The State of Youth Justice 2020

Youth crime down

One of the key issues emerging from the statistics is that youth crime keeps on falling:

• The number of children who received a caution or sentence has fallen by 83% over the last ten years, with a 19% fall in the last year.
• The number of first time entrants has fallen by 85% since the year ending March 2009, with an 18% fall since the year ending March 2018.
• There was a 1% decrease in knife and offensive weapon offences compared with the previous year after four year-on-year increases.
• The reoffending rate decreased by 2.5 percentage points in the last year, although it remains higher than ten years ago (when it was 37.1%).

Areas of concern

However, there was also plenty of less pleasing news:

• The number of children held in youth custody on remand increased by 12% in the last year and accounted for 28% of all children in youth custody.
• The average custodial sentence length given to children increased by more than six months over the last ten years, from 11.4 to 17.7 months.
• The number of Restrictive Physical Interventions increased by 16% in the last year, to around 6,300 incidents. The number of self harm incidents has increased by 3%, to around 1,800. For both measures, this is the highest number of incidents in the last five years.