Persistent Young Offenders

An Evaluation of Two Projects

David Lobley, David Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754641834
• eBook ISBN: 9781317082026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on some of the most interesting research of the last ten years, this book discusses effective practice in work with persistent young offenders. It contrasts two major evaluations of projects for juvenile offenders, one of which was successful and the other less so. The projects, Freagarrach and CueTen, were funded by The Scottish Office and the Scottish Executive. Freagarrach was evaluated over five years from 1995 and CueTen over three years (its entire lifespan) from 1996. This book makes the findings of these projects available to a wider readership, setting them in a wider discursive framework than is appropriate in a government report. The authors identify the factors that made Freagarrach a more successful project than CueTen, arguing that an understanding of these factors is important in drawing general conclusions from the experience of the two projects, and that this is particularly the case because some of these factors have received little attention in recent discussions of 'what works' in community-based programmes for offenders. This is a detailed and thorough study of work with juvenile offenders, which will be of particular value to those interested in less punitive approaches. It will be of interest both to practitioners and to academics in criminology, social policy and social work.

Chapter 1

The Establishment of the Projects

The Legislative Context

By virtue of the 1968 Social Work (Scotland) Act, Scotland acquired a distinctive system for dealing with juvenile offenders, and one that entailed a radical commitment to children’s needs rather to their formal legal rights. This is the Children’s Hearings System (CHS), which replaced juvenile courts in 1971, and represents a thoroughgoing commitment to the primacy of welfare rather than justice in responding to offending by juveniles. The CHS is an expression of the philosophy set out in the report of the Kilbrandon Committee (Scottish Home and Health Department, 1964): that, in general, criminal courts do not provide an appropriate setting for dealing with young offenders, because their work is based on the assumption of a degree of personal responsibility which unrealistically ignores the characteristics of children and young people that differentiate them from adults. Instead, the Kilbrandon Committee recommended that – with the exception of the most serious offences – offending by children and young people up to the age of 16 should be regarded as just one of a range of problems that might require official intervention, and should be dealt with by a tribunal that was explicitly not a criminal court. Thus, the CHS is inherently a system of diversion from criminal justice processes (Whyte, 2000), and offending is just one of a number of ‘grounds of referral’ which can bring children to the attention of the Reporter to the CHS, who will then decide what, if any, action is required.

In cases where the Reporter decides that the matter requires that the child or young person (‘child’ will be used in the following discussion for the sake of simplicity) be referred to a Children’s Panel, rather than being dealt with informally, the experience of the hearing is, by design, very different from the experience of appearing in a criminal court. The panel members are lay people, drawn from the local community, and they have no power to decide issues of guilt and innocence; if the child does not accept the ground of referral, the case may be sent to a Sheriff Court, which, if it finds that there is sufficient evidence, will normally send it back to the CHS for a decision. The task of the Panel members is to reach a decision based on consideration of the best interests of the child. They are there to resolve difficulties, not to blame or punish. The style of Hearings is meant to be open and informal, so as to provide maximum opportunities for the active involvement of children and their carers in reaching an agreed solution. It is non-adversarial, since the Hearing will not take place unless all present agree on the basic facts, and the child has no right to legal representation, although a lawyer may attend as a friend or supporter. While the Panel has no power to impose any punitive sentence, it does have the power to order ‘compulsory measures of care’, which can include supervision with a residential requirement, if it believes that these are the best means of promoting the child’s welfare. No formal punitive sanctions are available should the child fail to comply with the requirements of supervision; for example, the CueTen project worked with young people who had been required by a Hearing to attend its programme, but no penalty existed for failure to turn up, or to complete the programme. The ideal of the CHS is that decisions should be consensual, reflecting the outcome of a discussion in which all are concerned to serve the best interests of the child.

The CHS, with its commitment to a process of decision-making which is non-adversarial and specifically intended as a diversion from criminal justice processes, is exceptional among juvenile justice systems. Lockyer and Stone (1998: 256) argue that the international discourse of children’s rights, expressed in such United Nations statements as the Beijing Rules (1985), the Riyadh Guidelines (1990) and the Havana Rules (1990), tends to assume that children who offend will be dealt with by a body with the characteristics of a court, on the grounds that this is the only means of safeguarding their rights. According to Fox (1991), the British representatives at the Geneva meeting which agreed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989 were unaware of how far the CHS departed from this model, particularly in its bar on legal representation. In ratifying the Convention, the British government entered the reservation that it would maintain the CHS in its existing form, which had proved effective over the years. Thus, at the time of the establishment of the projects discussed in this book Scotland had, as it continues to have, a system for dealing with children in trouble which is something of an anomaly by international standards, but which has – in general and despite some tinkering – continued to be supported in Scotland both by politicians and by those who work within the system (Lockyer and Stone, 1998; Scottish Executive, 2000). This is not to say that the system is viewed as perfect or incapable of improvement; indeed, it was dissatisfaction with aspects of its operation that gave rise to the initiatives that made the Freagarrach and CueTen projects possible.

