Youth justice
Strip away all the politics and today's Youth Crime Action Plan seems to be an interesting and provocative academic argument on why some kids go bad.
The report (pdf link) starts by inviting readers to recognise that the number of serious offences
committed by young people is "actually very small" and that "only a minority of young people are actively engaged in serious crime".
The authors conclude that around 5% of youths commit half of all juvenile crime.
"The vast majority of young people make a positive contribution to society. Their
success should be recognised and praised," it says. (See yesterday's blog.)
But the government goes further with Ministers claiming in their introduction that when it comes to future troublemakers "we know how to identify these young people early on".
They produce a fascinating chart to explain what they mean.
[UPDATE 17 July, 12:12 BST:
There's a mistake in this graph for the correct version please see this post.]
It shows how a young person's temperament or 'bad attitude' has little effect on whether they grow up broadly law-abiding or head down the road of crime.
But suffering maltreatment as a child increases the chance three fold.
Having a mother with low IQ doubles the risk.
Poverty significantly increases it too.
And, perhaps most intriguingly, a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) increases the chances more than six fold. It seems notable that of those diagnosed with the disorder, close to 40% become high-rate offenders.
Now, there may be a circular argument going on here. Those youngsters whose behaviour is worst are diagnosed with ADHD so causation is effectively reversed. But groups campaigning around this issue argue that it is a neurobiological condition which can lead sufferers to criminal behaviour.
Another chart in today's plan shows something less startling - that hanging around with the wrong crowd makes it more likely a youngster will commit crime. But it does remind us that peer pressure is a powerful force.
The reports says that "even young people who view crime as wrong are more likely to offend as part of a delinquent peer group than on their own. This is not an isolated problem, with almost 12% of 14 and 15-year-olds belonging to one of these groups".
Just one youngster in 30 will carry a knife at any time in a year. But among kids whose mates get into trouble, one in eight will have packed a blade.
This plan is really about identifying and intervening early, a strategy that must make sense. However, there are no quick fixes in changing behaviour and the results of such initiatives will probably not be truly recognised for a generation.
The plan also talks about victimhood and quotes a startling statistic. Among adults about 14% will be the victim of a personal crime in any year. But for children aged 10 to 15, a third will be victims.
I'm 
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~12~RS~)
CommentsSign in
You need to sign in to contribute to this page. If you're new to BBC Blogs, creating your membership is quick and easy.
You wouldn't believe the kind of rubbish that lies behind the statistics.
I'll give you a few examples.
1) A headteacher calling the police when two six year olds came to blows in the playground.
2) A father reporting a theft on behalf of a child - the next neighbour was refusing to give the girl's ball back.
3) A mother and father calling the police to their home after two children had fought over the TV remote control. They wanted the elder child to be taken into care as 'beyond control' and when told that it wouldn't happen, demanded that the elder be arrested for damage to the remote control. The elder child was 11 years old.
There's no rise in crime here and there's no greater risk to our children than there was 10, 20 or 50 years ago. They still fight, squabble, call each other names and run off with each other's school bags.
It's just that
(a) the police have to record every single incident that is reported as a so-called crime.
(b) Every child has a mobile phone and can make immediate contact with the police, their carer or another agency (dedicated bullying hotlines are widely advertised in schools)
Complain about this comment
Some children ARE more likely to become criminals than others. I once volunteered in a primary school for a short while in preparation for a PGCE, and you can spot the future crims straightaway by their mannerisms--- they're loud, aggressive mini-chavs. And as un-PC as this is, they do have certain physical characteristics in common. Perhaps Lombroso was right! I think we ought to bonk them on the head early on and save ourselves the trouble of locking them up later!
Complain about this comment
Continuing on from no: 2, not too long ago my local paper printed about twenty mugshots of young offenders who had skipped bail or something like that. They all--- every single one--- had long faces and narrow rat-like eyes. A 'lean and hungry look' indeed!
Complain about this comment
Let us agree that only a very small number of young people are miscreants. The question still arises: is what we do reforming them, or not, and further could we do more?
Respect, self respect and disrespect seems to me be the both the key to a solution and a key to punishment and reform.
Leaving aside where young people learn respect for themselves and others. Is it not perhaps the key to provide respect for them, and when they transgress to judicially disrespect them in front of their friends.
