Young People, Crime and Justice

Roger Hopkins Burke

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317680413
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Strafrecht

In the minds of the general public, young people and crime are intrinsically linked; wide-spread belief persists that such activities are a result of the 'permissive 1960s' and the changing face of the traditional nuclear family. Roger Hopkins Burke challenges these preconceptions and offers a detailed and comprehensive introduction to youth crime and the subsequent response from the criminal justice system. This extended and fully updated new edition explores:

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• The development of young people and attempts to educate, discipline, control and construct them,

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• Criminological explanations and empirical evidence of why young people become involved in criminality,

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• The system established by the Youth Justice Board, its theoretical foundations, and the extent of its success,

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• Alternative approaches to youth justice around the globe and the apparent homogenisation throughout the neoliberal world.

The second edition also includes new chapters looking at youth justice in the wider context of social policy and comparative youth justice.

Young People, Crime and Justice is the perfect undergraduate critical introduction to the youth justice system, following a unique left-realist perspective while providing a balanced account of the critical criminology agenda, locating the practical working of the system in the critical socio-economic context. It is essential reading for students taking modules on youth crime, youth justice and contemporary social and criminal justice policy. Text features include key points, chapter summaries and review questions.

1 Introduction The problem of youth crime

DOI: 10.4324/9781315773100-1

Key issues

1. Measuring youth offending
2. The extent and nature of youth offending
3. Children, risk and crime: the On Track Youth Lifestyles Surveys
4. Structure of the book

Young people and crime have always been linked in the minds of the general public. Moreover, there are widely held common-sense notions that such activities are a relatively recent phenomenon and invariably an outcome of the ‘permissive 1960s’ and the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family that has occurred in the intervening years. It is also widely believed that in the past young people were orderly, disciplined, well behaved and law-abiding (Pearson 1983). Indeed, this has been a commonly held and extremely influential viewpoint which has had a considerable impact on political thinking and policy agendas.

The criminal behaviour of children and young people was to become a significant political issue in both the USA and the UK at the end of the twentieth century, with demands that if young people are prepared to break the law, they should also be prepared to take responsibility for their actions and this might well mean incarceration in the same institutions as adults. This is contrary to the dominant orthodoxy in both societies – and increasingly in the world beyond – throughout that century, that young people should be dealt with differently from their elders (Pitts 2003a).

These concerns about young people and their offending behaviour are, nevertheless, nothing new and they have reoccurred throughout history with a parallel erroneous assumption on the part of the public that things were always better in the past (Pearson 1983). Thus, for some, youth offending is little more than a recurring ‘moral panic’ – a notion which implies that the social reaction to a certain phenomenon is out of proportion to the scale of the problem (Young 1971; Cohen 1973) and is thus a relatively minor social problem where many, if not most children and young people, commit criminal offences, or acts of deviancy, which are part of a normal transition to adulthood. Left to their own devices they will simply grow out of such behaviour and become responsible, law-abiding citizens. For others, young people who offend are at risk of becoming persistent and serious offenders starting out on criminal careers which, without an appropriate and timely intervention in their lives, is likely to lead to them becoming the next generation of adult offenders readily equipped to inhabit the increasingly expanding prison estate. Interestingly, the number of young people entering the youth justice system as first-time offenders has decreased quite considerably during the past few years as we will see below. This finding suggests that either far fewer young people are indulging in illicit behaviour than was the case only a few years ago or something more ambiguous is happening. Calculating the extent of offending by children and young people is seriously problematic and crime statistics need to be considered with extreme caution.

Measuring youth offending

Statistical data about the prevalence of crime committed by children and young people are obtained from two main sources. First, there are the official crime statistics which consist of data compiled by the police and the courts and are routinely published by the Home Office as indices of the extent of crime; and second, there are self-reports which are a means of assessing the extent of crime by asking – in this case, children and young people – directly whether they are perpetrators. Each of these sources has their strengths but they also have significant shortcomings.

The most fundamental observation to be made about the official statistics is that they are both partial and socially constructed. Thus, for a criminal statistic to exist, a crime event has to be reported to the police by the public and this clearly does not happen in all cases for a variety of reasons (see Bottomley and Pease 1986). Moreover, even when an incident is reported to the police, it will not count as a crime unless it is recorded as such and again, there are a multitude of reasons why this might not happen (see Walker 1983). Changes in patterns of law enforcement – and thus what is to be regarded as criminal and recordable as such – make it very difficult to compare levels of youth criminality during different time periods. Muncie (1999a: 17–18) observes that:

Self-evidently, changes in legislation and in the number of arrests and sentences do not represent actual changes in the amount of crime, but changes in the capacity of the criminal justice system to process individual cases. More police and prisons coupled with the political will and resources to support law enforcement have an infinite ability to increase the amount of recorded crime.

