Young offenders UK

10 Key excerpts on "Young offenders UK"

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  Criminal Justice

  • Ursula Smartt(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  This section begins by giving the reader a brief insight into criminological research, based on psychological theories that dysfunctional elements in family set-ups can be central to deviant or criminal behaviour in youngsters. From the age of 10–17, young people appear in the Youth Court (usually a part of the Magistrates’ Court) and are dealt with by spe-cially trained Magistrates. This makes England one of the most punitive countries in the world, with one of the lowest ages of criminal responsi-bility. Proceedings may be reported in the press but the young person may not generally be identified ( Children and Young Persons Act 1933 ). The section also includes an overview of youth justice policies and how per-sistent young offenders have been punished over the past decade. Since 1997, anti-social behaviour legislation has been at the forefront of governmental penal policy ( Crime and Disorder Act 1998 ) and terminology now includes: lager louts; football hooligans; mobile phone thieves; and joy-riders. Core areas: Young people and crime Level of youth crime Youth justice policies The Youth Justice Board (YJB) Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) Youth Courts Sentencing young offenders Young people in prison Custodial sentences for young offenders. Learning outcomes By the end of this section you should be able to: • Show awareness of youth justice legislation; and • Show awareness of youth justice agencies in the English criminal justice system CRIMINAL JUSTICE 94 2.8 youth crime and youth justice • Characterise and quantify levels of youth crime in England/Wales • Explain various youth sentencing options available to the courts; and • Illustrate the use of Young Offender Institutions. Running themes • Inequality • Gender • Race • Human rights • Victims and crime • Punishment • Criminalisation • Crime and the media.

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  Punishing Juveniles

  Principle and Critique

  • Ido Weijers, R A Duff, Ido Weijers, R A Duff(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  It is against this background that we have seen enormous changes in the direction of juvenile justice policy. 1.2. A Brief Historical Sketch Prior to the nineteenth century, there was relatively little formal differentiation between adult and juvenile offenders (though there is evidence of some diver-sionary practices in the eighteenth century; King, 1984). However, over the course of the nineteenth century, a number of developments occurred which Recent Changes in Youth Policy in England and Wales 47 changed this: firstly, the emergence of a discourse on juvenile delinquency as a distinct social problem; secondly, the expansion of summary jurisdiction (mean-ing that young offenders no longer had to be detained in adult gaols); and thirdly, the emergence of Reformatory and Industrial schools which arguably had educational principles at their core though in the context of a need for a dis-ciplined, trained, emollient work force (Carlebach, 1970). But it was not until the 1908 Children Act that the principle of dealing with juvenile offenders separ-ately from adult offenders finally took root in England and Wales. This Act dic-tated that juvenile offenders should be kept separate from adult criminals and should receive treatment differentiated to suit their special needs, that parents should be made more responsible for the wrong-doing of their children, and that the imprisonment of juveniles should be abolished. Close scrutiny of the Act, however, suggests that far from being a simple reflection of humanitarian ideas and welfare principles, it also reflected ideas and principles derived from con-cerns about criminal justice and crime control as well as broader concerns about the state of the nation following the Boer War.

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  Offending Girls

  Young Women and Youth Justice

  • Gilly Sharpe(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Willan

    (Publisher)

  I review how girls’ challenging behaviour has been understood at different stages since then, highlighting ways in which legal and professional constructions of (certain types of) female youthful behaviour as problematic exemplify broader social and political concerns about gender and youth. The ways in which ‘offending’ girls’ and young women’s deeds and needs are defined and represented in empirical research are historically contingent and influenced by trends in criminological theorising and by broader sociopolitical concerns. As changes in theory, legislation, policy and practice occur, so does the profile of girls and young women in the youth justice system (see Chapter Three). 1908–32: child-saving and moral rescue A distinct category of juvenile offender emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, prompted by a number of official enquiries into the ‘epidemic’ of youth crime. The Youthful Offenders Act of 1854 subsequently gave official recognition to reformatory schools in England and Wales, marking a hiatus between the earlier ideology of punishment and retributive justice for children and the newer aims of reform or child-saving (Giller, 1982). The modern youth justice system in England and Wales dates back to 1908, when the first Children Act created the juvenile court, which established the principle of dealing with young offenders under 16 separately from adults and ended the imprisonment of children under 14. Predating the Children Act by just one year, the Probation of Offenders Act 1907 had already introduced probation and recognisances for offenders under certain circumstances: where offences were of a trivial nature; if there were extenuating circumstances; and/or if, having considered the character, previous record, age and mental condition of the offender, nothing more than a nominal punishment was warranted

