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Anyone working in the social care field for more than a few years will remember the mid-90s stories of "rat boy", responsible for a one-child crime wave. "Rat boy" was so named because he lived in a heating duct in Newcastle while carrying out a multitude of local burglaries. While stories like his are not terribly common, they regularly crop up in the media. They usually arise when we're in a state of panic over the effectiveness of the youth justice system. It is not necessarily the case that the youth justice system "creates" them when it is failing, but these children get noticed more at these crisis points, and someone then gets in touch with the media. Their stories provide a sort of barometer of public concern.

Clearly we are in the middle of another moral panic about youth crime. Earlier this year the public read all about the "terror triplets", all 13 years old, who were subject to an antisocial behaviour order for their activities in Gillingham town centre. More recently, home secretary David Blunkett was forced to make public statements concerning an 11-year-old in Cardiff who had been in court 150 times. A similar case in Scotland resulted in a debate on the local version of BBC Newsnight. At the Policy Research Bureau, we regularly field media enquiries about these child crime waves. As we answer these questions year on year, our responses remain consistent, despite widespread overhaul of the system as a whole and changes in the penalties available. We thought it might be useful to summarise the research evidence and point out what is generally supported as the best hope of rehabilitation.

The first question is, are persistent young offenders really different from other, less frequent, offenders? And do they require a different type of intervention, or just more of the same? It is odd that we have relatively little research information to help us answer these questions. To date, research has only really demonstrated that persistent young offenders start offending earlier than most one-off offenders, they are usually harder to manage as younger children, they nearly always have experienced chaotic, disadvantaged or abusive childhoods, and many have trouble concentrating or staying still. Really persistent offenders, who keep it up for life, tend to have poorer social skills, fewer friends, fewer things binding them to society and community. All these things are very important in considering rehabilitation.

However, what these children actually do in terms of offending is very much like what all young offenders do - lots of theft, lots of car crime. They just do more of it - persistent does not necessarily equal serious or violent. While these children only represent around 5 per cent or less of young offenders as a whole, they account for a very high proportion of offences, perhaps as much as half (depending on your definition of persistence).

When they first come before the courts, it is almost impossible to spot the ones that are going to go on to be serious trouble over a period of several years. Many youth justice practitioners will deny this, and will assert that they can spot the worst ones early on, but in fact lots of young people with similar background problems do not go on to be persistent. We have to be very careful not to drag them into it by criminalising them too fast. While its intentions are good, there is no denying that the youth justice system can cause or aggravate problems as well as solve them.

So what should we do about these young people? Often the policy solution is to try to broaden the custody net, so that we can get more of them off the streets. In the early 1990s, the answer conceived by the Conservative government, and delivered by the incoming Labour administration, was building more prisons for 12 to 14 year olds.

The new prisons (secure training centres) still exist, although the secure training order that sent children to them was phased out by 2000. It was replaced with a new custodial disposal, the detention and training order (DTO) that allowed for half of the sentence to be served in custody and half in the community. Around 6,000 DTOs are made each year, on our most persistent young offenders from age 12 upwards. Recently, the home secretary has pondered lowering the custodial age, so that the DTO could be used with 10 year olds at any time thought necessary.

The DTO reflects our ambivalence about what to do with these children. Should it be custody or community? Which bit is really rehabilitative, which bit can turn the child around? Is the custody bit just for our own sense of justice, to show that there is a proper punishment, whereas the community bit is where the real work is done?

The main arguments for locking-up persistent young offenders have been remarkably consistent over the years. One argument is that while offenders are in custody, they are not offending. However, the incapacitation effects of locking up young offenders are not as great as people think. Research has shown that we would have to lock up a gigantic proportion of the population of young people in order to actually feel any improvement in the crime hot spots.

Secondly, it has regularly been argued that custody would act as a deterrent to reoffending. Ironically, however, custody seems to be one of the most certain ways to ensure reoffending. Four out of five young people from young offenders institutions are reconvicted within two years of release.

Moreover, concerns with custody for young people go beyond its ineffectiveness. Research has indicated potential harmful effects of custody for this age group, including anxiety within the institution, disorientation upon release, and difficulties for family relationships. Indeed, the UK is a signatory to several international treaties (including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) that restrict custody to the minimum number of people for the minimum amount of time - the principle of "last resort".


If we cannot lock up enough young people to make a real difference (even if we were inclined to, which luckily most policy makers are not), then where else do we turn for solutions? What alternatives to custody seem to make a difference when tackling this problem? To say there are no easy solutions is a clich'. The less common corollary is that there are no cheap solutions either. Whatever we do with these young people, we have to be prepared to foot the bill. Generally speaking, while the public and policy makers are happy to pay a fortune for short and pointless stays in custody, they are much more squeamish about the cost of serious community interventions.

In order to really work, any community alternative to imprisonment, for these most persistent young offenders, has to include the following elements:

• Everyone has to agree what the focus of the intervention really is, and all efforts should be targeted directly at that.
• The young people's time has to be filled with positive activities. Supervising officers for Medway YOI trainees told us that their task effectively became a battle to fill the trainee's time, to keep them away from negative influences induced by boredom. Indeed, the only significant difference between those who offended and those who did not was whether activities were set up for them.
• The intervention has to deal with underlying problems. These are not simply bad children, but children with real difficulties. The offending will not go away if the family issues, drug issues, and educational issues are not tackled as well. Their offending is part of a lifestyle, not necessarily the result of a rational decision.
• Inter-agency co-operation is necessary. Everyone needs to play ball, to ensure swift arrangements of facilities. Disillusionment sets in fast, especially with younger children, if promised help is not forthcoming. These children have been let down by the system already to get into this situation, so the intervention and its missionaries must be reliable if trust with the authorities is going to be built up.
• Good role models should be provided. For example, building mentor-type relationships can do this, and can offer much needed stability.
• There has to be significant and continuous contact. Rules of thumb suggest programmes that last for six months or more.
• Staff need to be specially trained in dealing with difficult adolescents, not simply transferred from other parts of the criminal justice or welfare systems and expected to cope.

Any effective solution for persistent young offenders requires almost continuous supervision and surveillance in order to stabilise an often chaotic life filled with negative influences. The good news is that the government has already begun to roll-out a solution that more or less fulfils these criteria. Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programmes (ISSPs) include a highly structured daily itinerary of supervised programmes to address behaviour problems, educational deficits and drug or alcohol problems. Combined with mentoring schemes which foster adult-child relationships, these schemes could offer the stability desperately needed without the further disruption and anxiety caused by custody. It is early days yet, but evaluations are under way and should point out the most effective components. Other promising new developments include treatment foster care for those with mental health problems as well as antisocial behaviour. However, a cultural shift is still required to regard these interventions as investments, both in the future of young people and of communities, in order to accept the level of spending necessary to really make a difference.

Ann Hagell is co-director and Neal Hazel senior research fellow at social affairs research body the Policy Research Bureau (admin@prb.org.uk)

Further reading

A Hagell, N Hazel and C Shaw, Evaluation of Medway Secure Training Centre, Home Office, 2000

McGuire J, What Works: Reducing Reoffending, Wiley, 1995

M Rutter, H Giller, A Hagell, Antisocial Behaviour by Young People, Cambridge University Press, 1998

Youth Justice Board website (www.youth-justice-board.gov.uk)

Home Office Research Development website (www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds)