Statistics published by the Ministry of Justice in August (summarised in Appendix 1) indicate that the number of young adults aged 18-24 in prison or serving a community sentence has fallen by more than a third since 2011. The statistics also suggest that the proportion of young adults within the whole caseload has also dropped, by nearly 10%.

To inform its Transition to Adulthood (T2A) initiative and the T2A Alliance campaign, the Barrow Cadbury Trust would like to commission an analysis to understand the reasons for this decline.

We would like the final report to relate to the jurisdiction of England and Wales, and include data last 10 years. The analysis would be likely to cover the following issues (and potentially others):

• What has been the extent of the decline in the number of young adults subject to arrest, under probation supervision and in prison (remand and sentenced)?
• To what extent might other criminal justice factors have affected this decline – e.g. changes to police practices (e.g. arrest rates), changes to sentencing guidelines (e.g. the inclusion of ‘lack of maturity’ as a mitigating factor), or diversion schemes?
• To what extent might sentencing decisions have contributed to this decline (e.g. has there been a reduction in the use of community sentences or short prison sentences)?
• What impact might the fall in the number of children entering the youth justice system have on the decline in the number of young adults?
• What are the gender and race dimensions to this decline (and has there been any disproportionality by race or gender)?
• Was this decline been more significant for young adults than other age groups?
• Was there a decline in the number of young adults in the general population that may have had an impact on this decline?
• Is there any evidence of a similar decline internationally?

The budget available for this piece of work is up to £10,000, and is most likely to suit a university academic or consultancy based in the United Kingdom. The Ministry of Justice has indicated its support for the project and in facilitating access to data.

Please submit a proposal of up to two sides of A4, setting out:

• How you would approach this project;
• Your track record in delivering work of this kind (both in terms of the task and the focus on people in the criminal justice system) and;
• Brief details of the staff member(s) who would be involved.

Submissions should be sent to Max Rutherford, Criminal Justice Programme Manager at the Barrow Cadbury Trust by Friday 5^th January 2018 on [email protected]

A decision will be made by the end of January. We hope that the project would start in February 2018 and be completed within four months.

Appendix 1

The number of young adults aged 18-24 serving community sentences reduced by 40% in 5 years. In 2011, 54,262 young adults were serving either a community order or a suspended sentence order, accounting for 33% of all adults serving community sentences. In 2016, this dropped to 31,846, 25% of the total.

In prison, there was a 31% drop in number of young adults aged 18-24 in prison between 30 June 2011 and 30 June 2017. In 2011, 21,974 young adults aged 18-24 were in prison (26% of the total prison population), while in 2017 the number had reduced to 14,963 (17% of total).

These and other statistics can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2017

A significant new research study by the Ministry of Justice firmly supports T2A’s long-standing campaign objective that criminal justice agencies need to take account of young adults’ maturity in service design and delivery. This was also a key recommendation of the House of Commons Justice Select Committee in its inquiry on Young Adult Offenders in 2016.

It summaries the government’s research in developing and validating a new screening tool for psychosocial maturity for adult men serving prison sentences.

“This study suggests that it is possible to screen for maturity in a meaningful way, using a tool derived from OASys items.

The fact that there appears to be a strong relationship between maturity, risk and proven reoffending outcomes underlines the need to take into account maturity in the management of men who have committed crime.

This tool could usefully be used to better understand and respond to the needs of this group, and to support decisions about the commissioning of interventions, and sentence planning for young adults.

Combining assessment of risk of reoffending with the assessment of maturity, could help to target interventions to those most in need, and most likely to benefit from, intervention.

Implementation plans need to consider the benefits of the information this tool could provide in responding to the needs of younger adults in prison, against the resource and training implications of use.”