The Policy Context

In the early 1990s, a source of frustration for policy-makers and juvenile justice practitioners was the limited range of resources available for juveniles repeatedly referred to the CHS on grounds of offending. According to civil servants interviewed in the course of our work, the Scottish Office at that time received regular complaints from practitioners about the inadequacy of resources available to deal effectively with such persistent offenders, who, while relatively few in number, were responsible for a high proportion of juvenile crime. While there was then less pressure in Scotland than south of the border for overtly punitive measures (McIvor, 1994), because of the continued general acceptance of the principles of care built into the CHS (Kelly, 1996a), the Scottish Office wished to take these complaints seriously, and was interested in developing strategies which would provide the Children’s Hearings with additional options for disposal, and if possible begin to provide answers to the longer-term problems underlying persistent juvenile offending.

The Social Work Services Group and the Crime Prevention Unit within the Scottish Office had mutual interests in finding constructive solutions, and established a working alliance aimed at a long-term reduction in crime and its associated social problems. A central problem was that the Children’s Panels had few middle-range alternatives at their disposal between the poles of residential care and home supervision, ‘which in reality’, according to one interviewee, ‘was one hour a week with a social worker’ (if that, one might add). Discussions in the Scottish Office led to agreement that some intermediate options were required, particularly for 14–15 year-olds, the age group in which persistent offending seemed to be concentrated. If successful, these new measures should therefore have a medium-term crime reduction effect, in line with an emerging interest in social (offender-focused) crime prevention. The concept of the ‘persistent juvenile offender’ was central to these discussions, and lengthy debates apparently took place on how to define frequency or persistence of offending. While no single definition emerged, it was agreed that funding of new initiatives would be confined to projects which made a public commitment to working specifically with persistent offenders. It was also agreed that the strategy should be one which maintained the traditional welfare orientation of the CHS, and that projects should be encouraged to address and try to influence offending behaviour within a framework that should include issues such as individual motivation and the stimulation of new interests and potentials, rather than concentrating solely on the act of offending itself.

The hope was that this approach would be effective in dealing with the immediate problem of persistent offending, and also produce guidance on the most promising longer-term strategy. One interviewee, who had been involved in these early discussions, explained:

we all have to pursue a purposeful quest to get answers to such long-term difficult problems. We don’t just want a scheme to cope with today’s joyriders, but one that can cope with the more sophisticated thieves of tomorrow.

The aim was, then, to encourage a broad, ‘programme-driven’ strategic approach, rather than merely a number of discrete short-term projects (King, 1988). The main outcome of these deliberations that is relevant here was the announcement by the then Minister of State, Lord Fraser, at the Scottish Police Federation’s annual conference in 1994, of his intention

to promote a major new community based initiative designed to intervene in the behaviour of persistent young offenders who account for a disproportionate number of crimes and offences (Scottish Office, 1994).

The immediate origins of both the Freagarrach and the CueTen projects lay in this announcement, which took up a theme from the 1993 White Paper, Scotland’s Children:

Effective supervision in the community is also needed for those whose persistent offending makes them a nuisance to the neighbourhoods in which they live or whose disturbed behaviour makes them a serious risk to themselves and others. More intensive supervision arrangements are required for a small number of young people and these arrangements should be developed from existing intermediate treatment and groupwork projects and the establishment of new ones so that the resource is available at least in each major urban area (Scottish Office, 1993, para. 7.23).

The Scottish Office invited six voluntary child care organisations to submit proposals for pilot projects, and copies of the invitation were sent to the Chief Executives of the Regional and Islands Councils and to Directors of Social Work. It was made clear in the specification that ‘the schemes proposed will be required to attract the support and collaboration of Social Work Directors and indeed local children’s panels – as well as the police and the education service’ (Scottish Office, 1994), and that ‘proposals should therefore be presented in conjunction with the appropriate local authorities’. Grants totalling about £200,000 per annum for a period of five years were to be made available, with the suggestion that this could be ‘augmented’ in cash or in kind by the local authorities and/or the voluntary organisations. The specification envisaged that projects would be located in two areas, to enable comparisons that would inform the development of best practice for possible replication in other parts of Scotland. The aim of the projects should be to reduce the demand for secure residential care, through the development of innovative practice with persistent juvenile offenders.

