Youth Justice Stats 2018/179
Last week (30 January 2020), the Youth Justice Board published statistics for the Youth Justice System (YJS) in England and Wales for the year ending March 2019 in terms of the number of children and young people (those aged 10 – 17) in the system, the offences they committed, the outcomes they received, their demographics and the trends over time.
The main findings are highlighted in the infographic below:

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