AYJ Explains: Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill - Custody
Clauses 100-106 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill propose changes to the use of custody for children. Here, the AYJ examines these changes and sets out our recommendations.
A. The Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill is set to increase minimum custodial sentences for particular offences. This will result in an increase of children in custody as well as an increase in the length of time children spend in custody. There will also be an increase in the number of adults in custody for offences committed in childhood.
For Detention and Training Orders (DTOs), the most common custodial sentence for children, where the first half is spent in custody and the second half under supervision in the community, the Bill proposes to change them from being fixed lengths, so they can be any length between 4 and 24 months. Again, this is predicted to significantly increase the number of children in custody.
The projected increase in the number of children in custody due to provisions in this Bill means that demand for custodial placements is anticipated to grow, but it remains unclear how the introduction of Secure Schools fits into a long term strategy for the Youth Secure Estate.
A. There is no evidence that the threat of harsher custodial sentences deters children from offending, however there is plenty of evidence that imprisonment is extremely harmful to children and disrupts their healthy long-term development. Increasing custodial sentence lengths will leave children feeling hopeless and unmotivated to engage with education, purposeful activity, and rehabilitative support, therefore increasing the risk of a cycle of reoffending.
Custody must always be a last resort and where a custodial sentence is required, it must be for the shortest possible amount of time and include a regular review of the sentence to determine whether custody remains the only available option for the child (in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child). Courts must act in the best interests of the child and the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of the child must be a primary consideration (in line with Section 11 of the Children Act 2004). The court must also pay careful consideration to the long-term impact of the custodial sentence on the child.
These harsh proposals set out in the Bill also ignore the fact that children become involved in crime for numerous and complex reasons. One of which is child criminal exploitation (CCE), the grooming and exploitation of children into criminal activity, which is a growing and significant concern.
A. The government should not be introducing provisions that will significantly increase the number of children in custody, especially considering there are no clear benefits to the reform. The government itself admits that there is “limited evidence that the combined set of measures [in the Bill] will deter offenders long term or reduce overall crime.” The proposed changes to custodial sentences must be removed from the Bill. Reforms to Detention and Training Orders are predicted to increase the number of children in custody and should therefore not be introduced.
This is an opportunity to enshrine in legislation that sentencing must consider children’s rights, welfare, underlying causes of offending, and that custody must be a last resort. AYJ worked with an expert group of our members to develop a legislative proposal for what custody as a last resort would look like in legislation, which we urge Parliamentarians to support as an addition to this Bill. The proposal creates a higher seriousness threshold for offences eligible for a custodial sentence and sets out that even where an offence is deemed so serious that custody could be justified, there must be a significant risk of harm to the public. The court must be satisfied that there is no alternative mechanism for dealing with that risk with a community-based sentence and also must provide a valid reason for their decision.
We also urge the government to publish more information on its plans for Secure Schools and the decommissioning of Young Offender Institutions and Secure Training Centres.
For more information on custody or other measures in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, read our full briefing here.