Campaigning to end the unnecessary imprisonment of children
If we want to create safer communities, we need to radically rethink youth custody and the imprisonment of children.
According to the latest Youth Justice statistics, the reoffending rate remains highest for those released from custody. This is consistent with the pattern for the last 10 years. For children released from custody in the year ending March 2023, 66.1% reoffended.
This isn’t necessarily surprising when you look at the environment children are being exposed to and the lack of resources and support available to help steer them onto the right path.
The latest Children in Custody HM Inspectorates of Prison report revealed just one Young Offender Institution (YOI) out of four that was judged to be ‘safe’. It also highlighted that no YOIs had good enough education provision for the children they held.
It’s important to remember that in the year ending March 2024, 62% of children remanded to custody (when a child is held in prison while they await their trial or sentence) did not go on to receive a custodial sentence. Not only does this mean their freedom was deprived unnecessarily, but they also experienced disruptions to their education and were exposed to a traumatic environment, too.
How can we create safer communities when children are being held unnecessarily in custody and are not being given the effective support they need to transform their lives?
This is a question we asked ourselves and those working in the youth justice sector. The answer led us to pursue our new campaign work.
Campaigning to reduce the use of youth custody
Children should only be held in custody when it is absolutely essential. But too many people under the age of 18 are still being placed in custody despite them posing no serious or continuing risk to the public.
We want to change that and encourage more effective, community-based solutions to addressing the root cause of children’s behaviour so they can thrive.
Over the next 3 years, we will be partnering with two youth justice organisations to reduce the damaging impact that youth custody is having on children.
We will do this by :
- Campaigning to end the unnecessary use of custodial sentences (where a young person serves their sentence in either a Young Offender Institution, Secure Training Centre, Secure Children’s Home or Secure School)
- Calling for an end to the unnecessary use of custodial remand.
By supporting under-18s in the community, rather than exposing them to the harmful effects of custody, we can help young people flourish into happy and productive members of our communities. This will help us achieve our vision of creating safer communities.
Guided by young people and those with lived experience
We didn’t make this decision on our own.
Young people helped shape our organisational strategy, so it was important to involve them in our campaign strategy work too.
Find out how we did this by reading my LinkedIn article here.
A huge thank you to our Future Communities Collective, especially those who sit on our Campaign Working Group, and the justice experienced young people we spoke to who’ve played an important role in shaping our campaign work to date.
Next steps
We’ll be working with our new campaign partners over the next couple of months to identify key opportunities that will help us bring about much-needed change to youth justice.
Explore the resources on our new campaign landing page to understand why it’s important to keep children out of youth custody.
Follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with our campaign work and how you can support us. We’ll also be revealing our new campaign partners on social media later this week, too!