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With 14 different community sentences in existence in England and Wales alone, and a government that claims to be committed to reducing the numbers of children held in custody, it is a mystery why the UK remains so keen on detention as a response to youth crime.

Despite the availability of alternative options, over 7,500 children are sentenced to custody in England and Wales each year. Between 1992 and 2001 the number of child incarcerations rose by 90 per cent, with the highest increase seen among the youngest offenders - under-15s in detention rose by 800 per cent. Children in the UK are nearly four times more likely to be imprisoned than in France, and 100 times more likely than in Finland.


Yet this ballooning population of child prisoners (which has been condemned by the United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child) cannot be explained by a corresponding rise in youth crime. In fact, recorded youth offending fell by around 20 per cent during the 1990s.

Nor is it supported by low re-offending rates. According to rehabilitation charity Nacro, 84 per cent of young offenders held in young offenders institutions re-offend after release. This compares with 59 per cent of the prison population as a whole and is far higher than the recidivism rate for young offenders receiving non-custodial options.

Reasons for this failure were suggested by Oxford University and PA Consulting in a recent comparison of the custodial detention training order and the community-based intensive supervision and surveillance programme. Young offenders serving a detention order averaged only 12.7 hours of "purposeful activity" a week compared with 25.8 hours for young offenders on ISSPs.

Non-custodial sentences are also more financially economical as a six-month ISSP costs £6,000 compared with £21,000 for the same period in a YOI.

However, the most pertinent argument against youth custody is the tragic effect it can have on vulnerable young children.

Half of those held in YOIs are known to social services and many have experienced sexual or physical abuse. For these vulnerable young people detention can break important ties with their families - around a quarter never receive a visit - and expose them to an environment where, according to Anne Owers, the prisons chief inspector, bullying is rife.

The consequences of such exposure can be devastating, as illustrated by the 12 suicides in YOIs between 1998 and 2002 and 1,111 reported incidents of self-harm.

Tragedies such as these led the Howard League for Penal Reform to seek and, last year, win a landmark ruling that children held in young offenders institutions should receive the full protection of the Children Act 1989.

However, while the High Court ruled that the act should apply to children in custody, it did not impose any obligation on the prison service to ensure the act's protection was put in place. This responsibility remained with social services departments, creating the legal anomaly whereby social services had a statutory duty to safeguard the welfare of children in prison, but the prison service did not.

This anomaly remains. Frances Crook, the Howard League's director, says:"The government has, so far, refused to amend the act so we are still taking on cases where it seems that last year's judgement has not been taken seriously."

An obvious example of this is the continuing use of solitary confinement for young people, a practice that if carried out by a parent would be considered child abuse, says Crook.

Meanwhile, the use of non-custodial options appears to be achieving increasing success. The Youth Justice Board states that the rate of re-offending for young people on community punishments is 22.5 per cent lower than the predicted rate.

Interventions such as the ISSP, community rehabilitation orders, reparation orders, curfews, and drug treatment and testing orders appear finally to be making some inroads into the traditionally high recidivism rate of young offenders.

This has been recognised in the youth justice annex to the recent children's green paper Every Child Matters which proposes that community supervision and surveillance should become the "main response to repeat and serious offending".


Under the new proposals nine of the current juvenile non-custodial sentences will be merged into a broader action plan order that will offer a "comprehensive menu" of interventions such as fines, reparation, personal support, drug and alcohol awareness, anger management, mentoring, victim-offender mediation, family group conferences, fostering, hostel placements and mental health treatment.

In addition, the ISSP will become the sentence of choice for the most persistent and serious offenders. These young people will undergo intensive surveillance (most will wear electronic tags and be subject to curfews) and take part in an intensive programme focusing on five core areas: at least 15 hours of education and training per week; family support; interpersonal skills; challenging offending and restorative justice.

Bob Baird, manager of the Leeds ISSP who oversees around 130 programmes each year, believes the combination of intensive support and surveillance can have a dramatic effect on the crime rate of persistent juvenile offenders.

"I'm totally confident that there will have been a significant reduction in offending by the target group. This is a particularly prolific group of offenders so it speaks for itself that anything that makes them less prolific or commit less serious offences is bound to make a considerable impact."

A key element of the ISSP and several other community sentences is the use of restorative justice, a technique that seeks to encourage young offenders to accept responsibility for their actions and attempt to make amends with their victims.

The Scottish youth justice system, in particular, has promoted the use of restorative justice with a pioneering scheme recently set up in Glasgow under the leadership of Inspector Alan Speirs of Strathclyde Police.

The service targets young people under 16 who have offended between one and five times. It has three main components: restorative cautioning, restorative conferencing, and the restorative justice programme.

The restorative caution is conducted by trained police officers and focuses on the young person and the effects of their actions. Speirs said this replaces the old superintendent's warning where "if you reduced the young person to tears that was seen as a success".

Restorative conferencing mediates between the young offenders and their victims, often bringing them face-to-face, so that the offender can appreciate the effect of their actions and try to help repair the damage caused.

The restorative justice programme is reserved for the most serious offenders and consists of a four-week programme of modules delivered by a number of agencies including the council's youth and building services, the police, fire brigade, and health service.

"It's about encouraging them to understand the consequences of their actions and it also means that victims can be part of the process if they want," stresses Speirs.

The success of community sentences only goes to highlight the inadequacy of custody as an approach to youth crime. Nevertheless the YJB's recent announcement that the number of juvenile boys in custody has fallen by 13 per cent since October 2002, signals that the tide is slowly turning.