Their own death and pain (and asbos) seem not to bother the hardcore, but if they were to understand that the punishment they could expect would be to disrespect them in front of their friends then perhaps they would avoid the behaviour we wish to reduce.
Perhaps some from of public disapprobation might work. Some form of short duration public humiliation might be a real deterrent - having to wear some for of identifying garment for a week for example or to carry around some from of indication of their status. Locking onto their head a helmet with a blue flashing light for 24hours for a first offence for example. Or make them stand outside a police station with a sign indicating their 'crime' for the same length of time. (I am sure there are better ways, but well short of torture!)
In essence find something they genuinely fear and use it. Prison will not work.
Complain about this comment
Another report from the Department of the Blidingly Obvious.
Why do the media have such trouble with the fact that kids are human beings and as human beings, the vast majority will be nice, normal people whilst a minority will be theiving, murdering scumbags and a similar minority will be utterly selfless saints.
Welcome to the bell curve!
All this report shows is that people who feel they have nothing to gain by following the rules will not follow them. If they've grown up in poverty, with poor or non-existing parenting then following society's rules will likely see them in repetitive menial jobs or unemployed.
On top of that, society and the media has completely reversed the burden of proof so that all kids are suspected of being criminals until they can prove otherwise - clearly demonstrated in the eagerness displayed for the police to carry out random stop and searches based purely on age.
As someone who grew up before the police were required to give receipts when they searched people, I can promise you that increasing the use of these powers will only cause more problems. They are inevitably used to hassle the innocent because people just want children to be moved somewhere else because they assume them all to be criminals and any group of children is seen to be a problem waiting to happen.
The end result will be yet more people growing up distrusting the police and avoiding co-operating with them and yet more kids who have no reason to respect other people or the norms of society.
Complain about this comment
I am constantly amazed to hear the criticism of the young. The elder generation would have teenagers believe that, when they were young, they were all little angels.
Of course, the reality is this:
In the 1950's, the Teddy Boys roamed the streets at will. They formed gangs much like we see today and rioted for fun including race fuelled Notting hill riot in 58.
In the 1960's we saw the social and sexual revolution with teenagers drugged and sexed up to the hilt. The Teddy Boys of the 50's were put to one side in favour of Mods, Rockers and Hippies.
In the 1970's, the drugs got harder and the sex more free even than the 60's
I know, of course, how unfair it is of me to tarnish all teenagers from these decades with the same brush, but it is these people who now decide that ALL teenagers of the 90's and 2000's are violent, anti-social and dumb.
Complain about this comment
Mark - either the key for the first chart is wrong, or you have misread the data. The red line shows high rate offenders, but all the information you have given assumes that it is the blue line that does.
Even if the blue line showed high rate offenders, you still misrepresent the information given about people with ADHD. You say:
It seems notable that of those diagnosed with the disorder, close to 40% become high-rate offenders.
In fact, the information would suggest that 40% of offenders have ADHD - very different than the suggestion that 40% of people with AHDH are offenders.
Maybe a correction (and apology to ADHD sufferers) is in order?
Complain about this comment
A couple of thoughts on the chart showing the proportion of offenders with different risk factors (which overlap to some extent with happyclucker's thoughts).
Firstly, I think that in your reproduction, the labels have become transposed from those in the report. Next, I think that you may be inferring the wrong things from these figures. Surely they show (for example) that frequent offenders are about twice as likely to have a mother with a low IQ as occasional offenders. No comparison is given with non-offenders and I don't think that it is possible to say, from this data, that having a mother with a low IQ doubles the risk of leading a life of crime (a similar point may be made, as happyclucker notes, about ADHD or any of the other factors llisted).
Care should also be taken not to overstate these numbers. The largest of any of the figures was that forty-something percent of high rate offenders have experienced "low socio-economic status". This still means that more than fifty percent of high rate offenders have not. At the other extreme more than three quartres of high rate offenders and more than ninety of infrequent offenders have not been the victims of mistreatment.
Finally, although perhaps most importantly, we should be wary of committing the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: although more than forty percent of high rate offenders have experienced a "low socio-economic status" it does not mean that they are offending because they have experienced "low socio-economic status".
