Skip to main content
Monday, 04 November 2019 09:43

Children let down by justice system

Rate this item
(1 Vote)

The Youth court system is in 'chaos', says children's commissioner the Guardian reports. 

Vulnerable children in England and Wales waiting months for convictions, appearing without adult support and being wrongly placed in dock, Guardian investigation finds.

Anne Longfield called for a wholesale review of the youth justice system, saying the youth court was “not a child-friendly environment where you could really help a young person and is not meeting standards that we had hoped”.

 

Through interviews, freedom of information requests and extensive research including a month covering every case in Greater Manchester’s youth court, one of England’s busiest children’s courtrooms, the Guardian has learned:

Cases involving children now take almost 40% longer than they did in 2010, with the slowest region, Sussex Central, taking 491 days on average to deal with a child from offence to conviction.

Reoffending rates for children are higher than they were ten years ago, with 40.9% of young people committing an offence within a year of being convicted or cautioned in 2017, compared with 28.3% of adults aged 21 or over.

For full article https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/nov/03/youth-court-system-in-chaos-says-childrens-commissioner?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium=&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1572800111

Read 1411 times