Children should not be in the criminal justice system

How we rescued hundreds of thousands of children from the toxic and failing criminal justice system

This is a version of the speeches I gave in Stockholm as part of the symposium to celebrate being awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology and the presentation to the criminology department in the University of Stockholm.

It was a huge honour to be awarded the Prize and to share it with the hero, Professor Bryan Stevenson.

I talked about children in conflict with the law and the work I did to keep them out of the criminal justice system. The work brought together research, policy development, relationships with academics and criminal justice leaders and campaigning.

In a world where inequality, planet degradation, authoritarianism and in the words of Antonio Guterres at the United Nations, a world becoming unhinged, it is all too easy to focus on and blame the weakest, and that is often children and young people.

So to put in in context: In the UK there are 4.5 million children living in poverty. That is nearly a third of all our children.

The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is 10 so all my statistics relate to children aged 10 to 17. The law treats a child from aged 10 the same as an adult. A child is deemed able to know the difference between not just right and wrong, but the various subtle gradations of wrong doing. The child is deemed able to judge the consequences of their actions, both in terms of individual harm and the response of the state to what they have done.

In 1999 the Blair government set up a Youth Justice Board to oversee children in conflict with the law. In each local authority area there were committees comprising police, social workers, probation and other professionals. But instead of keeping children out of the system, because they wanted to help children, they sucked more hundreds of thousands into the criminal justice ambit instead of keeping them out.

Over 100,000 children were in the Youth Justice Board caseload by 2009.

The number of children in penal custody exploded with nearly 3,000 children in penal custody at any given time.

There are different places of detention for children. Prisons that hold the majority of children, boys aged 15 to 17.

Secure training centres were run by private security companies for profit, three of these have been closed down because they were so dreadful.

Local authorities run secure accommodation which are small, very expensive specialist centres that have a track record of helping the few most vulnerable, damaged and dangerous younger children.

A new centre has just opened called a secure school, costing £40million but is in deep trouble already and is restricted to nine children.

These institutions now account for about 450 children.

The number of children going through has been much higher, around 10,000, as they often spent only a few months in custody.

Prison conditions are dire. Food is terrible. Cells are sordid.

Physical and violent restraint by staff on children is common.

Children have taken their own lives, and one 15 year old died whilst being held down by security guard.

During the 1990s and 2000s everyone in the reform world was casting about looking for ways to reduce the use of penal custody.

There were attempts in Parliament to raise the age of criminal responsibility but no government, not the Labour government nor the Coalition of 2010 would consider it.

The standards of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommends 14 and bravo Sweden which is above that, at 15. Although I understand that there are moves to reduce it to 14 which would be a terrible mistake as Denmark found when it took it to 14 and had to increase it again to 15.

I led the Howard League from 1986 until 2021, some 35 years, and it had always focussed on children. If we can keep them out of trouble and out of the criminal justice and penal systems, we have probably kept them out for life. That way we prevent victims and help to create a safer community.

The charity carried out its own research and worked in partnership with academics from universities.

We had a legal team with lawyers working on children and young adults in custody, taking individual cases to improve their treatment and test cases to reform the system.

One of our best successes was a case that forced the whole prison system to recognise that children in custody (and that included refugee children) come under the protection of civil legislation like the Children Act.

Our legal team took hundreds of cases of children, challenging the use of solitary confinement, restraint, recall and appeals.

We ran campaigns to prevent deaths and suicides in prison, reduce the unnecessary use of prison, conditions, and worked in the community to improve education about human rights.

What I focused on during my talk in Stockholm was the work with the police to keep children out of the criminal justice system althogethr. Once they are inside the system it is all too easy to stay there, tumbling down the abyss into jail.

I realised that in order to cut prison numbers we had to stop children entering the system in the first place. The criminal justice system is a sausage factory, forcing the weak and annoying into an end product that is unpalatable.

If we could not get politicians to curtail the inflow of children to a system that was damaging, we had to stem the flow some other way.

So I turned to the police. They are the entry point to the whole imbroglio.

The thing about the police is they do as they are told. It is a disciplined force. So I had to get the top brass to lead on this.

We have 43 separate police forces who all do things differently. There are national bodies guiding their policies and practices, but each force is still pretty independent and can innovate and create its own systems.

I started by scoping the problem and carrying out some basic research.

Edinburgh University had carried out a longitudinal study of 4,000 children which showed that early identification of at-risk children is imprecise, and the inappropriate use of police intervention stigmatises children having counter-productive impacts.

