Meaningful decareration

Abolishing DTOs is the key to meaningful decarceration because they are the most frequently used custodial order for children, but generally aimed at non-serious offending, as they are short (between 4 and 24 months, where children are generally released into community supervision at the halfway stage) and can be used from the very young age of 12. However, following their introduction, custody use for children exploded, peaking at 3200 children in October 2002, demonstrating damaging over-use. Since that height, fortunately numbers have been dropping, with the latest figures showing an average of 440 children in custody at any one time. However, this drop masks the fact that the proportion of children being given immediate custody in court has remained stubbornly stagnant at 5-7%, suggesting that this reduction merely reflects more general falls in youth justice involvement for children rather than a concerted effort towards their decarceration in line with the UNCRC.

Five reasons why DTOs should be abolished

1. DTOs do not provide suitable education and training in custody, despite this being heralded as their raison d’être. Indeed, education provision in STCs and YOIs has been described as ‘woefully inadequate’. They’re particularly disadvantageous for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, with prescribed Local Authority funding halting at the prison gates, leaving the most vulnerable as the most abandoned.
2. DTOs are immoral and harmful, with custody for children acting as ‘institutional abuse’ by a ‘violent state’. Routine use of pain-inducing physical restraint, solitary confinement, bullying and violence have caused the closure of several disgraced custodial sites, and astonishing descriptions of Feltham A (still open) as being the ‘most violent’ prison in the UK. The closure of these institutions has created further difficulties for children sent there – very likely to be far from home, reducing the likelihood of family visits and good resettlement practice back into the community, bringing with it more damage to an already damaged cohort of children.
3. DTOs are ineffective, potentially even increasing their likelihood of reoffending on release. Children released from custody reoffend within a year at a rate of nearly 60%, which is significantly higher than for any other sentence. Given the significant fall in numbers receiving custody, many of the children who might previouslyhave been sent to prison (with its persistently high reoffending rate) are now receiving community sentences, for which the reoffending rate is much lower. This indicates that their likelihood of reoffending may well be directly related to the type of disposal received—those still receiving custody are more likely to reoffend partly because of that sentencing decision.
4. DTOs are NOT retained as a last resort, as required by the UNCRC, illustrated by the fact that children receive them for relatively minor offences. The most common period of time spent in custody is less than 3 months, indicating very minor offending, surely appropriate for a community order? Adding to this that nearly two thirds of children remanded to custody (required to stay in prison awaiting court dates) do not go on to receive a custodial outcome, even when found guilty, indicates a severe over-use of custody, in stark contrast to the principle of last resort.
5. DTOs are VERY expensive, with current costs of keeping a child in custody for a year ranging from £120,000 for a YOI to a staggering £330,000 for other provision, far outstripping the cost of community supervision. The extra public cost that this constitutes brings no benefit in terms of better outcomes, with higher reoffending after custody damaging both the children affected and the further ensuing victims.

So what is the alternative?

Community sentencing instead of prison terms can be tailored to children’s (and the community’s) needs, with Youth Rehabilitation Orders including a range of ‘requirements’ designed to support the child and thus reduce offending. Some requirements have been specifically designed as an ‘alternative to custody’, for example by applying ‘intensive supervision and surveillance’ or ‘intensive fostering’, both of which are robust enough for courts to already consider instead of a DTO.

Taking a lead from international examples shows that other nations are already well ahead of England and Wales in decarceration for children, without experiencing a feared spike in serious childhood offending. In Sweden, imprisonment of children requires demonstration of ‘exceptional circumstances’, whilst in Denmark notional custodial sentences for under-18s are generally served elsewhere than a prison (in the care of family or a hospital). Japan maintains a parens patriae attitude towards children, so they are rarely prosecuted at all, with only extremely serious crimes being dealt addressed with custodial outcomes (‘juvenile training school’). Most recently, Scotland has announced itself as a zero-custody nation for children, with a decree that no more under-18s will be sent to YOI (making use of ‘secure care’ instead, where deemed necessary). Whether this is semantics or not is unclear as yet, but even prior to this, Scotland did not have any custodial disposals available for children under 16, regardless of the crime committed.

These examples demonstrate that decarceration towards ‘last resort’ for children is an international project, and one that is long overdue in England and Wales.

Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here