17/02/2020
Police Oracle
Work with Offenders digs into the detail of the new annual statistics on youth justice
The Ministry of Justice and the Youth Justice Board has just published its annual statistics for the youth justice system in England and Wales for the year ending March 2019.
Youth crime is falling
There’s plenty of good news to be found among the statistics within the overall context that youth crime is continuing to fall. For example:
Racial disproportionality
However, it’s not all good news. Despite the Lammy report, racial disproportionality continues to grow in our criminal justice system.
Compared with the year ending March 2009, the numbers of arrests of children of each ethnicity have all decreased significantly, but at different rates. For example, arrests of White children have fallen by 83% compared to 55% for Chinese or Other children. This has led to a change in the proportions of arrests by ethnicity.
In the latest year, 69% (around 37,000) of arrests were of White children. This proportion is a decrease from 82% in the year ending March 2009. Arrests of Black children accounted for 16% (around 8,400) in the latest year, double the proportion of ten years ago. Arrests of Mixed (around 3,900) and Asian (just over 3,300) children made up 7% and 6% of the total respectively in the latest year and have also seen changes in proportions over the last ten years, albeit on a smaller scale.
The Youth Justice Board uses the Relative Rate Index (RRI) as a measure of the relative difference in rates of the occurrence of an event or incident type, between different ethnicities. While the RRI for Black children has fallen slightly in the last year, it still shows that they are over four times as likely as White children to be arrested. Children from Mixed and Chinese or Other ethnicities were around twice as likely to be arrested than White children, while Asian children had a similar chance to White children of being arrested.
Concerns about remands
There were just over 11,000 remand episodes last year of which the majority (83%) were bail remands, with youth detention accommodation remands accounting for 11%, and the remaining 6% being community remands with intervention.
The number of children held on remand in youth custody has increased by 12% in the last year, to just over 240 children, and now accounts for 28% of all children in youth custody. This is the largest proportion in the last ten years.
Two thirds (66%) of children given a remand to youth detention accommodation did not subsequently receive a custodial sentence. This is an increase of three percentage points compared with the previous year.
Custody
The good news is that there are far fewer children in custody than a decade ago – last year there was an average of just under 860 children in custody at any one time, a fall of 70% compare with 10 years ago and a 4% drop on last year. However, once again there is evidence of racial disproportionality with the number of Black children in youth custody up by 6% over the last year. A growing proportion of children are sent to youth custody for committing offences of violence against the person, this offence group now accounts for over half (51%) of the youth custody population.
As children are sentenced to custody for more serious offences, so the average length of custodial sentence has increased – it is now 17.7 months, up by more than six months from the 11.4 months figure of 10 years ago.
Conclusion
It is good to be reminded that youth crime continues to fall markedly, a stark contrast from what most of the mainstream media coverage would have us believe. On the other hand, it is distressing to see that the publication of the Lammy report has not yet resulted in any successful initiatives to reduce the racism in our criminal justice system.