Plan for courts to tag juveniles on bail

Juveniles on bail awaiting trial will be
electronically tagged, home secretary David Blunkett announced this
week.

Under the plans, courts will be given powers
to tag 12 to 16-year-olds who have been granted bail or remanded
into local authority accommodation, where they believe repeat,
imprisonable offences are likely to be committed.

The tagging will allow any bail or remand
conditions, such as a curfew requirement, to be monitored.

“There will be no ‘untouchables’ in our
criminal justice system,” said Blunkett.

But Paul Cavadino, chief executive of
rehabilitation charity Nacro, said there were problems with tagging
children, “not least the fact that some will regard the tag as a
badge of honour”.

Bail support and supervision programmes would
be more likely to keep them “out of trouble”, he added.

Blunkett’s measures to tackle youth crime
follow confirmation from Bradford Council that it recently issued
anti-social behaviour order warning letters to three pupils at the
city’s Laisterdyke High School.

“The letters were given out in the presence of
the police, the school’s community officer and their parents and
have been successful in putting a stop to their unacceptable
conduct,” said the council’s director of housing Geraldine
Howley.

According to the school’s head teacher Joan
Law, the action was taken to address a succession of computer
equipment thefts.

The school believed that working with the
council on anti-social behaviour orders would be more effective
than excluding the pupils from school.

 

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