Key findings

• A ten-item maturity screening tool was created from factor analysis of items from the Offender Assessment System (OASys). The tool was found to be valid and reliable.
• Scores on the OASys maturity screening tool were correlated significantly with age and with risk of reoffending.
• The OASys maturity screening tool improved the ability of a static risk assessment tool and age in predicting oneyear proven reoffending rates.
• Those who were less mature according to the OASys maturity screening tool were younger in age, and were a higher risk of proven reoffending than those who were more mature. Less mature individuals had higher rates of proven reoffending than were predicted by their OGRS3 scores. The reoffending rates of the more mature individuals were in line with those predicted by their OGRS3 scores.
• The OASys maturity screening tool has potential to inform the commissioning of appropriate services and interventions by identifying those who have lower psychosocial maturity.
• The relationship observed between maturity and proven reoffending suggests there would be value in incorporating assessment of maturity into the management of young adult men convicted of crime, so that issues relating to maturity can be appropriately addressed.

A distinct approach to young adults is tough on crime and a high-return investment, says Max Rutherford from Barrow Cadbury Trust

Three years ago, six projects set out to demonstrate the effectiveness of a ‘whole pathway’ approach to young adults involved in crime – from point of arrest to release from prison. Manchester Metropolitan University’s (MMU) independent evaluation of this ‘T2A Pathway’, published today, tells the story of these projects from design to delivery during a time when local services faced unprecedented turmoil and austerity.

It highlights the extraordinary resilience, flexibility and skill of voluntary sector organisations in meeting the needs of society’s most vulnerable people, turning young lives around and pulling them back from the brink of a life of crime, self-harm, addiction and, for many, an early death.

A distinct approach to young adults that is tough on crime

What the T2A Pathway delivered was unequivocally “tough on crime”. There’s nothing soft about intervening to calm down a young man wielding a samurai sword in a park full of children. There’s nothing fluffy about coming to the aid of a brain-injured young man who, every day, sits naked on a bridge and threatens to throw himself off. It’s not a charitable nicety to secure a safe place to live for a teenage mother and her new-born child who are both at high risk of sexual and physical abuse.

Commissioning services for 16-25 year olds that enable them to address their behaviour and turn their lives around is not do-gooding – it’s a high-return investment. No other age group is more likely to desist from crime, and no other group of adults has as much life still ahead of them. All of the 414 young people supported by the projects were causing harm to their communities (three quarters already had criminal records) and even more harm to themselves.

The evaluation is further evidence of the unmatchable value to people with complex needs of relationship-based, intensive support. This doesn’t mean services that are either high-cost or slow – quite the opposite. Services were described as “quicker” and “tailor made”, in comparison to statutory provision.

Benefits to other agencies

Of course, the work of projects like these benefits criminal justice agencies – reducing offending, avoiding breach and increasing compliance – all big wins for the police, courts, probation and prisons. It saves money, reduces crime and, perhaps most persuasive, saves these agencies precious time. As a police borough commander put it to me in conversation, “these projects help us spend more time catching bad guys”.

Yet it’s a direct benefit to other agencies too – mental health services (many of which have raised their thresholds to unreachable heights for young people) won’t have to pick up the pieces of acute crises; social care and child protection services won’t have to take as many children into care.

Gender and race

Nearly a third of the young adults supported by the projects were female, and one project was women-only. These teenage and young adult women had even more needs than the young men: 63% had experienced abuse, rape or domestic violence, and 15% had been involved in sex work. The evaluation reports great additional benefit from a gender-specific approach within the young adult focus.

A third of the young adults were BAME, with a higher rate in the prison-based projects than the community-based projects. A concern arising from the evaluation is disproportionately low levels of referral of young BAME men, in particular, by statutory agencies to voluntary sector services -, raising questions about the ability to meet the cultural, faith and ethnicity needs of this group -compared to referrals of young white men.

Sustainability

The most effective projects shared some common features in their structure and design, such as having a clearly defined distinct offer for young adults, strong partnerships in place from the beginning and a referral criteria and process that was co-designed by the project team and the referring agencies.

Sustainability of the projects beyond the pilot phase was universally tough at a time of continually shrinking budgets. Two projects were incorporated into the delivery model of a wider contract by the lead charity, two came to an end, and two secured further funding to carry on as they were. A reconviction study and economic analysis from MMU will conclude later this year, and be published in early 2018.

