only in operation during theschool holidays, because it is quite wellknown that when children are not at
school, in our country there are threeschool terms, so now children will finish
school in about, well about the same time
you’re finishing here I think, and thenthey will start at school again in
September. So that is a long period, fromthe middle of July until early September,and they will be at high risk of beingbored, nothing to do, they get involved in
vandalism or theft, so if you can provide
activities that these children will actually150

attend, that is sensible targeted crime
prevention. They have funded 150 ofthese programmes in summer holidays
and spring holidays.
Third, we have a small initiative called
Positive Futures, which is a programme
which uses sport to engage theparticipation of young people,
particularly football, soccer, which is very
popular in the U.K., but also other kindsof recreational activities including art
and music and drama, but it is mainly
sp o r t, a nd th e i d ea is th at yo u ca nsometimes engage, and get youngsters
involved by organizing them throughfootball and so on, and then you can doother work with them. So football is thegateway, soccer is the gateway to doingwork. So those are the three specificprevention initiatives that are underway.
Unfortunately, I know you are going to
ask me, do they work, and I have to say, I
don’t know yet, because it is too early totell. Although there have been somestudies of the crime rates in areas which
had the school holiday schemes which did
show big falls in some kinds of crimes,
but it is very difficult to be absolutely
sure that it is the impact of this scheme.
One of the problems for evaluators is that
there are a number of different initiatives
going on, we had our new government in
1997, and they are doing a lot, they had
been out of government for 18, 19 years,
an d w h en th e y c a m e to p o we r th e ywanted to change everything, so they
have put money into doing regenerationof communities, improving schools, morepolice, so when you go to an area and say,well is this project making a difference, it
is difficult to tease out, to say it is thisand tha t has m a de the red uctio n inburglary or the reduction in car crime or
the reduction in vandalism. So it is a hard
job for evaluators, but at least the crimein the areas is going down, and that isgood. We need now to find out which of

118TH INTERNATIONAL TRAINING COURSE
VISITING EXPERTS’ PAPERSt he t h in gs th a t a r e b e in g d o ne a r e
responsible for that. Which is really thep oint I w a n t to ma ke a bout broad er
prevention efforts.
There are important initiatives goingon in England. For example, thegovernment made a very bold
commitment to end child poverty in the
U.K., and what we mean in the U.K. bychild poverty is families who have lessthan half average earnings, that is thekind of definition. And they wa nt to
reduce and ultimately end that. So there
are a number of initiatives designed to
end family poverty, and they are starting
to w ork, a nd I think if the se so rt o fpolicies are successful then they willprobably do more to reduce crime in thelong-term than anything you do throughthe youth justice system. There are somespecific programmes to improve the earlyeducation of children. We have a scheme
called S ure Start, it is ba sed on theAmerican programme called High Scopethat was a programme under the headstart initiatives in the 1960s in the
United States in which children fromp o o r f a m i l ie s w e r e g iv e n e n r i c h e deducational experiences in their earlydays at school. And we have introduced
this. So we have a lot of different kinds ofthings going on in the prevention side, so
I don’t want you to think that it is just theYouth Justice Board that is engaged inthis, it is much broader.
On prevention, we do have under the
Crime and Disorder Act a requirement,
separate from the youth justice changes,a requirement that the police and local
government produce every three years acrime prevention plan, a crime reduction
plan based on an audit, a measurement ofcrime problems and consultation with thelocal community. This is done at a very
local level, so it would be at the city level
here, Fuchu City would have to have a

preventio n plan, it would be theresponsibility of the chief of police andthe mayor to produce that, and there
would be other agencies who would need
to be involved, probation and health, who
would need to be, a strategy drawn up
and consultation with members of thecommunity to produce that.
I want to turn now to intervention
projects, and by intervention projects I
mea n projects tha t are designed forchildren who are in the youth justicesystem. These are for youngsters who,
they may have received a final warning,they may be under a court order, under
supervision of some kind. And the Youth
Justice Board has funded projects inthese areas, more than 400 projects all
together. Restorative justice, education
training and employment, parenting,drugs and alcohol, cognitive behavioral,
bail support and supervision andmentoring. I’m going to talk about the
mentoring projects in my final lecture
which is about community involvement inyouth justice. But I want to say a little bit
about each of the other projects because I
said that all of them have been evaluated.
Well, fortunately a few weeks ago thee v a l u a t o r s h a v e p r o d u c e d in t e r i mpreliminary reports after the first year or
so of operation. So we do have some data,
we do have some findings from these. But
I would say, although we did use thesena tional supporters, these technica lassistance people, what is true across allof these projects, is that they have beenquite slow to start. And I think, maybe
this is something that is specific to the
U.K., there are not a lot of skills out inagencies, skills for people to get projects
up a n d r u n ni n g, g e t th e m w o r k i ng
quickly are not there. And that is partlyb e ca u se f o r s ev er a l ye a r s w e ha d agovernment that did not really invest alo t i n t h a t . W e h a d a co n se r va t iv e
government that was more about151

