By Gillian Hunter, Claire Ely, Carmen Robin-D’Cruz and Stephen Whitehead

This report details the findings of a research project which was jointly undertaken by the Centre for Justice Innovation (CJI) and the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research (ICPR), Birkbeck, with funding from the Nuffield Foundation.

The project examined current practice in the youth court, including how the court was meeting the needs of vulnerable young people. Specifically, we were interested in understanding current youth court practice and exploring the potential impact of practices aligned with problem-solving justice – an evidence-based approach which seeks to hold people accountable and to help them to proactively engage with the court to address the factors driving their offending.

Background In the last 10 years, there has been a 75% decline in cases coming into the youth court, caused by both falls in youth crime and the youth justice system’s success in diverting eligible cases away from court. However, while there are currently fewer court-involved young people, they tend to have more significant welfare and other needs as well as more serious offending profiles than they did a decade ago. Having fewer court-involved young people to work with gives the youth justice system a golden opportunity to concentrate its energies on further reducing reoffending and preventing future harm. To that end, the Carlile Inquiry in 2014 (in which the current Lord Chancellor participated), the Taylor Review in 2016 and the Lammy Review in 2017 all advised that youth court practice should become more ‘problem-solving’, to better address children’s underlying welfare needs. Missed opportunities Our research follows on from these reviews. It looks specifically at current youth court practice through the lens of evidence-led problem-solving justice. It does this by focussing on the procedural fairness of youth court hearings; the specialism of youth court practitioners; how multi-agency youth offending services provide collaborative interventions and supervision to court-involved children and young people; the extent to which youth courts engage in judicial monitoring post-sentence; and the operational environment surrounding youth court practitioners. Fieldwork was conducted in three sites across England, comprising five youth courts and associated youth offending services, between February and October 2019. During our research, we came across many dedicated practitioners who were committed to improving the support for children and young people appearing in court, and we saw examples of creative and innovative practice being developed locally. One site was trialling a form of post-sentence judicial monitoring (of the type recommended in the Carlile and Taylor reviews) to provide informal, YOS-managed review hearings for young people on Youth Rehabilitation Orders (YROs). A second site was preparing to pilot a similar approach, in which magistrates, in partnership with the YOS, will hold informal, monthly reviews of YROs. However, we also observed practice which fell short of what is recommended for the youth court: long delays, especially in cases coming to court; lack of availability of professionals with the required specialisms for youth court; limited services to respond to children and young people’s speech, language and communication or mental health needs; limited engagement by children’s services (understandable given their resource constraints); and generally, a more difficult operational environment, resulting from the twin impacts of constant court modernisation (including court closures and mergers) and reductions in funding. What we found far too often was an over-burdened system in which practitioners struggled to deliver the services required of them by national government. As a result, vulnerable children and young people coming before the court are not always receiving the treatment they need – making it all the more likely they will offend again. Time to get it right What our research has shown is that youth courts need to be enhanced to change outcomes for the vulnerable young people who appear there. We are very aware that the Carlile, Taylor and Lammy review teams have been here before us. Our research has walked in their footprints and, sadly, we have seen that their calls for significant reform have remained largely unanswered. We think it is time to get it right. 1. Tackle pre-court delays and maximise diversion opportunities pre-court There is urgent need for action to address the delays between offences and the commencement of court proceedings. These delays impact on everyone, including victims, witnesses and defendants. A key problem is delayed charging decisions by the police, which were also shown to disrupt children and young people’s own rehabilitative efforts. While we found strong support for out-of-court resolution of children and young people’s cases (and strong support for victim involvement and restorative justice in these disposals), we also found evidence of cases still coming to court that should have been resolved out of court. We recommend that (i) Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, the National Police Chief’s Council and the Home Office develop a protocol which limits the amount of time children and young people can be kept under investigation before a charging decision is made (though there may need to be exclusions for the most complex cases); (ii) we recommend that the Youth Justice Board should publish clear national guidance on effective, evidence-based point-of-arrest diversion and out-of-court disposal practice.

Centre for Justice Innovation, 2022. 48p.

