Youth Justice: co-operative solutions to offending

SPTC Director, Susan McColl reports on this conference held at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh on 24th January.

Susan says: this conference was compared by Brian Taylor, political editor of BBC Scotland. Each delegate was given a sort of remote control device to register our different perspectives and opinions around various issues discussed during the day.

The conference was as impressive as the venue with sixteen excellent speakers. They each spoke for 15 minutes and even though each of them came from a different perspective, the message was clear for me. This message was: NO, NO, NO to ASBO's! I got the idea from many of the speakers that ASBOs, (anti-social behaviour orders) are a step backward. Inspector Tom Halbert of Strathclyde Police hoped that West Lothian would refuse to take up the new powers. Bernadetter Monaghan, Director of APEX linked ASBOs to a possible breach of the basic human right to "free assembly". She also posed the question as to whether electronic tagging denies the child the right to freedom on welfare grounds.

Baroness Vivien Stern then talked at length praising our Scottish system compared to that south of the border. She talked of the prisons for young offenders set up soon after Tony Blair became PM. These prisons lock up 3337 vulnerable youngsters.

She went on to say that England has become an acquiescent society. Protests tend to be small scale and disorganised. Voluntary organisations have been kept quiet by receiving contracts from central government.,P> Baroness Stern reported that every few months a child commits suicide in custody. She held up a report on yet another child of fourteen who had hung himself with a small piece of blanket. This was the only article of clothing he was allowed as he was considered a high suicide risk. It was so sad because the report was 24 words long taking up newspaper space the exact size of a postage stamp.

David Smith, Professor of Criminology at Edinburgh University then gave us some facts.
Recorded crime is falling - it decreased from 1992 to 1999 and from 1992 to 2003 there was no overall change.
Not so bad then. Where does that put ASBOs?

We were told that youth crime normally peaks at 18 years of age and for 98% of offenders it is a transitory phase. But, if these youngsters are punished in the wrong way it can flip up to chronic. In order to turn around the lives of the 2% who are on a life course of crime, then we need to have the very best initiatives.

The most vulnerable youngsters usually live in deprivation; are single parents; are on low incomes; mix in groups where drugs and alcohol are abused; take risks; are impulsive and; are unemployed.

Not one of the speakers agreed that simply punishing young people is going to work and that it rarely rehabilitates criminals. Offenders need to be educated during custody and need to learn new skills to turn things around for them. The Governor of Polmont Young Offender's Institution described how they have tried to help offenders with courses in bricklaying, forklift driving, plumbing, electronics, amongst many other things. I believe that these initiatives are certainly the way to go.

Report by Susan McColl.