Today, Sadiq Khan the shadow justice secretary will announce that Labour would fundamentally reshape the criminal justice system for 18 to 20 year-olds.
At a speech at the Reform think tank, Khan will say that Labour’s aim is to reduce the number of young people within this age bracket that go to prison.
The crux of Khan’s plans lie in extending the current youth justice system for under-18 year-olds to young people aged 18, 19 and 20. This would mean extending the reach of the Youth Justice Board, which sees locally-run Youth Offending Teams working with adolescents who are given community orders, including intensive monitoring, mandatory work and curfews instead of short jail sentences, to young adults.
Khan will stress the fact that these reforms will not require spending increases but, as an IPPR report this week said, they have the potential to reduce re-offending and save the taxpayer millions.
Writing for the New Statesman, Khan explained the importance of extending the reach of the current system:
“For many young people, moving from adolescence to the cusp of adulthood sees support through the youth justice system stop, with young adults receiving no specific focus in the criminal justice system. Focusing attention on 18-20 year olds should help address what the House of Commons Justice Select Committee identified as a “period of high risk”‘
In his speech today, Khan will say that “this is an idea whose time has come“, and he will, in particular, champion the idea of locally-led initiatives that reduce re-offending and the numbers of young people in custody (following Miliband’s speech yesterday, another endorsement for moving powers away from Westminster):
“If we can re-create even a fraction of the success of the youth justice system, we’d cut crime, cut prison numbers and save the taxpayer money. This is a sensible step, building on what works, extending it to a decent chunk of the most prolific offenders. And, what’s more, working with another important group of first-time and repeat offenders.”
It’s a vote of confidence in locally led work to reduce re-offending and the numbers in custody. We will explore the workability and costs, but let me be clear… If we can recreate even a fraction of the success of the youth justice system, we’d cut crime, cut prison numbers and save the taxpayer money.
He will go on to say: “Devolving the budget for youth custody down to the local level could create a system that rewarded the agencies involved so that reductions in custody levels delivered a financial saving to local authorities. This would build on the current system whereby local authorities are now obliged to stump up the cost of custody for those on remand, which has incentivised them to do something to prevent this happening in the first place. It is a promising idea and one that we will certainly look at the feasibility of piloting should we win in 2015.”
While putting forward his own reform, Khan will lambast the current government’s plans to address youth offending rate. Talking about the government’s plan to introduce Secure Colleges – educational institutions for offenders – Khan will say that it is nothing “but a vanity project for Chris Grayling, a teenage Titan prison. There’s no evidence it’ll help reduce re-offending and, in fact, the fear is it will be a dangerous and violent place for many young people”.
He will also attack the current government’s privatisation of the probation services:
“By choosing to rip apart existing local working relationships, fragment supervision between two different organisations, introduce private companies with little or no track record of working in this area, they’ve opted for a system that’s never before operated in this or any other country. There’s been no piloting, no evaluation, no ironing out of the problems, no seeing if public safety might be put at risk. It’s evidence-free, ideologically driven codswallop.”
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