Children and Young People in Custody (part 2): The Youth Secure Estate and Resettlement Contents

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1Introduction

1.Reducing the number of young people and children in the criminal justice system, especially in custody, has been one of the significant success stories of the past decade. However, that success in diverting many young offenders away from formal justice processes leaves those who remain within the system both more complex and more demanding, not least because those children and young people have mainly committed very serious offences. The life chances of those who would once have faced custody and are now dealt with by other means have significantly improved. Simultaneously, those who remain within the system pose substantial challenges for the staff who look after them, for a system that seeks to rehabilitate offenders into society, and for that wider society as a whole.

2.The number of children entering the youth justice system has dropped by 85% since March 2009. Some 70% fewer children and young people are held in the secure estate than were a decade ago; only a few hundred children are now in custody in England and Wales at any particular time. This report considers how responsive the estate is to the physical, mental, rehabilitative and personal needs of that small but increasingly complex cohort.

3.As we noted in the companion to this report, published in October 2020, the youth justice system has been often reviewed in the past five years.1 Most notably, the 2016 Taylor Review recommended extensive change and the subsequent Lammy Review, published September 2017, raised significant concerns about race disproportionality.

4.This second part of our inquiry examines changes in the youth justice population and progress made in reforming the system. Our first report covered changes to the youth justice population, and entry into the system, focusing on diversion from formal criminal justice processing and youth courts. Here, we consider in particular the suitability of the custodial estate and resettlement of children from custody to the wider community.