RESOURCE MATERIAL SERIES No. 59
reducing public expenditure. So people ina ge ncie s w e re m ore use d to cutting
services. So now a government comes andsays, well actually we want to provide youwith some money to set up programmes,
people say, well thank you very much, butthey do not necessarily know how to do
this very well, and it takes time to recruit
staff, and we are lucky in the United
Kingdom we have low unemployment,
and so the recruitment of staff has notalways been straight-forward for theseprojects.
Restorative justice, the Youth Justice
Board funded 46 projects which have so
f ar prod uced tw o a nd half thousa ndinterventions. So two and a half thousand
young people have been w orked with
under these projects. The evaluators saythat 70% of these have been successful.
And by successful they mean that theintervention has had a successful
conclusion. But the interventions havevaried enormously. For the most part
they have been relatively minor, modest
interventions, so the offender has maybe
apologized to the victim, or maybe has
undertaken some work for thecomm unity, unpaid work for thecomm unity, and that has beensuccessfully completed. In only 7% of
c a se s has the r e be e n dir e ct vic tim offender contact. I think, for us, it ispartly a problem to do with the speed
through the system, which has made itdifficult for victims to be fully involved inthese projects. And so people running the
projects have said, we have not got thetime to do this, so we will just get this boy
to do 12 hours work cleaning the canal or
clearing up rubbish or doing some kind of
payback type work, which is okay, it isgood, but I think the promise ofrestorative justice should be higher than
7%, that is too low I think for us to be
comfortable.

152

We have funded 40 education, training
and employment projects, and they arevery varied, some are courses which train
people in skills, som e are school
inclusions, so there will be some support
given to a young person to help them tostay in the school, through mentoring or
something, some provide career advice,helping youngsters to pursue a career
through college and training. Others arec o u r s e s w h i c h in v o l v e e l e m e n ts o fphysical activity, taking youngsters onco urses to try and improve theircharacter through challenging activities
in the outdoors. About 1,700 participants.
O ne disa pp ointing f ind ing f rom theevaluators, up to 50% of the young people
drop out from these schemes, which I
thought was high, but you will remember
at the halfway house yesterday, when wew e r e he a r i n g a b o ut t he s c h e m e f orteaching boys to be chefs in Chinese
restaurants there were dropout rates ofabout this, I think two out of the six so far
had succeeded all the way. Because weare talking about difficult young people
we are not going to have 100% success, so
within that 50% dropout some of the
programmes were more successful andsome of them were less successful, andthe importance of the evaluation is to beable to ident ify th e factors or thecharacteristics of the successfulprogrammes. It seems to me that the
programmes that are most successful are
the ones t hat provide the h igh es t
intensity of contact, which is not
surprising, it is what you would expect. If
you just say to a boy, come once a week
and talk to me about what job you want
to do, that is one part of intervention. If
you say, right, you are going to comeeveryday, and we’re going to do this,we’re going to get your literacy levels
better, and then we’re going to talk about
this, if you can engage the youngster like
that, that is much more likely to turn

118TH INTERNATIONAL TRAINING COURSE
VISITING EXPERTS’ PAPERS
around the motivation in their life. So I
think intensity is important.
Parenting, we have funded 42 schemes.
Almost all are women attending, rather
than fathers. The research found thatthree quarters of sessions were attended
by parents. The impact is not yet know,
thought the evaluators say that a lot of
the women that went said that they found
it very helpful, which is good. What we
d o n ’t k n o w is wh et he r it m a d e an ydifference when they went home, and inth eir f a m ilies , and in th e way the yrelated to their children, whether thatchanged, and indeed even if that changed,
we do n’t know whether tha t ha d a n
impact on how their children behave. So
there are a lot of if s, but it is quite
encouraging. It is disappointing that so
f e w f a th e r s a p p e a r e d t o h a v e b e e ninvolved in these courses, but I think thereality is that a lot of young offenders do
not live with their fathers, there are a lot
more in single parent households, and infact that has, I will say a little bit aboutsome data we have from the asset
assessment profile, the assessment toolthat we have developed has given us
some data about children who are going
through the youth justice system, and I
think 30 or 40 percent of them do not livewith a father or any kind of male person
i n th e i r h o u s e a nd th a t m a y b e a nimportant part of their delinquency. And
it is obviously part of the rationale formentoring programmes, to try to fix up
young people with role models,particularly boys with men who can act
as a good role model for them.
The drugs and cognitive behavioral
programmes have been particularly slow
a t sta rting, a nd ha ve not had m any
referrals. By referrals I mean not many
children have been sent to these projects,
and we don’t know quite why that is. And
there h ave also been methodology

