Youth Crime
Targeting Young Offenders
The Home Office have announced plans to target a ‘hard core’ of juvenile offenders through the formation of a London Youth Crime Task Force and by introducing new powers of electronic tagging. This has been brought in to tackle the current high levels of violent crime and street crime.
The new tagging powers will be available to the courts where they believe that an offender is likely to commit another serious offence. The scheme will apply to 12 to 16 year olds who have either been granted bail or have been remanded to local authority accommodation.
Part of the bail conditions may require that the offender adheres to a curfew. The tags are used to ensure that the bail conditions are met. As soon as the person leaves their home the monitoring systems are alerted.
The theory behind this idea is based on is that in each borough there is believed to be a hard core of between 20 to 30 prolific offenders. If these can be targeted and kept off the streets during the hours when most offences are committed then crime in that area will fall.
Tagging of juveniles on bail will be implemented 6 areas on 22nd April 2002: Inner London, Greater Manchester, Northumbria, West Midlands, Thames Valley and Avon & Somerset. The national implementation date is 1st June 2002.
The scheme has met with opposition from the Howard League for Penal Reform who condemned the plans on the grounds that many young offenders are suffering from complex problems which are a result of their home life. They feel that locking an offender in an unstable home could endanger them. There is also concern that the tag could make some youngsters vulnerable and become a status symbol to others.
Home Office Minister John Denham will chair the London Youth Crime Task Force whose main aim will be to tackle violent street crime by making the agencies involved run more efficiently. This will hopefully result in quicker processing times from arrest to sentence. It also intends to look at the key stages of: intelligence gathering, detection, arrest, charge, remands, initiating and completing trials, securing convictions, ensuring appropriate sentences and programmes to support them.
The task force will initially concentrate on offenders aged between 10-18 who commit robbery offences in London although later it will start to look at youths who are charged with car thefts, shoplifting and robbery.
Last update: 15/09/03