2nd opinion: Too little, too late

On 9 August, 14-year-old Adam Rickwood committed suicide at the Hassockfield secure training centre in County Durham – the youngest person to die in custody in this country. This tragedy has raised public interest in the youth justice system, and rightly so.

I am a member of the Youth Justice Board, the statutory agency responsible for young offenders. I recently visited the new Oakhill secure training centre at Milton Keynes, where I was impressed by the well-equipped learning block, the recreational facilities and the effort made to avoid the oppressive, institutional feel of most prisons. The rooms were large and bright and designed to make self-harm as close to impossible as can be.

I left with mixed emotions: pleased the Youth Justice Board was opening such a fine centre, yet feeling something was profoundly wrong.

The young people in Oakhill will mostly come from very deprived backgrounds. Many would have been helped by more resources for their education, or from having a decent home or more support for their families.

Yet, having failed to do enough of these things to help them prepare for a fulfilling life, no expense is spared to stop them taking their lives or self-harming when they are locked up. Surely something is wrong where lavish sums of money are spent on them, but only after they are convicted: a place in a secure training centre costs £100,000 a year; local authority-run secure children’s homes, which provide more intensive support, cost even more.

We know the factors that put young people at most risk of offending and we know that intervention at an earlier stage is more likely to be successful than waiting until someone has multiple convictions.

In the past few years, the 155 locally based youth offending teams have developed a range of successful programmes for young offenders. These include providing mentors, organising summer activities for those at most risk of offending and arranging classes for parents. “Restorative justice” is a key element, where young offenders meet the victims of their crime.

Yet much more needs to be done. For example, young people formally excluded from school are known to be at high risk of offending but less well acknowledged is what happens with the large number of young people who simply go missing from school and get no formal education.

We need services aimed at the many thousands of young people who are not getting an adequate education. There are people with the skills and commitment to do this; they should get the resources they need.

The recent spending review allocated more money to programmes for preventing offending, but there are fiercely competing demands for public expenditure. Polls show public support for spending more on tackling crime – this usually means more police officers on the beat. It is more difficult to secure support for those preventive or remedial services whose benefits will only be seen years into the future.

Housing professionals can make a difference by developing socially balanced communities, working with non-housing agencies to help young people and their parents, providing supported housing for vulnerable young people, and by applying antisocial behaviour orders and approved behaviour contracts in a more sensitive manner. And we can all help by voting for politicians who support long-term measures to prevent offending and not simply punishment for offenders.

It won’t bring Adam back; but it would be a fitting legacy for a young life that was so tragically wasted.