How do we deal with young rioters?

By Martin McCluskey / @martinmccluskey

We’re now just two weeks on from the start of the riots that brought chaos to the centres of many English cities, and while everyone is still struggling to provide a definitive answer to the question of why the riots took place, we’re beginning to get a clearer picture of who was behind them.

In among the reams of data that the Guardian’s datablog has put together with records from Magistrates Courts across the country, the one figure that struck me was that just over 25% of offenders were between the ages of 11 and 17. Given that the data the Guardian had access to covered only around 1000 of the cases prosecuted, and that earlier reports suggested that around half of defendants in London courts were under 18, the final figure is likely to be higher.

The images of children as young as 11 walking in and out of courts across our country has rightly prompted a serious debate about what is going wrong in parts of our society. However, there seems to have been no discussion about how we deal with these children now they’re in the criminal justice system and absolutely no nuance in the debate over the punishment of rioters that has distinguished between adult and child offenders.

Since I moved to London in 2008, I’ve been a community panel member at a youth offending service in South London, dealing with children and young people given referral orders by the courts and sent to their local youth offending service. Referral orders were introduced by Labour in 2000 and were intended to bring the principles of restorative justice to the heart of the youth justice system.

Referral Orders aren’t just about community service. They deal with all aspects of offending behaviour: young people agree to a contract of work that includes payback to the community, contact with the victim of their crime to make them understand the consequences of their actions and regular intensive contact with specialist workers from the Youth Offending Service. All this is done while keeping young people in school (attendance normally forms part of the contract) and with their families (who are also offered parenting support). If the contract is breached, they’re returned to court to face likely time in custody.

This approach couldn’t be more different to custodial sentences. For young offenders who have committed crimes of the type we saw during the riots, jail terms will be relatively short, allow next to no rehabilitation work to take place and will likely introduce young people to more criminals than they have ever had contact with in their own communities. Data also shows that custodial sentences offer the worst outcomes in terms of re-offending, with those exiting a Young Offenders Institute almost three times more likely to re-offend than someone finishing a referral order.

When it comes to young people, “hang ’em and flog ’em” justice is going to get us nowhere. Britain already has one of the toughest penal systems for children of any developed country: the average number of under 18s in prison at any one time has jumped from 327 in 1991 to 2,040 in May 2011 and we hand out around 7,000 prison sentences to children each year. This at a time when we still have higher rates of youth offending than most European countries. Despite this, the response of the government (and many on the Labour benches), has been to call for longer sentences for everyone, including under-18s, involved in the riots. The evidence shows us that most of the young people who were rioting two weeks ago grew up in a society that more often resorts to prison for punishment, but it doesn’t seem to have deterred them. This should be a wake up call to anyone involved in developing youth justice policy and devising systems that work.

When it comes to young first time offenders, intensive community based sentences are invariably going to be more successful in reducing re-offending. That’s because they offer some of the support that is often lacking from a chaotic home life. Namely, stability and routine, positive role models and guidance to help them deal with the behaviour that leads them to offend. It also says to young people with no previous criminal record who have admitted to their crimes that society is willing to give them a chance to get their life back on track.

We may in some way be satisfied by images of under-18s being sent down at the end of a trial, but we have to ask ourselves if this really is the “tough” option and whether it’s going to achieve what we want it to. My argument is that it’s not and it won’t. These crimes were committed against individual communities and it’s in those communities where the impact has been felt. For young people who have never faced the consequences of their actions, putting them face to face with victims and members of the community is a far tougher sentence than allowing them to languish in a cell for a few months and escape without paying back their communities or facing the victims whose lives they’ve ruined.