Keeping young offenders out of court
The reoffending rates for children are the highest in the criminal justice system, particularly for those receiving a short-term custodial sentence.
Being burdened with a criminal record from an early age can seriously affect a young person’s education, employment opportunities and increases their chances of reoffending.
So, what can we do to help young offenders leave crime behind?
A new vision for youth justice
The sentencing white paper aims to achieve more balance in the youth justice system. This has led to courts being able to hand out stronger community sentences to young offenders who commit non-violent crimes.
Youth Justice Services (YJS) works hard to divert low level youth offenders to choose a new pathway. However, to ensure long term success, they need IT systems and resources that can cope with the increase in workload that will come with more community sentences.
Joining the dots
Often, children entering the youth justice system have chaotic lives, experiencing domestic abuse, family breakdown, parental substance misuse plus they may be without fixed residency. They may be moving in and out of different local authority boundaries, and their files might not travel with them due to constraints of current IT systems and historic ways of working between agencies.
If officers have a complete history of the people they’re working with, it’s easier for them to identify and address the reasons why a young person is offending. With this information, they can carry out risk assessments in real time and provide the right intervention at the right time.
The Youth Justice Board’s Asset Plus framework ensures a snapshot assessment can be made periodically as a young person goes through the criminal justice system. However, on some case management systems this can be time consuming for the YJS’ officer to fill in.
By using innovative agile case management systems, YJS’ officers can update cases on the go and on any device, which frees up their time to give more targeted interventions to help keep young people on the right track.
Preventing crime
The consistency of supervision is key to providing effective support, as qualitative studies reveal young offenders value being listened to and believed in. Regular, face to face meetings play an important part in this. But with more young people being managed in the community, the increase in caseloads will make it hard for YJS to offer this level of interaction.
However, by using secure, video conferencing systems support workers could set up regular virtual meetings with young clients. Organising quick video check ins could give YSJ the ability to provide support while keeping workloads under control.
Better connected
Many young offenders are already known to a range of practitioners working in social services, education and health, as well as to the police. By enabling information to be shared between multiple agencies gives a 360-degree view to help effective interventions to be put in place.
Making an accurate risk assessment relies on all support workers having access to a shared cloud-based system. Imagine if a teacher could flag to other agencies that a young person has missed a number of days at school, which could turn out to be the missing link needed to establish they were at risk of being exploited by a criminal gang.
This technology will help to support close collaboration between multiple agencies, which is vital to ensure effective community-based supervision.
When authorised youth workers have access to real-time information, they can spot any warning signs to be able to improve interventions and ultimately, increase the chances of a young person rejecting crime to secure a better future.
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