problems, what I mean by that is the
projects have not been very clear about
what exactly it is they are trying to do.
There is an issue with drugs projects,
because I think I said the other day thatuse of cannabis and marijuana is fairly
wide-spread amongst our population anda lot of young people do not really see it asa problem. It is against the law, but it is
not the most serious. O bviously it isserious if it involves graduation to otherdrugs, b ut w hat exactly you do w ith
children who have got this problem, it is
not entirely clear. So these projects have,of all the projects these are the ones thathave struggled the most.
Th e bail supp o rt and su pe rvision
programmes, which is the largest single
group, they have seemed to have beenquite successful because there has been afall in the number of children remanded
into custody by the courts, and that is
almost certainly because there are now inevery area just about these schemes toprovide support, so the court can say,instead of having to choose whether togive someone bail, conditional release or
remand to an institution, they have a
middle way, they can say you have bail,but you are under the supervision of thisproj ect, some of th e projects have
surveillance with the electronic bracelets,
some of them just have very intensive
surveillance by project workers. But thefall in custodial remands could be to dowith the reduction in delay, I talked
about speeding up the system. Well if you
speed the system up, which we have, that
reduces the time that young people are on
remand, so the population comes downthat way. So if you do want to reduce thenumber of people in institutions, one good
way of doing it is to speed things up,
because you just have less time to do it,
rather than create projects. So we arestill wo rk ing o ut w hy it is that the153

RESOURCE MATERIAL SERIES No. 59
numbers have come down, and what role
specifically these projects have had.
The e stim a te is that 3% o f yo ung
offenders commit 25% of the crimes thatare committed by this age group. There
are very high reconviction rates fromc u s t o d y, s o t h e r e w a s a n e e d f o r atargeted pro gramm e providing
surveillance so that the public w ere
confident but also providing intensive
supervision because these are often very
damaged children with a lot of problems.
So for entry into the intensive supervisionand surveillance programme, you have tohave committed at least four crimes, youhave to have ha d four convictions toqualify, and your most recent one has tobe a serious one, so it is really trying
target those youngsters who would begoing into the institutions, to try andprevent the kind of net widening, thekind of, what happens sometimes when
you create an a lterna tive, yo u d on’t
replace the prison, you supplement thecommunity. This is trying to say, prison
is not working for these boys, and it ismostly boys, let’s try and do something
different. And they are just starting, thefirst ones are starting on the first of July,so we will have some results by next year
as to how well these are going.
I have talked about the projects andthe programmes that the Youth Justice
Board has created and funded. I want toturn now to some other measures that theBoard has introduced, what I have calledpractice tools, things that are supposed tohelp people who are actually doing thework with young offenders face-to-face, todo that more effectively. And I want totalk first about the assessment tool,
ASSET. It is 12 pages of basic assessment
form, and then 4 pages additional forhigh-risk juveniles, where there has been
an identification of a risk of violence. And
then 3 pages at the end that the young

154

person themselves complete. When wedeve loped this, this ASSET wasdeveloped by Oxford University, andwhen they produced the first draft it was
30 pages long and all of the members of
the youth offending teams said, no way,
we are not going to fill in 30 pages forevery young person that comes into thesystem, so it is reduced.
It has three roles, there are three
purposes for this assessment. First of all,it is an opportunity when a child, when ayoung person first comes into the system,
first commits an offence for an initialassessment of the needs that they have,and the risks that they provide. The
second use or purpose is to track progress
through the system. O bviously mostyoung offenders may have one or twocrimes and then they stop offending, butthere are some who continue. Now wehope that all of these changes will meanthat number will be reduced, but there
are obviously some young people who
continue to commit crimes, and what thisform provides is an opportunity to see
how their needs and risks change overtime, and whether the interventions,
whether the programmes, whether thecase work, has any impact. And thirdly, it
provides a source of data, of information
about young people coming through thesystem. So every form is sent to the Youth
Justice Board, not with the names, it isanonymous data without names, but theYouth Justice Board wants to collect thed a ta, the inf o rm atio n to build up a
picture of the needs and risks presented
by young offenders in order to argue form o re r e so u rc e s w ith ot he r p a r ts o fgovernment. If, for example, there has
been some research on 500 ASSET forms
completed in 40 youth offending teamareas and it found, for example, only 40%of the young people had been living with
their father. So 60% had not been livingwith their father, that was the statistic I