By Mairéad Seymour

There is increasing recognition within the criminal justice system that strategies that engage individuals and encourage cooperation in the first instance may be more effective in promoting compliance with legal requirements than rigid, front-end enforcement approaches. One of the most recent examples is the ‘4 Es’ framework adopted as part of policing public health regulations introduced in England and Wales at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on guidance issued by the NPCC (National Police Chiefs Council) and the College of Policing in March 2020, the framework espoused engagement, explanation and encouragement as police strategies to promote public compliance, with enforcement utilised only as a measure of last resort. Aitkenhead et al.’s (2022) analysis of policing the pandemic from a public and police perspective, reports that the ‘4 Es’ approach helped to uphold police legitimacy while securing compliance with Covid-19 regulations and avoiding ‘any major breakdown in the relationship between the public and the police’ (p.7). In the youth justice domain, there has been a notable shift in England and Wales away from enforcement towards engagement in policy discourse and practice guidelines. The most recent case management guidance from the Youth Justice Board (YJB) emphasises that every effort should be taken to engage children to complete their order, with breach proceedings identified as a measure of last resort and initiated in exceptional circumstances (Youth Justice Board, 2022). The approach aligns with the YJB’s recently introduced central guiding principle of ‘Child First’ (Day, 2023; Youth Justice Board, 2021) and is in stark contrast to a decade or more earlier when the language of enforcement, in the form of mandatory warnings and breach proceedings, was embedded in policy discourse (Youth Justice Board, 2010). Offending statistics published by the YJB (2023) identify that ‘breach of statutory order’ has fallen by 89 per cent over the last ten years. While a multiplicity of factors are likely to underpin this figure, policy and practice shifts that emphasise support for compliance, rather than enforcement for non-compliance, provide at least partial explanation for the trend. There have been substantial reductions in new entrants to the youth justice system and in the number of children in custodial detention facilities over the last decade and beyond (HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2023; Youth Justice Board, 2023). While the result is lower Youth Offending Service (YOS) caseloads, HM Inspectorate of Probation (2022) argues that the needs of children entering the youth justice system are increasingly complex and far-reaching with the Covid-19 pandemic further exacerbating their circumstances. Harris and Goodfellow (2022) reiterate the point, explaining that vulnerability and marginalisation among many children in or on the periphery of the justice system, has led to them being the most adversely impacted by the pandemic. They describe the pandemic for these children as ‘an additional trauma to an already extensive list’ (p.4). It is against the context of the above developments and circumstances that this paper explores theory, policy and practice in supporting children’s compliance on community-based court orders. It begins by considering the term ‘compliance’ as well as the mechanisms that underpin decisions to comply (or not). Thereafter, the focus turns to unpacking what compliance means in the context of children and young people on community supervision before exploring strategies that pro-actively support and encourage compliance and respond to their non-compliance in ways other than formal enforcement procedures

Academic Insights 2023/04. Manchester, UK: HM Inspectorate of Probation 2023. 16p.

By Irving A. Spergel

Every day there are new stories of gang-related crime: from the proliferation of illegal weapons in the streets and children dealing drugs in their schools, to innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of never-ending gang wars. Once considered an urban phenomenon, gang violence is permeating American life, spreading to the suburbs and bringing the problem closer to home for much of America. The government, schools, social agencies, and the justice system are conspicuous by their sporadic interest in the subject and have failed to develop effective policies and programs. Existing social support mechanisms and strategies for suppressing violence have often been unsuccessful. And, state and federal policy is largely nonexistent.In The Youth Gang Problem: A Community Approach, Irving Spergel provides a systematic analysis of youth gangs in the United States. Based on research, historical and comparative analysis, and agency documents and the author's extensive first-hand experience, the work explores the gang problem from the perspective of community disorganization, especially population movement, and the plight of the underclass. It examines the factors of gang member personality, gang dynamics, criminal organization, and the influence of family, school, prisons, and politics, as well as the response of criminal justice agencies and community groups.

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  Spergel describes techniques used by social agencies, schools, employment programs, criminal justice agencies, and grass-roots organizations for dealing with gangs, and recommends strategies that emphasize the use of local resources, planning, and collaborative procedures.There is no single strategy and no easy solution to the youth gang problem in the United States. There are, however, substantial steps we can take, and they must be honestly and systematically tested. Offering a practical and alternative approach to a serious social problem, The Youth Gang Problem: A Community Approach is a major and long-awaited contribution to this dilemma. It is required reading for criminal justice personnel, school staff, social workers, policy makers, students and scholars of urban and organizational sociology, and the general reader concerned with the youth gang problem and how to control, intervene, and prevent it.

Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 368p.