Complain about this comment
Unfortunately happyclucker and prodnose are both correct and a great deal of the conclusions Mark Easton has come to are based on misunderstanding the figures.
Firstly, to see how much effect poverty has on likelihood of offending, you need to compare the overall percentage of young people living in poverty (or for an even clearer comparison, the proportion of non-offending young people living in poverty) to the percentage of high/low-rate offenders living in poverty. For example, if 30% of all young people live in poverty, but 50% of young offenders do, then that indicates that poverty raises the risk of offending. What you have done is compared the rates for high and low rate offenders and drawn utterly the wrong conclusions about comparative risks ("suffering maltreatment as a child increases the chance three fold", "Having a mother with low IQ doubles the risk", "Poverty significantly increases it" are all based on this misunderstanding).
Secondly, you've gone on to assume incorrectly that if x% of offenders of a particular type have a certain risk factor, then that means x% of people with that risk factor go on to be offenders of that type. A risk factor not mentioned in this report is simply "being male". For example, there are statistics suggesting around 80% of young offenders in Canada are male (four times as many as females!). Males are simply much more likely to commit a crime. However, this does not mean that 80% of males are offenders! So "It seems notable that of those diagnosed with the disorder, close to 40% become high-rate offenders" is nonsense.
Moreover, even if you actually had performed the correct comparisons, it is impossible to draw a conclusion about causation based on such data only. This is the "cum hoc ergo proper hoc" mentioned in the previous post by Prodnose. Just because two things are associated does not mean that one is causing the other - they may simply both be related to an underlying variable.
It irks me enough that journalists seldom understand the principle of "statistical significance" of results, which means they often misjudge the magnitude of a trend. Then there are those who can't understand that just because an effect is statistically significant (which essentially means "large enough to be measured by this investigation" or "confirmed to be non-zero") it isn't necessarily important - this is a large problem with health journalism, where very small effects are often found significant even though they aren't really very useful (e.g. "Putting tomato juice in your tea confirmed to raise life expectancy" may become a headline, with the small print "by only 0.2%").
However, in this case the statistical failings are much more basic - reading a chart, understanding relative risk, and knowing that "association does not imply causation". Being the Home Correspondent means that a large part of your job will be involved in surveying the national picture, aggregating information rather than focussing on one-off instances. Understanding the principles of statistics - and especially being able to recognise cases of misuse and manipulation that are often pulled off by government, politicians and lobby-groups - will be a powerful tool in succeeding in that role.
I don't want to come across as hyper-critical - your journalism is nuanced, doesn't reach for simplistic solutions, and demonstrates strong engagement with the issues. But based on this and prior blog entries, it would be a good idea for you to brush up a bit on your stats, particularly in a role where the ability to confidently tackle batches of statistics in a report and pull a story out of them would serve you very well indeed.
Complain about this comment
If the statistics are to be relied upon, then sadly those who are brought up under the named handicaps (poverty, maltreatment etc.) appear to be doomed to a life of crime.
The uncomfortable conclusion might be that protecting society from these damaged people by way of long term institutionalisation is the only course of action. You can not turn the clock back and give people a better upbringing.
Complain about this comment
I find some humour in the fact that commentators on this blog argue that there is an issue about how police record everything and therefore waste time, whilst on the blog about crime figures several commentators state that police figures are a massive underrepresentation because so many crimes are not recorded.
I agree with the perspective that children are much like everyone else - a mixed bag. I work as a lawyer prosecuting for a local authority, but also do mentoring and school liason work on the support side in my spare time. I find I need that support work to keep my perspective and see the difficult kids as the exception which they are.
When I was at a school last week I asked them how many adults they spoke to who were not parents or teaching staff or shop staff. Only a handful spoke to anyone, and all commented that adults look at them like they are animals. Coming back from this position is hard, but we have to try. Whether the press will enable change is another question and sadly I suspect one with the answer "no". Printed press shrinks year on year I believe, and in a shrinking market they will have to hold onto sensationalism to maintain their market share.
However, I find press coverage to be a tissue of lies which many use to reassure themselves of their own prejudices. I find this blog useful as a counter to that and "proper" journalism. I also enjoy the fact that opinion is given freely and often.
Complain about this comment
View these comments in RSS