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  The Language of Crime and Deviance

  An Introduction to Critical Linguistic Analysis in Media and Popular Culture

  • Andrea Mayr, David Machin(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  THE LANGUAGE OF CRIME AND DEVIANCE 80 with Switzerland. Ireland raised it from 7 to 12 in 2006 for all offences except murder, manslaughter and rape, and in Scotland, where it is 8, the government plans to raise it to 12. Whereas other European countries might foreground the effects of social context on the deviant behaviour of young people, in Britain this is less so. In cases in which young offenders are from social backgrounds associated with ‘broken’ families, educational failure and unemployment, this may be presented in the news media as further evidence of their immorality. The legal and justice systems treat young offenders differently to older ones, in that there are separate youth courts, which are less formal and not open to the public, and specific young offenders’ institutions. This separate treatment began in the mid-nineteenth century with the Young Offenders Act of 1854, which established reformatory institutions for children between 7 and 14. It was at that time that the idea of child welfare came to the fore. The 1908 Children Act introduced juvenile courts, and ‘Borstals’ for offenders between the ages of 16 and 21 began to be set up around that time, too. Since World War II, government policy towards young offenders has veered between an emphasis on care/welfare and control/punishment, depending on the political climate (Marsh and Melville, 2009). In the 1960s, the focus was predominantly on welfare, and the Children and Young Persons Act of 1969 explicitly stated the welfare and care for young offenders, as opposed to their punishment. Eventually this approach gave way to Conservative ‘law and order’ policies, such as the introduction of the ‘short, sharp shock’ initiative in the early 1980s. The early 1990s saw a marked shift towards a far more punitive approach to juvenile offending (see Newburn, 2007; Marsh and Melville, 2009).

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  Young Offenders and the Law

  How the Law Responds to Youth Offending

  • Raymond Arthur(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Youth Justice Critical Readings , London: Sage, pp. 22–8.

  May, M. (2002) ‘Innocence and experience: the evolution of the concept of juvenile delinquency in the mid-nineteenth century’ in Muncie, J., Hughes, G. and McLaughlin, E. (eds) Youth Justice Critical Readings , London: Sage, pp. 98–112.

  Morris, A. and Giller, H. (1987) Understanding Juvenile Justice , London: Croom Helm, pp. 3–36.

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  2 Development of the youth justice system – 1900–69

  Introduction

  Chapter 2 will examine the development of the youth justice system through the major part of the twentieth century, up to 1969. Chapter 3 will examine the period from 1969 to the present. Chapter 2 will examine the conflict between legalism and welfarism. This chapter will establish that the principle that children and young people should be protected from the full weight of adult criminal justice systems underpins the concept of ‘welfare’ in youth justice, and can be traced back to the invention of juvenile delinquency in the early nineteenth century and the subsequent inception of specific legislation, court structures, policies, procedures and practices for the processing of young offenders at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  Development of a separate court in England for young people who offend

  The Youthful Offenders Act 1901 extended the use of alternatives to prison for young people and also made parents liable for the behaviour of their children. Section 4 of the 1901 Act allowed magistrates to remand young people accused of a crime to a workhouse or the custody of any fit person who was willing to receive him instead of prison. The 1901 Act also allowed the courts to order parents of young offenders (under 16 years of age) to pay whatever costs or compensation as the court considered reasonable. The Probation Act 1907 extended the use of alternatives to prison. The 1907 Act put probation on a statutory footing which allowed courts to appoint probation officers and children’s probation officers for cases involving young people below 16 years of age (section 3, Probation Act 1907). The 1907 Act introduced the probation order which required probation officers to ‘advise, assist and befriend’ the young person towards rehabilitation. The effect of the 1901 Act and the 1907 Act was to develop supervised probation as a widely used penalty.

