In 1996 the Audit Commission report Misspent Youth was highly critical of the youth justice system in England and Wales. It concluded that: ‘The current system for dealing with youth crime is inefficient and expensive while little is being done to deal effectively with juvenile nuisance.’ (Audit Commission, 1996: 96) The New Labour government responded to the Audit Commission’s verdict on the youth justice system in the Consultation Paper No More Excuses – A New Approach to Tackling Youth Crime in England and Wales in which it suggested that up until 1997 youth offending had been greeted with excuses instead of action (Home Office, 1997a: 1). No More Excuses proposed a ‘root and branch’ overhaul of the youth justice system and a breaking with the philosophy of the 1969 Act (Home Office, 1997a: 9.2). Consequently section 37 of the Crime and Disorder Act establishes preventing offending by children and young people as the principal aim of the youth justice system and places all those working in the youth justice system under a duty to have regard to that aim in carrying out their duties. Welfare concerns are also ominously absent from the Youth Justice Board’s ‘Strategic Objectives for 2008-11’, these objectives are to: prevent offending and reoffending by children and young people under 18 years; to increase victim and public confidence; and to ensure safe and effective use of custody. (Youth Justice Board, 2008). Prior to taking office as Prime Minister, Tony Blair expressed his view that ‘duty’ was at the heart of creating a strong society, “bonds of duty allows us to be much tougher and in the rules we apply and how we apply them” (Blair, 1995). This notion of ‘duty’ and responsibility underpins New Labour’s approach to crime and disorder. New Labour emphasised the need for citizens to share risks and responsibilities with the state, reflecting a
with concern that child imprisonment compounds the likelihood of reconviction and that this has been a recurrent and enduring historical theme of youth imprisonment. In the early 1990’s custody was described as ‘an expensive way of making bad people worse’ (Home Office, 1990: 27) and Miller acknowledged that ‘the hard truth is that … juvenile penal institutions have minimal impact on crime [and if] most prisons were closed tomorrow, the rise in crime would be negligible’ (Miller, 1991: 181-182). These views echo those expressed by Mary Carpenter in the 19th century when she described prisons as being ‘most costly, most inefficacious for any end but to prepare the child for a life of crime’ (Carpenter, 1853: 13). The current approach to using custody in the English youth justice system fails to address the underlying causes of offending, does not prevent offending and is very expensive. Expenditure on custody accounts for almost 70 per cent of the Youth Justice Board’s expenditure. The Crime and Society Foundation found that countries with higher rates of welfare investment are likely to enjoy lower rates of custody and conversely countries with the highest rate of imprisonment, including the UK, all spend below average proportions of their GDP on welfare (Downes and Hansen 2006). Similarly the Audit Commission stressed that if effective early intervention had been provided for just one in ten young offenders in custody, annual savings in excess of £100 million could have been achieved (Audit Commission 2004). Social investment in family offers a promising prospect for both reducing crime and maximising the human capital that the young represent. A progressive approach to youth crime prevention is ultimately bound up with the pursual and resourcing of mechanisms for social justice. The government must ensure that social justice extends to all members of society. According to this view the state must acknowledge that it, as well as the offender has some responsibility for youth crime and that society can justifiably punish young offenders for their crimes only to the extent it has fulfilled its obligations to those young people and their families as members of society.
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