The Origins of Freagarrach

In the event, only one project was initially funded, in what was then Central Region, the area now covered by Clackmannanshire, Falkirk and Stirling. This was what was to become Freagarrach. Staff in the Scottish Office interviewed near the start of the evaluation were in no doubt that the crucial factors in the success of the bid were the existence of a coherent inter-agency strategy and the credibility that the voluntary organisation concerned, Barnardo’s Scotland, had established with the relevant agencies: ‘We were tremendously impressed by the inter-agency reaction…Impressed by Bill Wilson [Chief Constable] and his commitment to TRACE’. (TRACE, the importance of which is discussed below, was the computerised information system on juvenile offenders used by Central Scotland Police.) Furthermore, ‘they [Barnardo’s] had also reached over to the Children’s Panel and got the Reporter’s confidence.’ Barnardo’s impressed the Scottish Office officials as ‘determined catalysts’ already well established in the region as providers of special education and intermediate treatment services, but it was the inter-agency dimension of the proposal, which was also strongly stressed in the presentation at the Scottish Office, that was most important to its success.

Barnardo’s had to work fast in preparing the proposal, since the Scottish Office’s schedule allowed for only three months between the issue of the outline specification and the presentation of the tender in July 1994. In order to make the deadline Barnardo’s had to bypass its own committee structure, through which approval for such a major development would normally be obtained. Its organisation proved flexible enough to allow for executive approval, which was later ratified by the relevant committees. Barnardo’s staff were, however, somewhat uneasy about the speed of the process, and about its competitive nature, to which they were unused. There was some concern that a partnership with one authority might offend others, and alienate them from Barnardo’s, and some anxiety about the effect the competition might have on relations among the voluntary organisations themselves.

As well as this organisational flexibility, Barnardo’s was able to demonstrate in its proposal first-hand knowledge that a coherent inter-agency strategy was already in place, and how the proposed project would fit into it. The proposal was convincing in giving evidence of thorough knowledge of the regional strategy on young people and of Barnardo’s credibility with the key agencies. The presence of existing good relationships between Barnardo’s and statutory agencies in Central Region was modestly described by a senior manager as ‘a happy coincidence’, but it was a coincidence which strengthened the proposal enormously by allowing what became the Freagarrach project to be presented as a logical extension of the existing range of services. TRACE data were used to show the extent of the problem of persistent offending by young people in Central Region (according to a well-defined criterion of persistence), and therefore to establish an empirical case for a specialist project (58 young people were identified as having had five or more ‘episodes of offending’ in the previous year). The proposal would have been very different without its practical evidence of support at chief officer level in the key agencies, and it seems likely that this was what crucially distinguished it from the other bids considered.

While the tight time scale for tendering presented some problems for Barnardo’s, it may in practice have been helpful. Many people have found that an imminent deadline concentrates the mind; in this case, the short time available may also have increased awareness of the strength of the existing partnership and of the value and accessibility of the TRACE data. Insofar as what is at issue here is a ‘happy coincidence’, there may be an implication that future invitations to tender for similar projects should allow a longer preparation period, to enable, in particular, a thorough empirical demonstration of need. On the other hand, it could be argued that a soundly-based inter-agency strategy should include ready access to relevant data, and that a longer preparation period could encourage proposals in which ‘partnerships’ were established for purely presentational purposes, with no substantial basis in practice (see Crawford, 1997).

The Scottish Office publicly announced the award of the tender for the development project to Barnardo’s, in association with Central Region, at the end of August 1994. Interviews for the post of Project Leader were held in November. The person appointed, Kelly Bayes, had worked in Central Region for many years, and was well known to staff in the relevant agencies and fully aware of the inter-agency strategy and the potential of the TRACE system. Her official starting date in her new post was 20 February 1995, but she was able to take part in preparatory work on the project before her formal appointment. She was joined shortly afterwards by a Project Administrator. Job descriptions for all the remaining posts were drawn up in January 1995, and interviews were arranged for the following two months. The project, not yet named, was to operate from two centres, one in the south (in Polmont, near Falkirk) and one in the north (in the event, in Alloa) of the Region. Each centre was to be run by a senior social worker and three project workers, with support staff, in line with the original proposal. The two senior posts were filled towards the end of March, both those appointed coming from jobs in Central Region Social Work Department that involved work with young people. In April and May three project workers were appointed by Barnardo’s, all with qualifications in Community Education. Central Region was to second three workers to the project; the first two, both with experience in residential child care, started work in April, and the third, who completed the staff team, in October.