Wider impact

As a collective, T2A Pathway projects contributed evidence to the House of Commons Justice Select Committee’s inquiry on Young Adult Offenders, which concluded in 2016 that there is “overwhelming evidence” in support of a distinct approach to young adults throughout the criminal justice system. Professionals and young people from the projects spoke at national conferences and local events alongside politicians, Police and Crime Commissioners and senior officials. The projects took part in an array of pioneering research projects, including ones on brain injury, bereavement and race equality.

The projects’ legacy is still emerging, but it is clear they have already delivered immense impact, not only on the lives of hundreds of young people and their communities, but also on the people who work with them, and on those who make the policies.

This blog was written by Max Rutherford, Criminal Justice Programme Manager at the Barrow Cadbury Trust in response to the Final Process Evaluation report of the T2A Pathway (which can be read here). For more information email Max at [email protected]

The final process evaluation of the T2A Pathway initiative is published today. The report, from the Policy, Evaluation and Research Unit (PERU) at Manchester Metropolitan University, highlights the benefits of a distinct approach to young adults involved in crime throughout the criminal justice process. It also identifies the important role, skill and resilience of the voluntary sector in supporting young people with complex needs at a time of unprecedented reform and budget constraint.

The T2A Pathway initiative, 6 projects led by charities in partnership with statutory services, delivered services to 16-25 year olds across sites in England between 2014-2017. The projects worked with young adults at the point of arrest, pre-court, in prison and on release. Each project had a specialist focus, such as family engagement, mental health treatment and drug abuse.

The projects worked with 414 young people over three years:

• On average the young adults had four ‘criminogenic needs’ (factors that directly contributed to criminal behaviour);
• Three quarters already had criminal records;
• 30% were young women, most of whom had experienced abuse, rape or domestic violence;
• 15% were of ethnicities other than white British

The report found that the T2A Pathway projects:

• Offered a flexible, intensive, relationship-based intervention to young people with highly complex and urgent needs;
• Were particularly effective from the start where they had multi-agency support and referral arrangements that had been jointly designed;
• Helped to change the culture of statutory partners, successfully embedding a young adult focus into mainstream practice;
• Influenced national policy (such as the House of Commons Justice Select Committee’s inquiry on Young Adult Offenders).

Kevin Wong one of the authors of the report, Associate Director of the Policy Evaluation and Research Unit (PERU) from Manchester Metropolitan University said:

“The evaluation has identified valuable lessons for commissioners and service providers in: designing, setting up and implementing services for young adults with complex needs.  Chief amongst these being: A responsive commissioning and programme management process and providing the space and time for the services find the best way to work with young adults with  complex needs”

Sara Llewellin, CEO of the Barrow Cadbury Trust (which commissioned the research and the T2A Pathway initiative) said:

“These projects fulfilled the brief to demonstrate how a ‘whole pathway’ approach to young adults involved in crime can work to deliver an effective approach throughout the criminal justice system. The skill and dedication of each charity’s professional staff, working with statutory partners, helped turn around the lives of so many young people, and contributed to the evidence base that the Justice Committee called “irrefutable”. We are pleased that several of the project models have already become part of mainstream practice. The T2A Pathway legacy will be impactful and long-lasting change, both for many hundreds of individuals and the system as a whole.”

The report is based on 142 interviews with professionals (103) and young people (39) with direct involvement in the projects. Economic and reconviction analyses will be published in early 2018.

The report is available to download here

A blog about the evaluation report by Max Rutherford, Criminal Justice Programme Manager at the Barrow Cadbury Trust can be read here.

T2A Pathway projects: Main areas of focus and location map

New statistics published by the Ministry of Justice have revealed that the number of young adults aged 18-24 in prison or serving a community sentences has fallen by more than a third since 2011. Their proportion as a share of the total caseload has also dropped by nearly 10%.

The number of young adults aged 18-24 serving community sentences is down by 40% in 5 years. In 2011, 54,262 young adults were serving either a community order or a suspended sentence order, accounting for 33% of all adults serving community sentences. In 2016, this had dropped to 31,846, 25% of the total.