118TH INTERNATIONAL TRAINING COURSE
VISITING EXPERTS’ PAPERS
was trying to remember before. 15% had
n o sch o ol p la ce , a nd e mo tio na l a n dmental health create frequent problems.
Well, when be build up the picture about
the school problem, we can take this to
the Ministry of Education and say, look,there is a very serious problem here, 15%of these children a re not having any
school place, we need to develop somemore policy to deal with that. So threer o l e s , in it ia l a ss e s s m e n t, p r o gr e s sthrough the system, and then building up
a picture.
What the form does, it goes throughdifferent sections. It starts of with asection on the criminal and care history of
the young person, and then covers theiroffending behavior, their living
arrangements, their family and personal
relationships, education, the kind ofneighborhood they live in, the kind oflifestyle they have, their health, whether
there is any substance misuse, what theirperception of themselves is, and of otherpeople, what their attitudes are, how they
think and behave, what their motivation
to change is like, what positive factors
there are. Which I think is very
important, because it is very easy in these
exercises simply to list problems,
problems, problems, problems. But I
think, certainly I be lie ve, that it isimportant to look as well at the strengths
and competencies and potential thatyoung people have. And again this a partof what is distinctive about the youth
system, we are saying, these are young
people, they have yet to fully develop so
let’s look at what could be developed andwhat is positive. We look at indicators ofvulnerability, and indicators that thechildren might present a serious risk,
because obviously this is an important
way of trying to predict if there are somevery serious, there are a small number ofvery dangerous young people, and it isperhaps a way of doing that.

Now under each of those sections there
is a rating, a score, the person filling in
the form is invited to make a score as tohow lik ely, w hat is the im p ac t tha t
se c ti o n h a s o n th e ir l ik e ly f u r th e roffending. The idea at the end of the
document, there is space to describe theplanned interventions, and how thosemeet all of the se prob lem s. Beca use
another of the problems with assessmentin the past has been, you have a very
detailed assessment, and then you don’t
actually do anything, you have not got thetools to be able to meet all of these needs.
So there is a section to say ho w theplanned programme of supervision, ofintervention, whether it is mentoring or
restorative justice, or parenting, how it isgoing to link into all of these problems.
There is a shorter version of this asset
which is done at the remand stage, and ashorter one as well is being developed forthe final warning. I said that the final
warning stage of proceedings is a lot of
yo un g p e o pl e a n d i t ha s to b e d o nequickly, and people, practitioners havesaid that this is too much to do then, so
we are producing a shorter version.
The evaluation which I mentioned thathas been undertaken of ASSET has beenquite encouraging. It found that it is usedon 80% of young offenders when they firstenter the system, and of those 80%, innine out of ten cases the whole form iscompleted, which is good. And on thewhole, practitioners have accepted thistool, and I say that because there aresome people who are resistant to tools
like this because they say, well, I am aprofessional social worker or probation
officer, I do not need this list of boxes totick, it is not a good way of doing it. There
are some people w ho sa y that. Some
professionals say they have been doing
this for 20 years and they do not needthis. But the id ea is this is not a
substitute for professional judgement, it

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RESOURCE MATERIAL SERIES No. 59
is an aid, an assistance to professional
judgement, and if that message is given
then people are more likely to embrace it.
Two problem areas that the evaluation
showed, first of all, the section about therisks posed by young people has not been
filled in very well. Some of theprofessionals have misunderstood thatand they have thought it was about risks
to the child, not risks by the child. And
the other thing is although the idea isthat the ASSETs completed at the start ofan intervention and at the end to see
whether there has been any change, it isless well completed at the end. So that is
an area we have to work on at the Youth
Justice Board to get practitioners to fillthis in at the end. One of the problems
may be that youth offending teams do not
like to fill it in at the end in case it showsthat the work they have done has notbeen successful. There is one specificproblem which has been mentioned to me,which is to do with drugs. If you start towork with a young offender, and you say
to them, maybe I have not met you before,a nd I sa y to y o u , h a v e y o u g o t a ny
problem with drugs, they’ll say no, no, no.
I work with you, I get to know you, I visit
your family, I talk to you about w hy
you’re in trouble. Three months later they
trust me, I trust them, I’m filling the form
in, and I say do you have a problem withdrugs, they may say well, yes, actually I
do. So it looks like they started with nodrug problem, and finished with a drug
problem, which is not good, so we need tofind a way around that sort of thing. So
we need to get people to do more work at
the end of the measures.
Ne xt a fte r AS S E T , I just w a nt tomention that the Youth Justice Board has
produced a lot of other guidance, a lot of
documentation about various aspects of
how to work in the youth justice system.
There is a list in the full paper, and156

