30/05/2022
Police Oracle
Work with offenders on the latest Academic Insight from the probation inspectorate
In recent years, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation has extended its role and become a major contributor to the evidence base which underpins modern probation work through a number of approaches. One of its most valuable is the “Academic Insights” series in which the inspectorate commissions leading academics to present their views on specific topics with the aim of facilitating informed debate about what helps and hinders best practice in the probation and youth justice arenas.
Despite being a comparatively recent initiative, the Inspectorate has invested considerable energy in the series and has already published 34 of these insights since its launch just over three years ago. The Inspectorate has been successful in enticing of many of the most well-known academics in the probation arena including (“Mr Desistance”) Shadd Maruna, Rob Canton, David Best, Chris Fox and Charlie Brooker. The topics covered include both reviews of the evidence around key areas such as desistance and recovery and emerging new approaches in both probation and youth justice practice.
Children’s rights
The most recent publication (which came out last Friday) looks at the issue of compliance with international children’s rights in the youth justice system. Authored by Dr Louise Forde from Brunel University London, the report looks at how children’s rights can be adequately realised for children who come into contact with the youth justice system. At the core of the report is the discussion about the differences of welfare-focused youth justice systems (what we call the Child First approach in the UK) and justice-focused ones where individual accountability and punishment also have an important role to play.
Dr Forde highlights five core criteria as being particularly important for the development of a child rights-complaint youth justice system:
She considers these principles from the viewpoint of the two approaches to youth justice maintaining that while both may have inherent advantages, each also presents its own challenges. Within ‘justice’-based systems, there is a risk that a traditional criminal justice approach will not give sufficient attention to the wellbeing and developmental needs of the child, and may result in excessive punitiveness. It is clear that criminal justice processes – with police, youth justice workers, courts and secure settings – need significant adaptation in order for children’s rights to be adequately upheld.
Conversely, welfare-based systems can be vulnerable to political pressures to adopt more punitive approaches which emphasise accountability, particularly in cases of serious or repeat offending, or in cases involving older children. These considerations can result in systems where older children or those who have committed more serious offences are transferred out of specialised, child-focused systems, to adult systems of justice, with serious implications for the realisation of their rights. This is an issue that has been of concern recently with the closure of Secure Training Centres resulting in children being placed in young offender institutions.
Dr Forde acknowledges that all youth justice systems struggle to deal with the issue of the small minority of children who commit very serious offences; something that is clear from our long-running debates about how best to respond to the two young children who killed James Bulger.
The report says that there is no ‘silver bullet’ approach to developing rights-compliant youth justice systems, and that it is vital that we pay sustained attention to the children’s rights standards to ensure that all of the rights to which children are entitled are adequately upheld, regardless of the model of youth justice in place.