In prison, the downward trend has been similarly dramatic. There was a 31% drop in number of young adults aged 18-24 in prison between 30 June 2011 and 30 June 2017. In 2011, 21,974 young adults aged 18-24 were in prison (26% of the total prison population), while in 2017 the number had reduced to 14,963 (17% of total).

Last year, the Justice Select Committee called upon the government to pursue a distinct approach for all young adults throughout the criminal justice process. David Lammy’s Report last week called on the government to extend the youth justice system beyond 18. While these structural and legislative changes are still some way off, the significant progress made in recent years to divert young adults away from the acute end of the criminal justice system is clear to see.

All of these statistics (published August 2017), and many more, can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2017

T2A welcomes the findings and recommendations of the Lammy Review published today.

Whilst the number of young adults in the prison population has decreased, the proportion of BAME young adults has risen.  T2A is very concerned by this growing disproportionality of BAME young adults in the criminal justice system and in particular the prison population. It is also vital that the ‘double disadvantage’ faced by BAME women in the CJS is recognised and addressed. The government’s response to this Review will be crucial in addressing these longstanding disparities.

The Review is right to identify the specific needs of young adults, and its recommendations for policy and practice reform would go some of the way towards T2A’s aim of promoting and disseminating the evidence for a distinct approach to the 18-25 young adult population involved in the CJS.

In particular, T2A supports the proposal that every young adults’ maturity should be taken into account in criminal justice decision-making. This reflects evidence from neuroscience that shows young adults’ brains are not fully developed until the mid-20s.

T2A also welcomes the recommendation that professionals have the option of “extending the support structures of the youth justice system for offenders over the age of 18 who are judged to have low levels of maturity”. This is a common-sense approach that has been tried and tested in most European countries, where youth justice routinely extends beyond 18, and in some cases well into the late 20s.

T2A and its partners await the official response to the Review with interest, and will seek to support its implementation

Today, HM Inspectorate of Prisons published its report on a young adult prison, HMYOI Aylesbury. A summary of the findings are below.

1. YOI Aylesbury holds 440 of the longest sentenced 18-20 year olds the English prison system, including young adults serving life sentences
2. Nearly two-thirds of the young people reported feeling unsafe, and there were high levels of sometimes very serious violence
3. The Inspectorate reports “a combination of volatile and frustrated young people locked up for long periods with no activity”
4. There were “too few staff and many who were inexperienced” and that “good staff were overwhelmed with work and unable to focus”
5. Staff told HMIP:“Aylesbury will always be a violent place”. HMIP states “fatalism about unacceptable levels of violence needed to change”
6. During the working day 2 out of 5 young men were locked in their cells and a quarter of prisoners were unemployed
7. HMIP report that the young adults in this prison get only 30 minutes a day exercise in the open air
8. A third of young men there are waiting for a transfer to the adult estate where they will continue their long prison sentences elsewhere
9. Mechanisms of accountability for the very high use of force had effectively broken down, and management oversight was very poor
10. HMIP found that hundreds of officers’ accounts of use of force, which should have been completed immediately, had not been done at all
11. Since 2015 there were improvements in measures on ‘respect’. Health care and chaplaincy staff were particularly effective
12. Inspectors found young men behaved well when they could attend workshops &  education, where they were able to engage in purposeful work
13. Despite many problems HMIP found areas of considerable potential. Most staff appeared remarkably resilient & want to improve the prison
14. There was some excellent innovation eg coffee roasting & retail shop, giving prisoners valuable skills in realistic work environments
15. Aylesbury YOI continued to provide outstanding support to some of the most vulnerable and troubled young men in the prison estate
16. The full HMIP report on HMYOI Aylesbury can be found at: https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprisons/

‘Race and the Criminal Justice System: Hearing from Young Adults’ is the first report from the T2A Young Adult Advisory Group and Leaders Unlocked.  The T2A Young Adult Advisory Group is an innovative project enabling young adults with personal experience of the criminal justice system, such as a personal or family experience or engagement with the police, to have a national voice on policy.