again, if people would like copies they canlet me know and I can arrange that when
I get back to England. I want to mention
just two or three of the pieces of guidanceor tools that have been made available.
We have done a lot of work about
reducing delay because of the importancethat’s been attached to that. I do notthink that will be particularly interesting
to many of you because it is very specificto the system in our country. But wehave, as well as ASSET, we are working
on two specific assessment tools. One, totry and assess whether a case is suitable
fo r resto ra tive justice, w he ther theattitude of the young person, and thekind of crime, and the attitude of thevictim ma ke it the kind of case tha ts h o u l d g o f o r a r e s t o r a t i v e j u s ti c eapproach. And the second is anassessment tool for parents. Is this aparent who should go on a parenting
programme, do they need help with theirparenting skills or not, so it’s a specific
tool because the basic asset does not havea lot about parenting on it. We have as
well, at the Youth Justice Board,
produced a parenting video for use by
projects that are working with parents. It
is a 25, 30 minute video with scenes ofconflicts within families that trigger
discussion. So you play a little of thevideo, a child comes back late at night,
and they are two hours past their curfew
and there is a flaming row between themother and the child, and then the video
stops and you have a discussion with theparents about how to handle that. Or themother finds some cannabis under theyo ung p e rso n’s b e d, or so m e str on g
alcohol, how do they handle thatsituation. So very practical to try to help
parents. I did some years ago, in fact, I
myself went on a parenting course, I was
not ordered by the courts, I was a
volunteer because I wanted to see what
this was like. It was very interesting, thiswas about five years ago, and we used

118TH INTERNATIONAL TRAINING COURSE
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another video, and it was a very good wayof getting people to think about different
ways of com munication, because
communication is the key I think.
The final piece of guidance that I wantto mention has been the most difficult one
to produce. And it sounds a very boring
subject, and it is information sharing.
And the reason it is difficult is that wehave a data protection law in the U.K.,
which means that if someone has some
information about an individual that they
get in the course of their work they can’t
just give that information a round to
everybody else, that is a protection forin div idua ls. I don ’t kn ow if oth er
countries have these laws or not.
Although the Crime and Disorder Act
tried to say that in cases of crimes, then it
is okay to share information between
agencies, it is still quite complicated andsome agencies, some organizations do no
like to share information so much about
individuals. I give you an example, asocial worker is visiting a boy, a social
worker in the youth offending team, he
has a boy under his supervision, and hefinds out that the boy’s older brother isinvolved in drugs, does he tell the police
at the youth offending team, has he got to
do that or not? These are difficult practiceissues that have developed. There is alsoa question about information about thevictims, how, whether that should betran sferred amongst th e different
agencies. So it is a technical question, but
it shows that the multi-disciplinary work,
the w ork be tw een a gencies, is q uite
difficult in pra ctice. There are som e
problem areas that need to be overcome,and the Youth Justice Board is trying todo that.
Fina lly on this, the Y outh Justice
Board had promoted training, there is afive-day basic training course which is
aimed at youth offending team members

who have not previously experienced theyouth justice system, so people fromeducation a nd health who have beenbrought in to youth offending teams,
because most of the social workers, andpolice, and probation officers alreadyhave some experience in this area fromtheir own professional training. So it ismore to get the new members of the youth
offending teams involved. The Youth
Justice Board has promoted training aswell for ASSETs and some restorative
justice training, and is currently working
on the development of on-the-job training
for unqualified staff. There is arecognition that there are a lot of people
who ar e may be n ot pr ofes sionallyqualified, who have a lot to offer young
people working on these projects, and soon, but there is not currently a system fortraining them, and we are in the processof establishing something like that. One
thing I should mention, the basic five-day
training has been held both for youth
offending team members and staff indetention facilities, they have done thisjointly, and that may sound very sensible.
Tha t w a s a big ste p fo rw a rd fo r us,
because in the past, people who worked indetention, and people who worked in thecommunity were in very separate kind of,separate lives, and separate training andseparate everything, and we are reallytrying to bring them together on the basisthat they are working with the same boys
and girls, this new detention and trainingo r d e r is a b o u t a j o i n t a p p r o a c h t oplanning, to treatment, to work. We haveto get people to work together and do
training together much more.
I want to say a little bit about setting
performance targets, because, this sounds
a rather boring subject, but it is, an
important part of the function of theYouth Justice Board has been to raise
performance, to raise the quality of theservices available locally. The targets are

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the things that it is saying it will do. For
example, we are saying that by April nextyear, ASSET will be completed in allcases where a youngster gets a
community sentence and a custodial
sentence. That is the target, under atarget to cross the range of the Board’s
interest.
I mentioned at the beginning that theYouth Justice Board had some ability to
p rovide funding f or youth offe nd ing
teams. Most of the funding is local, butthere is some central top up funding, andwe can make that funding available onth e con ditio n th at the lo cal yo uth
offending teams meet their targets. At
the Youth Justice Board we can’t goaround completing ASSET forms, weneed the people in the youth offending
teams to do it. But we can say to them, we
will give you some more funding if you
need more people to do it, but you mustmeet these targets to do it. How will weknow whether those targets are met?
Well there are various ways in which wemonitor the performance of the local
services. Every year each youth offending
team, or each area of the country has top roduce a youth justice p la n, w hichd e scribe s the arr a nge m en ts f o r th esteering group who is on the top level,
and who is on the youth offending team,
how many staff, from what agencies,
what is the budget, what other services
are available to young offenders, what are
the numbers of young offenders going
through the system, to make an analysisof whether the arrangements in a local
area meet the need properly. And eachyear we grade the plans depending on
h o w g o o d th e y a r e . S o gr a d e 1 i s acommended, excellent plan, so that’s fine,down to grade 4 which is sorry, that is notgood enough, try again. I think this year
there were only three or four that were ingrade 4 out of 154 or so, most of the youth
justice plans are quite good. But that is158