Scottish Office staff interviewed about the establishment of the project reported that they had had some anxieties in early 1995 about apparent delays in getting it ‘up and running’. The main delay was over finding suitable premises for the project’s northern site; the Regional Council could not identify a suitable building, as had originally been hoped, and Barnardo’s Property Services and the Project Director herself began to look for premises in Alloa. These were finally identified in May; builders began work in early July; and project staff were able to move in on 1 September. This undoubtedly represented a slippage from the original timetable, but by this time the project was well established at the other site in Polmont, to which Barnardo’s had gained access in February. Building work was not finally completed until the beginning of May, but office accommodation and a meeting room had been available from the end of March. ‘Minor hiccups’ mentioned by the Project Director (Bayes, 1996) were interference on telephone lines, a tendency for mail to be delivered in error to the nearby Polmont Young Offenders Institution, and visits to the project by a mouse or mice.

Much of the Project Director’s work in the first months of her appointment was concerned with discussing means of ensuring that the project had access to relevant information and educational resources. It was arranged that she should have direct access to TRACE through a terminal in the project building and that seven places in Special Education Units should be set aside specifically for young people attending the project and excluded from, or for other reasons unable to attend, mainstream school. She also arranged meetings with Children’s Panel members, Victim Support groups, Intermediate Treatment projects, SACRO (the Scottish Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders), and social work teams, and responded to requests to provide training and contribute to conferences. She began to set up systems for data collection and storage which, as well as meeting the project’s own information needs, would be useful for external evaluation. With other Barnardo’s staff, she became a member of the Central Region inter-agency Young Offenders Strategy Implementation Group, which met for the first time in March 1995.

When other members of the project team were appointed, the Project Director worked with them to develop referral procedures, guidelines on policy and practice, and information for young people, their parents and social workers. These were produced in May 1995. The information for children and their parents included clear statements about what was expected from them as well as what they could expect from the project. This was particularly important as the team was agreed that young people should attend the project voluntarily, on a basis of invitation and acceptance, although as persistent offenders they would usually already be subject to statutory supervision. The project’s commitment to an open access policy on client records was stressed, and its policy on child protection issues was explained. The written material was extended in September, when a booklet on admissions criteria was sent to all relevant agencies, and the project staff made continuing efforts to keep social workers informed of developments, by visiting social work and criminal justice teams and inviting social workers to the open days held at both the project sites. Bayes (1996: 4) reported that the project had the capacity to work with 20 young people at any one time, and anticipated that over a year it would work with about 40 (on the assumption that the average length of an individual programme would be about six months).

The emphasis on voluntary attendance (albeit against the background of a statutory order) might have surprised Lord Fraser, who had stressed in his speech that: ‘The new programmes… are not a soft option; they will be intensive, requiring compulsory attendance which will include evenings and weekends where necessary’. Although it is not unusual for politicians to use a language which practitioners might find unfamiliar when describing social work programmes, other statements from around the same time also implied that the project would provide a direct service to the Children’s Hearings, with the implication that attendance would be a condition of supervision. It is less clear that this was ever how Barnardo’s and its Central Region partners understood the project’s purposes: the successful proposal assumed that all young people referred would be subject to statutory supervision, and did envisage referrals from the Reporter, through a ‘fast-track’ process made possible by access to TRACE, but it also predicted a high demand for the project from social work teams. It was also envisaged by the Director of Social Work that the project would take referrals of young people returning home from residential care outwith Central Region (Bayes, 1996). In the event, the main route to attendance at the project was, from the outset, via a referral (sometimes prompted by the Project Director) from a social worker, and the young people’s attendance was, with the exception of a few whose attendance was required by a Probation Order, voluntary, against the background of a statutory order. The first young offender to be accepted by the project began to attend in early June of 1995.

It was about this time (the exact moment is unclear) that the project acquired a name, apparently after much debate. ‘Freagarrach’ is a Scots Gaelic adjective defined by MacAlpine and Mackenzie (1973) as ‘answering, answerable, suitable, fitting’. There may be advantages in a name which, at least to the great majority of young people attending the project, will be empty of emotional resonances, except those associated with a vague feeling that it is probably from the Gaelic. For anyone who did know the meaning of the word, its ambiguity could usefully convey both that the project aimed to provide a suitable service for the young people who attended it and that they were themselves answerable for the way in which they responded to the help offered.

The Origins of CueTen

The parent organisation of the CueTen project, Apex Scotland, was involved in one of the unsuccessful bids for funding under the initiative which led to the establishment of Freagarrach. Apex Scotland began work in 1987, with the aim of improving the chances in the labour market of people with a criminal record, and in the belief that employment should promote desistance from offending; its sister organisation south of the border was well established (see Soothill (1974) for an account of its ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Establishment of the Projects
• 2 CueTen at Work
• 3 Freagarrach at Work
• 4 The Young People at the Projects
• 5 Perceptions and Expectations of the Projects
• 6 The Effectiveness of the Projects
• 7 Costs and Benefits
• 8 An Overall Evaluation of the Projects
• Bibliography
• Index