Jason Pollard, a Community Member of a Youth Offending Panel and a School Governor in an inner city primary school in London, reports

In August 2006 Rod Morgan, head of the Youth Justice Board, warned that prisons for 10–17 year olds were nearing operational capacity. Britain currently has some of the highest numbers of young people in custody in Europe, and at any time the juvenile estate holds over 2,500 juvenile offenders.

Nearly 7,000 young people under 18 pass through the juvenile prison system each year. New Labour’s approach to youth justice has been driven by an overarching ideological commitment to the community as the basic unit of society. Young people, as part of the community, have been encouraged to assume greater responsibilities for their actions.

But the process of creating stronger and more robust communities demanded an ‘other’ against which to define itself. Increasingly, it is the behaviour of young people that has provided this measure, and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) and other community measures issued in by The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 have allowed the progressive targeting of young people as an easy and highly visible group in society.

Does the recent warning by the Youth Justice Board indicate that the New Labour attempt to combat youth offending has failed? After all, in the same period that young people have been increasingly vilified as a group the government has been seeking to provide increased opportunities for them within the community.

Since 1998 the government has made much of the joined-up approach to the reform of children’s services. If these programmes have increased opportunities for socially excluded young people, why has the past decade seen a 20 per cent rise in the number of 15 to 17 year olds (the age group most represented) in some form of custody, and why does the juvenile prison estate currently hold, on average, around 2,500 young people at any one time? There are several reasons, each of which point to confusion in the government’s approach towards both community renewal and the inclusivity of vulnerable groups within it.

One reason is the failure of children’s agencies to practice a joined-up approach to the delivery of services to young people. Young offenders who end up in custody are still characterised by experiences of education failure, truancy, substance abuse and mental health issues.

Gaps in service provision
Many young people, once outside of the nominal supervision of schools fall between gaps in service provision as agencies fail to agree joint working practices. A key issue is resources, and anecdotal evidence from youth offending teams reveals how many social service departments close their files on a young person at entry into the criminal justice system rather than work with the other agencies involved – precisely at the point that continuity of contact with youth workers is most needed by a young person.

In part, the government’s attempts to strengthen communities relies on handing over to communities the decision about where the threshold of acceptable behaviour lies. Paradoxically, allowing local communities to define what types of behaviour affects them works against the government’s own aspirations for community cohesion since many young people are targeted for non-criminal behaviour such as ‘hanging around’ in groups, while those who need support to compensate for inadequate parenting are simply criminalised instead.

Are communities therefore unwittingly setting young people up to fail? By 2003 30 young people under-18 received custodial sentences for breaching the terms of their ASBO, and a further 179 for committing a crime whilst on an order.

It is a tragedy that many of the young people sentenced to custody are those who are least able to benefit from the current levels of support available in the penal estate. Educational failure amongst young offenders is only one of the challenges, and without addressing this the government’s attempts to engage young people with their communities will fail.