The youth criminal system is in dire need of reform
“Chaotic and dysfunctional” are two words Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, recently used to describe the national youth justice system. New data shows that criminal cases involving children (10-17 years old) take nearly 40% longer from offence to completion today as compared to 2010, with the slowest judicial region, Sussex Central, taking an average of 491 days. Amid these reports, Longfield admitted youth court is “not a child-friendly environment” and called for a wholesale review of the framework.
The above statistic must be considered alongside the good: total child prosecutions per year have actually fallen by three-quarters since 2010, prompting the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) to label the current situation a success. Yet, can a drop in quantity justify a parallel drop in quality?
The decline in prosecutions has allowed the government to cut the MOJ’s budget by a quarter since 2010, leading to a depletion in resources. This includes the closing of half of all Magistrate’s Courts in England and Wales, the site of youth court hearings. A scarcity of courts means children now have to travel up to 50 miles for hearings and cases involving competing gangs often have to be heard in the same location, which has led to violence on multiple occasions. A lack of resources has also resulted in the mistreatment of child offenders: many children are restrained by handcuffs even inside courtrooms and forced to sit in secure docks of bulletproof glass, despite such measures only being suggested as necessary for highly dangerous individuals. Many minors are equally forced to appear in court without legal representation or even a known adult (parent or social worker).
Year-long trials and procedural miscarriages are simply not conducive to rehabilitating youth criminals. The increase in duration has coincided with a spike in occurrences of repeat offenders: today, 41% of convicted 10-17 year olds will commit a second offence within one year of being cautioned, a figure 12 percentage points higher than that of above-21s. Also interesting is the fact that already marginalized groups seem to be the most affected by the youth justice system’s flaws, with the proportion of children receiving a caution or sentence who were of Black, Asian, or ethnic minority (BAME) descent nearly doubling from 2010 to 2018. Manchester Metropolitan Criminology Lecturer Becky Clarke, speaking to the Guardian, reasoned this could also be put down to a lack of resources and training—causing differing treatment of BAME children in the system.
Whether the precedence placed by the MOJ on an overall decrease in youth offenders is reflective of the actual state of the system is debatable, to say the least. A rise in the proportion of reoffending children as well as youth BAME sentences is a high price to pay for continuing budget cuts to the MOJ. The current situation requires a good, hard look from the government into whether Commissioner Longfield’s suggestions will be honoured through a (re)injection of funds and policy reform.
