Youth Justice and Criminal Justice

Abstract

To judge by the excessive use of custody, youth and criminal justice in the UK remains overpunitive. An unacceptably high number of young offenders continue to be locked up, including some in prison. In the adult sector, an excessive number of minor, including first, offenders are imprisoned. Meanwhile, the number of life sentence prisoners — currently 4,000, the highest total in recorded history — has grown by ten times over the past 30 years, exceeding the total for the rest of Western Europe put together and growing at more than 300 per year. We can expect the equivalent of ten prisons to be catering for more than 7,000 pensioner prisoners serving life or very long sentences, a decade from now. By the criteria used by officials themselves — reconviction rates, cost, cleanliness — prison is not effective.KeywordsCriminal JusticeCriminal Justice SystemProbation OfficerLabour GovernmentYoung OffenderThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.