News

Simon Merrington is a research consultant working on the evaluation of ISSP for Oxford University. He has worked on various evaluation projects for the Home Office and Youth Justice Board, and was previously a researcher with the probation service. The views expressed are his own.

The publication of the evaluation of the intensive supervision and surveillance programme last year led The Sun to announce that “Youth crime scheme fails”.(1) The BBC News headline was that eight out of 10 young offenders on a flagship community punishment scheme re-offended within a year. The Youth Justice Board, which had published the evaluation, sent out a press release declaring that the bold and imaginative scheme had made a positive start to reforming the worst young offenders.

 

As one of the researchers, I was disappointed to see three years’ work summarised in such contradictory and simplistic ways. Governments commission sophisticated research in order to measure the impact of social programmes, but it seems that politicians and the media can only cope with simple headlines.

 

So what are the real results of our research so far, and how can they be communicated in a balanced way? The ISSP is the YJB’s most intrusive community intervention, reserved for the most persistent and serious offenders. It was phased in between 2001 and 2003. It lasts six months and contains a surveillance element (usually electronic tagging) and attendance at a variety of programmes (mainly educational and offending-related) for 25 hours a week, dropping to five hours a week after three months.

 

Our most important finding was that the 41 schemes we evaluated managed to set up ISSP successfully, target the most difficult offenders, achieve credibility with sentencers, and reach the national target of 4,000 starts per year. Most designed their own programmes, but some adopted established schemes like the American Youth Advocate Programme. While contact hours only averaged 22 hours in the intensive period, they averaged 16 hours in the second three months, well above the requirement.

 

The main press criticism of ISSP has been that 85 per cent of offenders committed at least one offence during the 12-month follow-up period. This is hardly surprising given that they had committed an average of 8.5 offences during the previous year. It would be naive to expect such people to stop offending altogether.

 

Because of this, the YJB’s objective was to reduce the frequency and seriousness of offending. According to our follow-up data, the frequency of offending in the following year dropped to 4.9 offences - a reduction of 43 per cent. There was also an improvement when the most serious offence in the two periods was compared. This news was reported by the BBC and The Times.

 

But there is a danger with using this headline as well, since the improvement may not be attributable to the ISSP. We therefore followed up a small control group of people who were eligible but received ordinary supervision in the community by youth offending teams. The existence of this control group was not mentioned by any of the press or in the YJB’s press release.

 

Surprisingly, this group’s offending reduced by a similar amount to the ISSP group. What does this mean? It could be that both methods are equally effective. Or, since persistent offending occurs in bursts, it could mean that some reduction was likely whatever action was taken. Or it could be that different results would be found with a larger and more representative control group. We are currently extending the study for 12 months and enlarging the control group to explore this further, but at the moment the impact of ISSP on reoffending is unclear.

 

The Daily Mail criticised the fact that only 47 per cent completed their ISSP orders. Clearly this is serious and limits the positive impact that ISSP can have. But we need to understand the reasons for this: the intensive demands of the programme, the profile of young people and the strictness with which non-compliance is dealt with. On the latter point, 34 per cent were taken back to court and re-sentenced for failing to comply. As a comparison, in a recent study of drug treatment and testing orders, only 30 per cent of people completed their programme.(2) So our conclusion was that the ISSP was relatively successful in getting people through their orders.

 

The YJB has promoted the ISSP policy as a “robust alternative to custody for young people” and Community Care’s editorial focused on the value of ISSP in diverting people from custody. But to what extent does it actually do this? At one level it is simply a misleading description of ISSP, because it can be used at three stages in the sentencing process: as a condition of bail, as a condition of a community sentence, and following release from custody. Only the second has the potential to be an alternative to a custodial sentence (62 per cent of all ISSPs).

 

We investigated whether this type of ISSP appeared to have had an impact on custodial sentencing across the country. In research terms it is difficult to establish a causal connection. True, there was a reduction in use of custody for juveniles between 2001 and 2003. But other trends were at work too, and we found that the reduction in use of custody was as great in areas without ISSP as in areas with it. In other words, ISSP did not appear to be an essential element in the reduction. While not disagreeing with Community Care about the negative effects of custody, we did not find evidence that ISSP is having an impact at national level.

 

F inally, we considered the impact of ISSP on offenders’ lives, and especially the problems underlying their offending. Tackling these is likely to have the greatest impact on offending in the long term. Not surprisingly, our sample was high on personal and social problems. Only one in five were in mainstream education and their average reading age was 10.8 (actual age 16.4).

Of those over school-leaving age, more than half were unemployed. Thirty-eight per cent absconded or regularly stayed away from home, and 36 per cent were living with known offenders. While substance abuse was less serious (mainly alcohol, tobacco and cannabis), 60 per cent said they had lots of friends who got into trouble. Perhaps most significantly, many had attitudes which supported offending, and saw themselves as offenders.

 

ISSPs addressed many of these problems, and we tried to measure improvements in various ways. Not all problems were tackled successfully and improvements were greater among programme completers. But there were significant improvements in education, lifestyle (especially peer group influence), attitudes to offending, and  self-control. While these were not tested in the control group, the feedback from staff, offenders and parents or carers suggests ISSPs have an impact on offending-related problems.

 

Overall, what have we learned? There are no easy fixes, even when using an intensive, multi-modal programme. Early intervention is likely to be more cost-effective than waiting until a pattern of persistent offending has developed. But it is possible to make an impact on the frequency and seriousness of offending.

 

A key to success is to balance the “control” elements of ISSP (such as tagging and strict enforcement) with the “helping” elements (such as education, mentoring and programme work), which can engage and motivate young offenders to change. Solely using alternatives such as tagging or custody are unlikely to be as effective.

 

ABSTRACT

This article responds to the media coverage of a research study on the Youth Justice Board’s intensive supervision and surveillance programmes for persistent and serious young offenders. It argues that simplistic reporting, either from hostile or sympathetic sections of the press, fails to do justice to the complexity of important social programmes, and the results of research.

 

REFERENCES

(1) R Moore, E Gray, C Roberts, S Merrington, I Waters, R Fernandez, G Hayward and R Rogers, The Initial Report on the Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme, Youth Justice Board, 2004

(2) M Hough, A Clancy, T McSweeney and P Turnbull, The Impact of Drug Treatment and Testing Orders on Offending: Two Year Reconviction Results, Home office research findings 184, 2003

 

CONTACT THE AUTHOR

Email: merrington@onetel.com