The converse could also be true, less police and cutbacks in the criminal justice system alongside a political will (or perhaps a lack of it) not to pursue crime could lead to a reduction in recorded crime and could help explain the reduction in first-time entrants into the youth justice system that we consider below.

Self-report studies have been widely used for over half a century to gain a more accurate picture of both the prevalence of criminality and exactly why people become involved. They also have significant shortcomings. First, they depend on the willingness of those being interviewed to admit their ‘criminality’ to researchers. Second, they are invariably administered through the use of questionnaires which have a notoriously low completion rate, in particular, among ethnic minority groups (Coleman and Moynihan 1996). Third, they tend to ignore some significant hidden crimes such as domestic violence which includes crimes against children.

Self-report studies have tended to confirm the notion that a great many young people have committed a crime at some point in their lives and that involvement in criminality is in some way part of a normal transition to adulthood. Belson (1975) found in his earlier study of London schoolboys that 98 per cent admitted offences of some kind, with 70 per cent having stolen from a shop. Rutter and Giller (1983), in a large-scale review of self-report studies, produced similar findings. A decade later Anderson et al. (1994) found – in a study of young people conducted in Edinburgh – that two-thirds admitted to having committed a crime during the previous nine months.

Three influential reports during the mid-1990s found offending by children and young people to be extremely widespread and expensive to society. First, a study conducted for the Home Office supported the evidence of previous research and showed that one in two males and one in three females aged between 14 and 25 years admitted to having committed a criminal offence, with a similar ratio admitting the use of illegal drugs (Graham and Bowling 1995). Second, the Audit Commission Report Misspent Youth: Young People and Crime (Audit Commission 1996) estimated that people under 18 years of age committed seven million offences a year against individuals, retailers and manufacturers, with public services spending over £1 billion a year in response to offending by this age. Third, NACRO (1998) estimated the average response cost in dealing with one individual to be around £52,000 (made up of prosecution, incarceration and supervision costs as well as family intervention and care). The direct cost of offending to the community was found to average around £22,700 per young offender. In short, these three influential reports found that many young people commit criminal offences at a great cost to society and this recognition was considered indicative of a significant social problem worthy of rigorous government intervention.

The costs of youth offending to the economy should nevertheless be put into some context. For example, it has been estimated that in the USA the economic losses from various white-collar crimes are about ten times those from ‘ordinary’ economic crime (Conklin 1977), with corporate crime killing and maiming more than any violence committed by the poor or the young (Liazos 1972). Corporate crime has received little publicity in the mass media – in contrast to often low-level offences committed by young people – unless there has been fraud on a massive scale. Examples in the UK include the collapse of the investment managers Barlow Clowes in 1998, which left 17,000 small investors owed a total of £200 million; the Guinness-Distillers Affair of 1990; the disclosure in 1991 that the late Robert Maxwell had appropriated £500 million from his employee’s pension fund; and the collapse of Asdil Nadir’s ‘Polly Peck’ empire in 1993 with the disappearance of £450 million. The latter subsequently jumped bail and fled the country (S. Jones 2001). Croall (1992, 2001) observes that the activities of the corporate criminal are not only greater in impact than those of the ordinary offender, but also longer-lasting in effect. The view taken in this book is that offending behaviour by children and young people is still a highly significant issue which requires a rigorous and appropriate intervention where this is deemed both necessary and appropriate.

It is very important to recognise that young offenders are not a homogenous group and this is a key theme in this book. The great majority of young people who commit offences do so infrequently and are predominantly responsible for less serious property crimes. It is this group that tends to grow out of their offending behaviour at a relatively young age, which can be diverted from their activities by a warning from the authorities while they are extremely unlikely to become regular drug users. It is also very likely that many grow out of both offending and drug-taking activities without any criminal justice intervention at all, although this is very hard to quantify. The influential Audit Commission report (1996) readily acknowledged that the great majority of young people who offend do so infrequently, but at the same time, noted the existence of a substantially more problematic, small hard core of persistent offenders who apparently fail to respond to attempts to divert them from their activities and who are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime. Research conducted by the Home Office found that about 3 per cent of young offenders aged 14–25 commit 22 per cent of youth crime (Flood-Page et al. 2000) with 0.2 per cent of males having made six or more court appearances by age 17 and accounting for 28 per cent of the total for that age group (Home Office 2001). Crimes committed ranged from minor anti-social behaviour to more serious offending.

Defining a persistent young offender

The Home Office (1997) defines a persistent young offender as:

A young person aged 10–17 years who has been sentenced by any criminal court in the UK on three or more occasions for one or more recordable offences and within three years of the last sentencing occasion is subsequently arrested or has information laid against him for further recordable offence.