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  The Law and Social Work

  Contemporary Issues for Practice

  • Lesley-Anne Long, Jeremy Roche, Debbie Stringer(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  148 The Law and Social Work known to social services for reasons unrelated to crime, have a record of poor school attendance and in many cases will have experienced local authority care (Whyte, 2009). Often crime or antisocial behaviour is committed against other chil-dren. Sometimes it is almost a matter of chance who becomes the victim and who the offender. Where, rarely, serious violent crime is committed, again the victims may be other children. One such crime – the killing by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson (both aged ten at the time) of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993 – has had, as will be seen, a profound impact upon public attitudes and governmental policy towards offending by children. Youth justice in context In considering how society should respond to the criminal and antiso-cial behaviour of children a preliminary issue arises: how does society perceive childhood itself? If it is accepted that being a child is in some way different from being an adult then consequences should flow for both the family and the State. Although the concept of childhood remains deeply contested, the State has accepted this difference in a number of significant ways, including, as we shall see, the creation of a legal age of criminal responsibility below which children cannot be prosecuted for what would be offences if committed by an adult. But this does not mean that youth justice policy is coherent in its approach to children’s troublesome behaviour, nor that it has remained constant. Instead, different models of youth justice can be seen to underpin different aspects of policy at any one time and adherence to each of the models swings, sometimes dramatically, over time. Much has been written about the two main models of youth justice, commonly referred to as the ‘welfare model’ and the ‘justice model’. The welfare model reached its zenith in the 1960s and culminated in the Children and Young Persons Act 1969.

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  Making Youth: A History of Youth in Modern Britain

  • Melanie Tebbutt(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  This was on the basis that it was ‘archaic’, because the earlier maturation of the modern child meant that a 10- to 14-year-old was bound to recog-nise the difference between right and wrong, and as a result, the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales was reduced to 10. (The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has repeatedly argued that the age of criminal responsibility should be at least 12 and that countries should be aiming for an age of criminal responsibility of between 14 and 15 years old. 92 ) Government preoccupations with juvenile delinquency and youth crime were hardly new, but the power of public opinion to influence political decisions about youth crime and its treatment became more potent between 1988 and 1996, as a key feature of public policy and the discourse of both main political parties. The Labour Government, con-tinuing the neo-liberal approaches of its predecessor, expanded the use of penalties and policies which criminalised and punished the young. The Crime and Disorder Act of 1998 and the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act, 1999 became the statutory basis of ‘the most radical reform of youth justice policy and practice in the post-war period’. 93 Prevention and intervention became leitmotifs of policies that criminalised a much broader range of young people for offences which in earlier decades might have been dealt with more leniently. The youth justice system was extended to much younger children below the age of criminal responsi-bility, who were considered to be at risk of offending, the burden of proof TROUBLEMAKING AND IMPOSING ORDER 73 subordinated to expectations of what a young person might do. The UK was the only country in Europe to record the DNA of children who were arrested, over a million between 1995 and 2000, half a million of whom were aged between 10 and 16, their details kept, regardless of a not-guilty verdict or whether charges were dropped.

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  Youth Policy in the 1990s

  The Way Forward

  • John C. Coleman, Chris Warren-Adamson, John C. Coleman, Chris Warren-Adamson(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10 Juvenile-justice policy in England and Wales John Pitts

  The mid- to late 1960s saw a sustained attempt by a Labour government, radical social scientists, progressive Home Office civil servants, and members of the social-work profession to transform the juvenile-justice system in England and Wales.

  In the run-up to what eventually became the 1969 Children and Young Persons Act (CYPA ), the reformers attempted, among other things, to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 17, to transfer the control of juvenile justice from central to local government, and to abolish the imprisonment of children and young people. Three related principles informed their endeavour. They were:

  1. that social inequality, and the social disadvantages it engendered, were instrumental in propelling young people into delinquency;
  2. that the stigma involved in a court appearance merely compounded such social disadvantage by confirming the young offender’s delinquent identity;
  3. that the state, through its social, economic, and criminal-justice policies, should play a central role in combating, and responding humanely to, both the causes and the consequences of social inequality.

  The reformers wanted to replace a court-based system, founded upon the principle of ‘just desserts’, with a system based upon a scientific understanding of social inequality and its consequences. In justification they pointed to the fact that the juvenile court was first and foremost a mechanism for processing the most deprived working-class children and young people. How, they asked, could such a system, which responded only to the offence and ignored its ultimate social and psychological causes, deliver just deserts in an unjust society?