just them writing down what they want
us to see, they may be making it up. So
we have another way of monitoring, andthat is through what are called quarterly
returns. Every three months the youth
offending teams have to send information
to the Youth Justice Board about the
numbers of young people going throughthe syst em in th eir a re a , and wh at
happens to them, whether they get final
warnings, if they get a final warning, if
they get some measure, someinterve ntion to try and help the
youngster stay out of trouble, how many
re ports are written, how m any
supervision orders, how many detention
and training orders and so on. Althoughpeople could make that up, there will be away eventually of seeing whether thattallies with centrally-held information, sothat is quite a good system, and it is a
way of assessing whether some of thesetargets are being met. And thirdly, there
is an element, or there will be an elementof independent scrutiny of the system.
The detention facilities are inspected byan independent inspector of prisons, aninspector of social services, the youth
offending teams, the Youth Justice Board
is at the moment finalizing the right way
to do inspections of these services. So we
ha ven’t yet got in p lace a process of
independent inspection of the yo uth
offending teams but we will do it over the
next few months.
When that process of inspection is inplace, one of the things that theinspectors will look at is how well youth
offending teams meet what are called
national standards. We have hadnational standards for the supervision of
offenders in the community since 1992 in
England and Wales, and I think you havesome from Singapore that have been
distributed, and I haven’t had a chance toread them but I suspect they are in somerespects similar. In England they set out

118TH INTERNATIONAL TRAINING COURSE
VISITING EXPERTS’ PAPERS
central exp ecta tions b y government
departments of how individual cases
should be supervised by probation officers
and social workers. So there are national
standards, but th is is not just forjuveniles, they have been for initially for
adults and juveniles, so they form a kindof benchmark against which you caninspect and assess performance. They
were revised first in 1995, and when theYouth Justice Board came on the scene in1998, you’ll rem ember that has astatutory role of advising aboutstandards.
They came into operation in April lastyear, although there are two caveats,
there are two kinds of conditions. One,
they are very demanding standards interms of what they expect, and basicallyw hat they said a re, expectation thatmembers of the youth offending teams
should do things within particular timescales. T hey sho uld see an o ff end er
within a day of an order being made,there should be a minimum level o fconta ct betw een a supervis or an d
somebody of an order, so that if a young
offender does not comply with an orderthen they are given a warning and thenmaybe another warning, but if they fail tocomply a third time then they are takenback to court for breach proceedings, thatis the sort of level of specificity. And theyouth offending teams said we do nothave the resources now to be able to meetthese standards. So the Youth Justice
Court has a target, you will see that in
the list of targets, that by 2004 they will
be operating according to thesestandards. If they can get there quicker,
great, but there is a recognition from thecenter of government that you can’t justask people to do more and more withoutbuilding up the resources, the numbers ofstaff in youth offending teams and so on.

S o w h a t t he s t a n d a rd s c o v e r a r e
preventive work, work with young people
following arrest, one of the functions in
our country, if a young person is arrested,
then they cannot be interviewed unlessthey are with a parent or an adult, someother adult that is called an “appropriate
adult”, and it is for the youth offending
teams to provide appropriate adults if
pa rents refuse to come, or cannot befound, there has to be a scheme by whichanother independent person can comeand act as an appropriate adult. There isa stan d a rd o n as se ssm e n t wh ich i s
obviously about using the ASSET tool,
there is a standard on work with thevictims of crime, pre-court interventions,court work and remands, court-orderedintervention, detention and training
orders, and the supervision of gra ve
offenders. So that is an important tool
really for ensuring that the actual work
between individual youth offending teammembers and individual young offenders
is done effectively, and q uickly, andintensively.
Finally, I want to just talk for ten or
fifteen minutes about what we now callthe secure estates, but I suppose what I
mean is all of the places where people
under 18 can be locked up in England andWales. There are on any one day justunder 3000 young people under 18 locked
up on remand and under sentence. I
mentioned on Tuesday, conditions in theprison establishments are very, or havebeen historically very poor. There wast hi s re p ort i n 1 9 9 6 t ha t w a s a very
serious criticism of these. Basically there
are three kinds of institutions for young
offenders, closed institutions.
First of a ll, what are called young
offender institutions, which are run by
the prison service, so they are basicallyprison establishments, 80% of under 18s
who are locked up are locked up in young