The Youth Lifestyles Survey – which was conducted in England and Wales between October 1998 and January 1999 – offers a simpler alternative definition of a persistent young offender ‘as someone who, in the last year, had committed three or more offences’ (Campbell and Harrington 2000). Among those aged 12–17 who fitted into this category, the survey found that 23 per cent had been sanctioned (cautioned or taken to court) in the previous twelve months (24 per cent of male and 21 per cent of female persistent offenders). Younger persistent offenders – those under the age of 18 – were more likely to have been sanctioned (23 per cent) than those who were older (14 per cent). This finding could be explained because they had committed more offences – the average number of offences committed by persistent offenders under 18 was five compared to four for those aged 18 to 30 – or because younger offenders tend to commit more commonly detected offences (e.g., criminal damage or shoplifting) whereas older persistent offenders are more involved in fraud and theft from the workplace, which are less likely to result in sanction or even detection. With this recognition, the whole notion of ‘growing out of crime’ is itself suspect.

There are significant methodological issues which make it impossible to both accurately estimate the full extent of current persistent or non-persistent offending behaviour and legitimately compare it with any other time period (Campbell and Harrington 2000). Thus, those who are not caught by the police – or those who receive informal warnings rather than recorded cautions – are not included in the crime figure. Low police clear-up rates suggest that many offences and offenders go undetected and the published figures are thus serious underestimations of the true extent of crime. Moreover, policies that have been introduced at different times to divert young offenders from the criminal justice system – through measures such as informal cautions – will have the effect of reducing the number sanctioned and who are therefore recorded in the crime statistics. These observations need to be borne in mind when we now consider the most recent youth justice statistics for England and Wales (Youth Justice Board/Ministry of Justice, 2015).¹

The extent and nature of youth offending

The statistics considered in this section are based on the flow of young people through the Youth Justice System (YJS) from 1 April 2013 to 31 March 2014 and are collected from a number of official agencies.

Gateway to the youth justice system

In 2012/13, there were 126,809 arrests of young people (aged 10–17) for notifiable offences, which accounted for 11.8 per cent of the total number arrested. Young people accounted for 10.5 per cent of the offending age population (i.e., those aged 10 and over) which suggests that this group is over-represented in the criminal justice system.

The following year – 2013/14 – there were 25,625 youth cautions given to young people in England and Wales, which was a decrease of 17 per cent on the 30,739 given the previous year, and a decrease of 73 per cent on the 96,381 given ten years previously in 2003/04. There were 400 Penalty Notices for Disorder given to 16–17-year-olds in 2013/14 and in 2013 there were 277 Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) given to young people.

First-time entrants to the youth justice system

In 2013/14, there were 61,053 offences committed by young people (aged 10–17) who had at least one offence that resulted in a youth caution or conviction. Of these 22,393 (37 per cent) were first offences, and the rest were further offences. Ten years previously, in 2003/04, there were 185,478 offences committed by young people, with 48 per cent being first offences. Since 2012/13, the number of first-time entrants has fallen by 20 per cent from 28,059 to 22,393 in 2013/14 – continuing the downward trend that has occurred since the 2006/07 peak. The number of first-time entrants has fallen by 75 per cent since 2003/04 and by 51 per cent since 2010/11. In 2013/14, 76 per cent of first-time entrants had a youth caution, compared with 89 per cent in 2003/04.

Characteristics of those in the youth justice system

A total of 41,569 young people received a substantive outcome in 2013/14 which was a reduction of 16 per cent from 49,222 the previous year. Overall, 81 per cent were male, and 78 per cent aged over 15 years. Most (75 per cent) came from a white ethnic background. There were 42,596 young people who had first or further offences resulting in a caution or conviction in 2013/14, which was a 20 per cent reduction from the 53,337 the previous year.

Proven offences by young people

There were 90,769 offences for which a young person was convicted in 2013/14, down by 8 per cent from the previous year and this figure has reduced by 68 per cent in the ten years since 2003/04. The main offence types for which young people were convicted in 2013/14 were: violence against the person (22 per cent), theft and handling (18 per cent) and criminal damage (11 per cent).

Young people sentenced

In 2013/14 there were 45,891 young people proceeded against at magistrates’ courts, a fall of 21 per cent on the number in the previo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction The problem of youth crime
• Part I Young people, criminality and criminal justice
• 2 Children, young people and modernity
• 3 From justice to welfare and its malcontents
• 4 Youth justice and the new conservatism
• 5 New Labour and the Youth Justice Board
• 6 Theorising the development of youth justice
• Part II Explaining offending behaviour by children and young people
• 7 Youth offending as rational behaviour
• 8 Biological explanations of youth crime
• 9 Psychological explanations of youth crime
• 10 Sociological explanations of youth crime
• Part III The contemporary youth justice system and its critics
• 11 The Coalition, the Big Society and youth justice policy
• 12 The contemporary youth justice system
• 13 Effective youth justice in practice
• Part IV Alternative youth justice systems and the contemporary world
• 14 Youth justice in wider context
• 15 Comparative youth justice
• 16 Conclusions The future of youth justice
• References
• Author index
• Subject Index