  The reforms of the 1960s aimed to recast the image of the young offender as a victim of social deprivation and the psychological problems which such deprivation engendered. As such, the young offender needed the scientifically informed interventions of ‘trained experts’ rather than punishment. This attempt to decriminalize and depoliticize the juvenile-justice system encountered sustained resistance from the Conservative opposition and the legal and academic establishments (Pitts 1988

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  Youth Justice

  A Critical Introduction

  • Stephen Case(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  et al. 2010). A new category of ‘juvenile delinquency’ began to emerge, initially covering the offending behaviour of children, with public and governmental discussions focusing on the need to create penal and legal strategies and structures to respond to the ostensibly growing problem of children breaking the law (Shore 1999).

  Controversies and debates

  The pre-nineteenth-century social construction of juvenile delinquency?

  Evidence suggests that the social construction of juvenile delinquency through bespoke language, structures, strategies and processes comfortably predates the common starting point for historical analysis, the beginning of Victorian era (1837–1901). It is possible to trace the use of specialised language to categorise juvenile delinquency back to the sixteenth century. For example, Paul Griffiths has identified evidence of ‘places of confinement for the young’, specialised forms of policing for disorderly youth and attempts at reformation as far back as the pre-nineteenth century (Griffiths 2002: 25). Furthermore, courts were shaping their judgements in relation to the defendant’s age prior to the late eighteenth century (Shore 2011). Raymond Arthur (2016) asserts that concern over the causes of juvenile crime, the issue of criminal responsibility and the remedy for youthful misbehaviour can be traced back to the 1790s and the formation of the earliest voluntary societies aimed at addressing the juvenile delinquency problem. The best example of a voluntary society is the ‘Philanthropic Society’, which was essentially a ‘new youth justice’ structure responding to public and political concerns from the 1780s regarding disorderly and idle children and a need to increase the provision of basic educational facilities for the poor (King 2006). The Philanthropic Society signified a new sensibility towards the criminal and delinquent child (Straker and Sons 1988, in Shore 2011) through its focus on ‘those who most need instruction [and] have been most neglected; and those who did not find friends in their parents [and] have found none in the Public, but have been abandoned to infamy and ruin’ (Philanthropic Society 1792: 6, in Shore 2011). In the 1790s, the Philanthropic Society placed delinquent boys into the ‘Reform’, where they were provided with a moral and social education. Once ‘sufficiently reformed’, they were transferred to the ‘Manufactory’, where they were taught practical skills and undertook employment. Another bespoke institution, the ‘Refuge for the Destitute’ (founded in London in 1806) exemplified how the Government worked closely with the philanthropic (voluntary) sector, such that by the mid-1830s the Refuge was essentially a (partially) state-funded juvenile reformatory (King 2006; Shore 2011).

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  Juvenile Justice

  International Perspectives, Models and Trends

  • John A. Winterdyk(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  What are your main criticisms of the current youth justice system in England and Wales? 3. How does the youth justice systems in England and Wales and Northern Ireland (see Chapter 11 for Scotland) fare in the context of European human rights and more par-ticularly, children’s rights? 4. Where next for youth justice in England and Wales and Northern Ireland? What can these countries within the United Kingdom learn from other countries? 5. What should youth justice look like? References Bailey, V. (1987). Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender 1914-1948 . Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bottoms, A. (2002). On the decriminalisation of English juvenile courts. In J. Muncie, G. Hughes, and E. McLaughlin (Eds.), Youth Justice, Critical Readings (pp. 216–227). London: Sage. Bottoms, A., Brown, P., McWilliams, B., McWilliams, W., and Nellis, M. (1990). Intermediate Treatment and Juvenile Justice: Key Findings and Implications from a National Survey of Intermediate Treatment Policy and Practice . London: HMSO. Briggs, D. (2013). Conceptualising risk and need: The rise of actuarialism and the death of welfare? Youth Justice: An International Journal , 13(1): 17–30. Brown, S. (1998). Understanding Youth and Crime . Buckingham: Open University Press. Cameron, D. (2011, August 10). UK riots: David Cameron’s statement in full. The Telegraph . Retrieved from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8693134/UK-riots-David-Camerons-statement-in-full.html. Campbell, S. (2002). A Review of Anti-social Behaviour Orders . Home Office Research Study 236. London: Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate. Case, S. and Haines, K. (2009). Putting children first in Wales: The evaluation of extending entitle-ment. Social Work Review , (3–4): 22–30. CPS (Crown Prosecution Service). (2002). Narrowing the justice gap . London: CPS. Crawford, A. and Newburn, T. (2003). Youth Offending and Restorative Justice: Implementing Reform in Youth Justice .

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