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o f f e nd e r in sti tut io ns. Th e re a r e 1 3
establishments now that take juveniles
under 18. In some of these the whole
institution is for under 18s, in others it isa part of an institution that is made overfor under 18s and the other part usuallytakes 18 to 21 year olds, but there is no
mixing, so it is a separate establishment
eff ective ly. These are quite large
institutions, so the biggest one now takes
about 350 boys living in units of about 40.
So that’s the prison part of the estate. Im entione d that conditions are poor.
T here is a pro gram me o f trying to
improve things but it is a slow business
improving, because there has been a lot ofneglect of these establishments.
The second set of establishments arewhat are called local authority secureunits. I suppose these are like children’s
homes, but they are locked children’s
homes. So they are very much smaller,
and the regimes, the quality of life in asecure unit is very much better, verymuch higher, the staffing levels are verym uch better. They are run b y social
services departments of local authorities,s o t he y a re s oc ia l w o r ke r s w ho a r erunning them rather than prison officers.
But you will not be surprised that theya re very m uch more expe nsive tha nprisons, maybe up to six times the cost to
keep a child in a secure unit.
The third set of institutions are called
secure training centers, and currently
there are three, and they are run byprivate companies, and they provide
about 150 places. I should have said the
local authority secure units provide about
350 beds, 350 places. The secure training
centers about 150. These secure training
centers were very controversial because
they represented a new ability for courts
to send children as young as 12 directly toa secure establishment, and they were
controversial because they were run by160

private companies. Two are run by acom pa ny ca lled G roup 4 , w hich is asecurity company. The third is run byanother organization called Securicor,
which is another security company, who
run other adult prisons in the U.K. and inother countries, including I think South
Africa, or they are going to, I think, run
an establishment in South Africa, Group4.
The idea tha t people should makeprofit out of locking up 12-year-olds was acontroversial political idea. I have to saythat they had a very sticky start, the firstof these secure training centers had a lotof difficulties, when it first started there
was a riot at the establishment, and a lotof staff left and they had a very hard time
bu t the y ha ve w o rked q uite ha rd to
improve conditions and the latest reportsby the inspectors show that they havemade a lot of improvements. And
although I used to be not in favor ofp r i v a t e co m p a n i e s d o i n g t h i s w o rk
personally, I have visited recently one ofthese establishments and it is very goodquality care of children, probably betterin some respects than the local authority
units. So the secure training centers andthe local authority units take the younger
children. We have an arrangement thatchildren under 15 do not go to the prison
establishments, and some of the children
who are 15 and 16 who are particularly
vulnerable would also go to these smaller
local auth ority or secure trainin gestablishments.
One of the particular problems in oursystem is finding suitable accommodation
for the girls who need to be locked up, andthere are currently about 70 girls who arelocked up in prison establishments andthe Youth Justice Board has made acommitment to get those girls out ofprison establishments and into either

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local authority units or secure training
centers.

raising performance by making theserequirements.

So what are we doing to improve theestate? Well the way the system now
works is that the Youth Justice Board at
the center basically has a contract withthe prison service and the local
authorities and the secure training center
providers. And in that contract there are
se rvice le ve l a gr ee m ents, the re a r e
agreements about the level of service thatis going to be provided, the outcomes, theoutputs, what will have to happen. For
these organizations to get the money fromthe Youth Justice Board, they have toensure that children have 30 hours ofeducation, that they are out of their cellfor 12 hours at least every day, and so on
and so forth. So there are sets ofspecifications that are put in place, and inorder to check whether those things are
actually done, the Youth Justice Board
has monitors, actual people, there isn’t
one in every establishment, they cover agroup of establishments, but they go andt h e y c h e c k w h e t h e r w h a t is i n t h econtrac t is being provided. So th e
specifications are quite thorough, theyc o v e r w ha t a n e s ta b l is h m e n t m u st
provide, they cover standards of healthand hygiene, they require the provider to
get engaged with the assessment process,and review the progress of youngsters,
they specify how many visits are allowed,
there must be a complaints procedure,th e re m ust b e a suic id e p r ev en tio nsystem and so on. The biggest weakness,
I think, is the education and training thatis available in the prison service
estab lishm ents is not of a very highquality. The prison service has failed so
far to meet all of the elements in thecontract, and they had to pay some money
back to the Youth Justice Board because
the y faile d to m e et, s o it is like acontractual relationship. The idea is thathaving this central quality is a way of

Obviously the Youth Justice Board islimited by the fact that there are only acertain number of locked establishmentsin the country. It is not really a market.
We cannot easily say, well, if you do not
perform to these standards we will not
send the children here we will send them
there, because there isn’t a “there” tosend them to. So we are in the process ofcommissioning some new establishments,
some new secure training centers, which
will in a way diversify the market andenable childre n to be sent to better
quality establishments. So there is a
programme of commission ing n ew
establishments. Most of these, well in fact
th e y ar e a ll b e in g c re a te d th r o u gh
something called the private financeinitiative. So a private company finances,
designs, constructs and manages the newunit and then receives its money when it
starts to take young people. They get paid
on a per day or per week basis dependingon the numbers of children that they
have. But I think most of the contracts
are designed that they borrow the money
to build the place, and then recoup thecost through the cost that they charge theYouth Justice Board for looking after thechildren, that is the method that we have.
One of the other problems with thesecure estates is that the establishments
are not in the right places. So we have a
lot of young offenders in London, which isin the capital, biggest city, but we do nothave enough places. We have one rather
bad establishment to the west of London,
and there is really nothing else. So somechildren from London have to be based along way from home. One of the targets
that the Youth Justice Board has is toensure that as many children as possible
are places within 50 miles of home, so
within 80 kilometers of home, which is161