In their first year, the group chose race and the criminal justice system as their first priority because it tied in with a number of current national developments, such as the Lammy Review and the Young Review. The report details the Advisory Group’s findings from peer-to-peer research carried out with 90 young adults across the country – including peer interviews in prisons, focus groups with Youth Offending Teams, homeless organisations and community groups.

The Group’s aims were to:
•Understand whether, and how, participants feel their racial, ethnic and religious identity affected these experiences.
•Explore participants’ views on trust in the CJS.
•Involve participants in the development of solutions for policy makers.
•Gather personal testimonies from BAME (Black Asian and Minority Ethnic) young adults of their experiences of policing and criminal justice.

The Sentencing Council should work towards developing formal sentencing principles for young adults, similar to the principles that are in place for children, says a report published by the Howard League for Penal Reform and  T2A.

The report, Judging Maturity: Exploring the role of maturity in the sentencing of young adults analysed 174 court judgments in cases involving young adults, focusing on how judges considered the concept of maturity. The findings suggest that the age and maturity of young adult defendants are not sufficiently considered by the courts at present. However, the research also shows that where a young adult’s immaturity is raised by court professionals, the courts are well placed to factor it in to achieve better outcomes – and more likely to do so if sentencing guidance encourages it.

There is substantial evidence that young adults – aged 18 to 25 – should be treated as a distinct group from older adults, largely because they are still maturing – neuroscience research has proven that brain development continues well into the mid-20s. Reaching adulthood is a process, not an event, and the key markers of adulthood, such as independent living, employment and establishing relationships, happen at different times for different young people.

Young adults are more likely to be caught up in the criminal justice system than older adults. They face significant difficulties coping in prison, where both the suicide rate and violence rates are higher among their age group than among the prison population as a whole, and they have higher reconviction rates following release than older adults. Between 2006 and 2016, 164 people aged 18 to 24 died in custody, including 136 who died by suicide.

While there is a wealth of guidance and case law concerning the sentencing of children, there is no set of principles to ensure that judges take a tailored approach to sentencing young adults. Tens of thousands of young adults who appear before the courts for sentencing each year could benefit from a distinct approach.

Roger Grimshaw, Research Director at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) carried out research for T2A into how practitioners have been using T2A’s ‘Taking Account of Maturity’ guide which was published in 2013.  His findings have just been published in his report ‘Making Sense of Maturity’.  

In the publication Making Sense of Maturity, research with practitioners and managers shows ways in which the Guide was disseminated and embraced within probation services, and how they see it in the present context. We wanted to find out how the Guide was being used to develop frontline probation practice, to discover any ‘ripple’ effects (for example, on other agencies), to provide a template for monitoring use of the Guide and to scope out directions for future guidance.

Because fieldwork started in 2014, at the point when Transforming Rehabilitation brought abrupt structural changes, the research was delayed as probation grappled with its new priorities. Later, it proved possible to listen to practitioners who were operating with the Guide in the new context that prevails today. Amid the turbulence, the buy-in of senior management to promoting a maturity agenda was a factor in making the Guide a part of practice with young adults, though not all probation areas will have followed the same path. The Guide’s use was enhanced by practice briefings and support which could then chime with organisational delivery, especially by specialist teams.

Maturity looks different from the point of view of probation practice, because there are specific social pathways that have created challenges to the maturity of young adults under supervision.

‘So maturity is fundamental, it’s absolutely fundamental. About 30% of our young people have been in care. 50% of them didn’t finish school. Out of the 50% that did, only 5% got a formal qualification. So the rites of passage that you would normally associate with teenage growth and maturity, they just haven’t hit those milestones.’ (Probation manager)

Missing out on education, going through the care system, having difficulty communicating with agencies: these are just some of the experiences that need to be properly understood. Good communication and the development of trust are vital if young adults are to be engaged. Hence caseloads have to be adjusted to allow time for this sensitive work and other agencies must be fully engaged.

Crucially, the future health of maturity initiatives in probation depends on: an active strategic commitment to developing practice sensitive to the maturity of young adults; and an awareness of the pathways and milestones that a well-informed social policy binding together all agencies should address. If practitioners want to turn those conditions into reality, our research will give them plenty of ammunition and evidence.