Youth Justice News

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s, the level of child imprisonment in England and Wales rose rapidly with youth justice decision-making firmly under the sway of what has become known as the ‘punitive turn’. Although the use of custodial sentences declined a little in the early part of the next decade, the population of the children’s secure estate remained stubbornly high as a consequence of an increase in average sentence length and continued rises in the number of children subject to custodial remand. The extent of child incarceration accordingly attracted repeated criticism from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child which, as recently as 2008, noted that detention of liberty was not being used as a measure of last resort as required by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. From that year, however, there was a marked shift in trajectory, initiating a sharp decline which has continued to the present day. Although consistent figures are not available over the whole period, it seems clear that the number of children in custody is currently substantially lower than that immediately prior to the start of the inflationary trend triggered by the punitivism of the final decade of the last century. Figures prior 1992 cannot be compared with later data because 17-year-olds were treated as adults for criminal justice purposes until that year. Statistics for the population of children in custody at any one time are only available from 2000 onwards; reliable remand figures are also not obtainable over the whole period. An outline of trends can however be derived from the number of children sentenced to imprisonment each year. As Table 1 indicates, there was a 77 per cent rise in the number of custodial disposals imposed on children between 1992 and 1997. There was a further modest increase of 6 per cent over the next 5 years before the onset of a period of decline which has accelerated rapidly over the most recent decade. In 2019, the number of child custodial sentences was less than one-third of that recorded in 1992. As indicated earlier, population data are available from the turn of the century, showing the number of children detained through the youth justice system at any one time, rather