Youth justice reforms prioritise evidence over ideology

The latest Youth Justice White Paper - ‘Cutting Youth Crime, Changing Young Lives’ -contains much that is welcome.

The increased use of early intervention, including funding for the government’s Turnaround programme, and out-of-court resolutions (one of the recommendations of the Leveson Review) recognise that there are often more effective means of reducing offending, both among young people and in later life, than punishment.

Additionally, the piloting of new Youth Intervention Courts might be among the more headline-grabbing (not to say ‘transformative’) of the proposed changes, strengthening the relationships between the courts and other specialist support services which will, the government hopes, ‘tackle the drivers of offending and keep young people on track’.

This development coincides with, and seems to build upon insights gained from, the use of ‘Child Focused Courts’ (CFCs), previously known as ‘Pathfinder Courts’, piloted through the Family Court system in various parts of the country since February 2022.

The results speak for themselves: the Family Court backlog as a whole dropped by 50% (which by itself would have those overseeing our criminal courts salivating at the prospect) and there were reports of cases resolving up to seven and a half months faster than they would have otherwise. 

David Lammy had clearly recognised the value of these institutions, since he confirmed an expansion of the scheme and an additional £17 million in funding on 17^th March this year, in a move welcomed by Judges.

Family Law has its own issues and procedures, and lessons learned here will sometimes, necessarily, require translation into other domains of law, such as crime. But critically, the approach taken by the CFCs was emphatically focussed on ‘the voice of the child’, taking a less adversarial and more investigative, ‘problem-solving’ approach to dealing with the issues they faced. 

This bears emphasising as, in a criminal context, this can very easily get lost in the process of attempting to establish guilt or innocence, and the consequences which should follow. Even in a Youth Court, where there are procedural differences from dealing with an adult and there is a stronger presumption against immediate custodial sentences, the ‘voice of the child’ can easily be drowned out by the competing voice of the law and its institutions. 

This approach also requires a large amount of labour, investment and communication between stakeholders from the start, since one of its aims is to reduce the overall number of hearings as much as possible.