RESOURCE MATERIAL SERIES No. 59
still quite a long way if you w ant tom a i n t a i n c o n t a c t w i th f a m il y , a n dschooling and all of that.
The third thing we’re doing to try andimprove the estates is to research anddisseminate best practice. There are few
effective programmes for changing the
behavior of young offenders in custody. In
the young offender institutions there aresome programmes that have originallybeen developed for adults that are being
used with juveniles. In the securetraining centers and local authority units
they tend to adopt what they call a wholesystem approach, or a positive parenting
approach, in which the idea is to try andinfluence the young people on a day-today basis through eve ry kind ofinteraction that the staff have. It is in
psychology terms pro-social modeling. So
the way in which I, as a member of staff,
talk to you, as another member of staff, in
front of the child, that should be how wewant that child to be, to be relating topeople. So you should be courteous, you
should not shout, you should not lose yourtemper, you should be reasonable, you
should negotiate. All of these things, if
you go to a prison establishment that is
not always how things are in our country.
There is a lot of shouting, and so the idea
is that throughout the whole system you
are trying to model good behavior.
In addition, you need sp ecificp rogra mm es, b eca use so me of thesechildren have very serious problems with
their anger management, they cannot
c o n tr o l t h e i r te m p e r , o r t h e y h a v e
problems with alcohol, drugs. So we aretrying to introduce some newprogrammes, we are also about toproduce some guidance on rewards andincentives for young people in theseestablishments to try and encourage goodb e ha vio r, b e ca u se the re h a s b e e n a
problem, the introduction of the detention

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and training order which I mentioned has
removed the right of governors of prisons
to add additional days, if a young person
in a prison behaves very badly you used
to be able to add time, say you get an
extra week. It is possible for the period in
custody to be extended but that is if you
have failed to cooperate with the plan forpreventing offending. So the idea is when
you go into custody a plan is drawn up
between the secure establishment andthe youth offending team, and if theyo un gste r d o es v er y we ll he c a n b e
released early, and if he does very badly
on that then he can be required to staylo nger. What has ha ppe ne d in so me
places is some boys who have been about
to be released, because they have donewell, they know they are going, theysmash up their room the night before
they go, and there is very little that canb e d o ne at th at sta ge . S o the re is a
programme of rewards and incentives.
We already have in prison establishments
a s y st e m o f in c e n t iv e s a n d e a r n e dprivileges, and basically there are threestandards of, you have a basic regime
when you first arrive, and if you behave
well you can end up with a television inyour cell, and the ability to wear yourown clothes, and so on.
This sector, as I said, is inspected very
thoroughly and it is very right that there
is an independent inspection. If you aretaking the liberty away from children or
young people then it is essential thatsomebody is coming to check that this isokay. We ha ve ha d historically very
powerful inspectors of prisons who have
had no hesitation in publishing in thenewspapers their views about the qualityof establishments. So if the Youth Justice
Board does not deliver the changes thenit will be obvious to everybody, so it isvery important that these changes dotake place. But it is a big challenge,
because there is a lot of work to do.

118TH INTERNATIONAL TRAINING COURSE
VISITING EXPERTS’ PAPERS
So finally, in conclusion, the Youth
Justice B oard is exercising thislea de rship ro le , b oth o n com m unity
treatment and institutional treatment.
What it is trying to bring about is acultural change within the system. A
cultural change to try and encourage
more intervention with young people,
better quality work, and better
performance, so that people can actually
measure whether what they are doing is
successful. Now it is very early to knowwhether the Youth Justice Board has
been successful. We have been successful
in setting up, putting the pieces in place,but whether it is working, I don’t know.
But it is interesting that in the manifestoof the Labor party before the election
which took place two weeks ago, there
was a commitment to extend some of theideas that have been put in place forjuveniles to the next age group up, to the
18 to 21 year-olds, because the thinking isthat just because somebody reaches 18,
they do not overnight turn into a capable,
developed, sensible person. They often
have the same problems, the same needs,
the same difficulties. The approach of themultidisciplinary team, it would perhaps
be different disciplines th at wereinvolved, but that is seen to be a very
promising one, not only for youngo f f e nd e r s b u t f o r yo u ng a d ult s a n dperhaps some adults as well.

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