In 2013 we gathered the statistics from England and Wales. From 2008 to 2011 the police in England and Wales carried out more than a million child arrests.

Arrest is critically important because it is the entry point to the criminal justice system. It is also carefully monitored and counted. Police know exactly who they arrest.

Once arrested and detained in a police station a child is known to the police and is more likely to be detained again, and again. The police form a negative impression of the child which permits them to see the child as a nuisance. Remember, I am talking about children as young as 10 as the age of criminal responsibility kicks in from the child’s 10th birthday.

A child experiencing arrest and detention can also mean being strip searched by uniformed police officers and being kept in a police cell overnight.

Once we had researched the numbers and the impact on children and the police, in 2013 we published the first paper setting out the information. We had asked each individual police force across England and Wales for their arrest figures, broken down by age, sex and ethnicity. 41 of the 43 police forces responded and we eventually got the other two.

It’s important to note that I talk about child arrests, not arrests of children, because some children are arrested more than once. Indeed, as I have said, once a child comes into conflict with the law, he or she is more likely to be arrested again.

We found that in 2011 there had been over 2,000 arrests of children of primary school age, 10 to 11 year olds.

We also found that 17 year olds were treated as an adult whilst detained by the police meaning that they were not given the protection of the law that means having a responsible adult present and access to social services support. The Howard League legal team took a judicial review to the courts and won, although it took a over a year, and eventually all children under the age of 18 were recognised under the domestic law of the Children Act which embodies the UN Convention.

We found that girls accounted for a fifth of the arrests with some 200,000 arrests of girls.

Ethnicity was a problem as some forces confused race with nationality and there seemed to be a mix of self-defined race with police assumed ethnicity.

We were engaged in other research on the treatment of vulnerable children at the same time. We were one of the first organisations looking at the treatment of girls who had been sexually exploited and abused and who too often were arrested by the police instead of focussing on their abusers. The girls were engaging in risky and sometimes criminal behaviour as a cry for help. In these years, the police and other authorities failed to help these girls. Many inquiries and scandals over the years have forced the police and social services and politicians to understand that they got it wrong and I am proud that the academic research we published contributed to this change.

I started a programme of visits to police chiefs. It was a charm offensive!

I met every chief constable. One to one. Some several times. I spent time in custody suites talking to the sergeants in charge of detention. I went on onto the streets with police officers on the front line. I talked to the senior officers in charge of policy. I had amazing access and I am grateful to all the police officers from top to street level who gave me their time and patiently explained what they were doing and took the robust criticism I put forward.

Each year we published new figures in a short briefing and got masses of publicity. We sent out 43 separate press statements, each one detailing the individual force. We sent it to each of them in advance so they could comment.

I got the police to understand that doing nothing was the best option. It’s very hard to stop well meaning people from interfering, they always want to do something. But what do we do instead, they kept asking. Nothing. I would say. It’s not your problem if a 12 year old is caught stealing sweets from the local shop, it’s their parents or the school who should deal with it.

Teenagers are annoying. They challenge us. And quite right too. It’s what they should do. We as adults should respond appropriately to guide them into a socialised adulthood. Only a few children really do anything very dangerous or serious and they need specialist help.

The police got it eventually. They realised that arresting a child clogged up their cells and tied up police time. Once the former Labour government’s targets for arrest were lifted, the police were only too pleased to change.

Each year we sent out a press release congratulating the police on arresting fewer children. We got them competing with each other to see which force could reduce the number of child arrests.

As the numbers of children entering the system plummeted, the number being prosecuted fell. The number being remanded to custody fell and the number in penal custody went down and down.

We started with over 3,000 children in penal custody at any one time.

Now there are some 440 children in custody, almost all boys, as there were an average of 12 girls, both the lowest number on record.

There are still too many children experiencing penal custody. Too many being given penal sentences for what is teenage challenging behaviour. Too many experiencing arrest. Too many children incarcerated whilst on remand. Too many in the most disgusting, violent and frightening prison conditions.

But this work has in effect raised the age of criminal responsibility as it is rare now for a child of 10, 11, 12 or 13 to be arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned. It happens, but far less than it used to.

This work has prevented hundreds of thousands of children over the past fifteen years from being arrested. At the same time recorded crime by children has plummeted.

There is more to do. I hope we across Europe can all be part of it, no matter what country we live in.