Chris Perry is former Director of Social Services at South Glamorgan County Council.
Concerns about knife crime amongst young people, unacceptable delays in the court system, prisons bursting at the seams and yet most reported crime goes unresolved.
It is detection, not punishment, which is the real deterrent and detection rates are very low and only bolstered by “taken into accounts”.
First COVID and then the cost-of-living crisis has left the UK with areas of deprivation the likes of which have not been seen for a very long time. There are parents struggling to cope and children and young people with little to do and very little hope or aspiration.
How can we punish children for behaviour which is a direct result of the society into which they have been born?
And given what we know about adolescent behaviour it is hardly surprising that many young people go on offending sprees between apprehension for an offence and disposal through the courts, which is why this period needs to be kept as short as possible and to a matter of days rather than weeks.
Group residential intervention, be it Young Offender Institutions or residential care (secure or otherwise), for young people has been shown to reinforce offending and establish a pattern of offending for life. As per the 1970s ITV documentary “Creating Criminals”.
During my social work training my residential placement was in a Remand Home. When boys arrived the others would gather around and ask what they had done. Which would usually be greeted by “Oh, is that all”. The story would get progressively serious with each telling and the main topic of conversation was crime.
Even if children were rehabilitated the local community would expect them to behave as before and they would soon be forced back into role and revert to past behaviour.
There is therefore little wonder that re-offending rates are so high following residential intervention.
Many children, who offend, commit their first offence whilst truanting from school because they are already on the wrong side of the law and have been labelled as such. Schools should look at what they might do differently to attract the non-attenders.
Community Policing should be exactly that, with a neighbourhood policeman who could be around when children go to school so that the children know them and they know most of the children by sight – as happened in the not too distant past.
In the 1940s, 50s and 60s school hours were from 8-45 am to 4-15 pm, during which children were not allowed off the premises. Children either left school and went into apprenticeships, where they had one to one supervision from an adult, or into sixth forms where the same school attendance rules applied. Now it is the norm for both parents to work, schools turn out by 3 pm and older children go to six form colleges and are not confined to the campus.
So, how should society respond to children who offend?
The answer is to separate and occupy. Children and young people who offend need to be fully occupied throughout their waking hours on activities which interest and motivate them, so they grow out of their offending. Community-based activities are not cheap and have to be adequately resourced because of the risks involved.
They are also very visible and, as such, can lead to criticism of rewarding bad behaviour. Society is happier to spend £130,000 per child per year on Young Offenders Institutions which is seen as punishment, even though it does not work, than a fraction of that cost on constructive intervention.
This is why it is important that some of the activity should involve face to face contact with people in need (such as the CSV Children in Care Programme of the 70s and 80s) to change the perception from delinquent to helper in both the young person’s own eyes and in those around them.
Involving young people in environmental projects will give them ownership, so that instead of defacing them they will protect them.
Restorative Justice whereby the young person is brought face to face with their victim, or victims, to discuss the consequences of their behaviour can also bring about lasting change.
The danger is that Courts use their powers to prescribe community activity which is then less effective as the value in that the young person wanting to take part voluntarily.
For those young people who are beyond parental control and cannot be supported at home professional foster carers have been shown to be effective.
There is little point holding parents accountable for their children’s behaviour during adolescence. Adolescence is a period of rapid physical and emotional change during which the young person is trying to establish an identity independent of their parents.
It is a time of insecurity when peer group support is essential but can be detrimental due to “egging on” which is why parents often say their child has got into bad company – which is what all the parents of that group of children say. Parents may be responsible for their child’s behaviour but if they have not got a positive relationship with their child when they reach adolescence it is too late: they cannot go back a relive the early years.
The early years are the formulative ones when children learn right from wrong and form many of their values, prejudices, behaviours and motivations which will remain with them for life
In March 2023 there were 107,317 children in the care of a local authority in the UK – the highest number ever.
These children were mainly taken into care for abuse or neglect. And it is not uncommon for children taken into care for their own protection to exhibit understandably disturbed behaviour as a reaction to removal from home which if not dealt with can escalate and sometimes result in them being transferred to residential resources intended for children taken into care for disturbed behaviour or offending from where they emerge as offenders.
Although, not cheap, community-based intervention is cheaper than counter-productive secure residential accommodation and therefore there is money available to re-deploy to early intervention and preventative work with families, particularly those with children under five, to reduce the number of children needing to be taken into care.
There are now 3.9 million children being brought up in poverty – 2/3rds of whom have a parent in work. Children brought up in poverty are less likely to do well at school, more likely to have health problems, making a demand upon the NHS, and have a shorter life expectancy.
Perhaps now is the time to address pay differentials in the larger organisations – perhaps linking the pay of the lowest paid in an organisation to that of the highest paid – with the back stop of the minimum wage. Those at the top could still have their million-pound salaries provided they paid those on whose hard work they depend proportionately. This might also improve morale, output and productivity. There is a positive and significant relationship between directors’ pay and employees’ average wage in Japan.
However, given the global nature of many of the large corporations and multi-billionaires this would benefit from the backing of the United Nations. At the time of writing, Spain, France, South Africa and Brazil are trying to get international agreement on a minimum wealth tax on multi-billionaires.
One cannot resolve whole system problems with component level solutions. Income inequality and poverty are the great social evils of our time and effect so much else as does badly structured and managed systems.
The public sector needs radical reform, restructuring and cultural change based upon a whole systems review. It is how we use and distribute our resources which is the big issue.
