SOCIALIST UNITY

The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies have published a report on NL’s youth justice reforms during the last 10 years and impact on levels of self-reported youth offending. What NL has succeeded in accomplishing is criminalising and imprisoning more children and teenagers. The Youth Justice Board that was set up in 1998 and commits 64% of its budget on commissioning custodial places and a meagre 5% on prevention.

The youth justice isn’t meeting the needs of young people and children such as mental health, housing, drug dependency, education, employment and training but rather pushing the whole ideology of the ASBOisation and stigmatisation of youth.

NL is channelling money into the YJB where it is being spent on custody and where prevention is not seen as a fundamental importance in understanding youth crime. As Deborah Orr correctly argues:

The worry must be that Labour has spent a great deal of its time and energy over the last 10 years being “tough on crime” but not quite so tough on “the causes of crime”. The Government understands the importance of early intervention, but in introducing policies that prioritise people being “brought to justice”, even for minor offences, it has swelled the prison population.

This, in the youth justice arena, has ensured that 10 times as much of the YJB’s cash is being spent on incarceration than is being spent on the preventive projects that are such a theoretically essential part of its remit. Further, the emphasis on youth justice is diverting social services funds into environments where it is a struggle to access social services support at all.

We are back to that old maxim, “understand a little less, condemn a little more”