Seen From The Other SideExploring youth justice innovation in Denmark, USA and Brazil

Laura Baynton

2013

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“We must not forget that when every material improvement has been effected in prisons, when the temperature has been rightly adjusted, when the proper food to maintain health and strength has been given, when the doctors,

chaplains and prison visitors have come and gone, the convict stands deprived of everything that a free man calls life. We must not forget that all these improvements, which are sometimes salves to our consciences, do not change that position.

The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the state, and even of convicted criminals against the state, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes, and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man. These are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.”

Winston Churchill, House of Commons speech, given as Home Secretary, July 20, 1910

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CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 3

INTRODUCTION 5

1. SHRINK THE COHORT 7

2. GROW THE EVIDENCE 13

3. STOP THE CARE-TO-PRISON PIPELINE 19

4. RETHINK CUSTODY 25

5. WHO PAYS FOR WHAT? 35

SELECTION OF REFERENCES 45

THANK YOU 46

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY1: Shrink the cohortThere is compelling evidence from the UK and abroad that being involved in the youth justice system itself can increase the likelihood of future reoffending and that most young people grow out of crime without intervention. If one of the primary purposes of the youth justice system is to reduce offending we need to balance the duty to intervene and hold young people accountable for their actions against the need to reduce net-widening. Programmes such as Brazil’s ‘scholastic acceleration’ help develop protective factors in young people without routing them through the justice system, whilst in Denmark the higher age of criminal responsibility means that young people aged below 15 who offend are diverted into the welfare rather than justice system, and the family court system is used as an effective alternative to the criminal court in some cases. The Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative has achieved promising results in reducing jurisdictions’ reliance on secure remand across the US and in generating an appetite for reform at a local and national level, such as Chicago’s after-school reporting centres.

1. Establish an independent commission to consider raising the age of criminal responsibility to 14. Encourage public dialogue on this issue, based on Denmark’s Parliamentary Youth Commission, or as a minimum consider transferring cases involving high welfare need from the youth court to the family court.

2. Transfer learning from the Chicago’s after-school reporting centre model. Use the lessons learnt from this model to inform the development of Attendance Centres in England and Wales.

2: Grow the evidenceWhilst there is a growing focus on effective practice in our youth justice system, we need to develop a more comprehensive strategy for nurturing innovation, rapidly evaluating new approaches, having the space and political distance to allow projects to fail and to learn from them, and to use this evidence to support central and local decision-making. We tend to rely on a small group of evidence-based practices rather than looking to proactively invest in and expand the evidence-base on other programmes and practices to improve what we know and do. In the US in particular there are compelling examples of encouraging innovation and using evidence more intelligently to inform decision-making, equipping practitioners and policymakers with cost-benefit analysis tools, using data to tell compelling narratives and improving outcomes for young people in the system.

3. Create a youth justice innovation fund. Encourage innovation in priority areas where little is known about what works, and use the fund to replicate, scale-up and evaluate promising practice.

4. Consider creative ways to make rich data sources on youth justice more accessible and useful. Support evidence-based decision-making by practitioners, the judiciary, policymakers and the public starting with improved data sets for sentencers.

5. Set up a youth justice academic panel to strengthen links between academia, policy makers and local decision-makers. Increase the role of academic and non-governmental experts in challenging and shaping policy.

6. Establish an international Youth Justice Network. Encourage dialogue and collaboration on shared youth justice challenges – such as improving education outcomes post-custody.

3: Stop the care-to-prison pipelineAround a third of all young people growing up in the care system end up serving time in prison, and between a quarter and a third of the youth prison population have come from the care system. Perhaps surprisingly, this correlation between the care system and the youth justice system does not seem to exist to the same extent in other countries such as Denmark. Here, most experts see the emphasis on social pedagogy methods as effective in reducing the over-criminalisation of young people in care. Transitional housing models offer one option to support

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those transitioning out of care, whilst the ‘Crossover Youth Practice Model’ provides a useful template for how agencies can collaborate to improve outcomes for young people in care. Finally, novel approaches to working with the courts, such as ‘dedicated dockets’ and ‘Project Confirm’ in New York, demonstrate what can be achieved.

7. The Department of Education should undertake a follow-up ‘social pedagogy’ trial. Address the limitations of the initial study to trial the introduction of experienced pedagogues into the senior staff structure in children’s care homes and youth custody settings.

8. Trial the ‘Crossover Youth Practice Model’ in two local authorities in England and Wales. Work with the CJJR at Georgetown University Public Policy Institute to adapt the Crossover Youth Practice Model for use in England and Wales and pilot with two local authorities in 2014.

9. Use learning from ‘Project Confirm’ to improve outcomes for looked-after children in the youth justice system. Improve data collection on the number of looked-after children in custody, and introduce better systems to tackle disproportionate sentencing decisions for looked-after children coming to court.

4: Rethink custodyWhat if custody looked different? In Denmark, the MultifunC and similar models like the ‘Flying Dutchman’ turn the traditional prison model on its head – rather than institutionalising young people behind closed doors, the MultifunC model focuses intensively on local resettlement from day one. Across Brazil, different ways of incentivising reduction in sentence length are underway, along with the development of specialist training centres for staff. A different approach, the Missouri model, has been gaining momentum in the US. Providing a graduated set of residential options for offenders, only a small group of the highest risk offenders are placed in secure custody, and are held in small, local units where they receive individual care within a group-treatment model to try to change behaviour and reduce re-offending.

10. Consider introducing a MultifunC secure establishment in London. Trial a small, local unit in East London for high-risk young offenders, with a focus on effective integration back into their local community, building on Danish expertise at the Copenhagen MultifunC and the ‘Flying Dutchman’.

11. Invest in research to better understand the medium and long-term financial implications of commissioning different custodial models. Work with academics to establish whether small, local secure units with specialist workforce results in significantly reduced reoffending rates (and thereby cost savings) to warrant the initial high investment.

5: Who pays for what? - Incentivise local areas to improve outcomesThe youth justice system in England and Wales has traditionally been structured in such a way that local authorities bear the costs of overseeing young people on community sentences and for the cost of bail support packages, whilst central Government pays the full cost whenever young people are sentenced to custody. This can create perverse incentives that encourage the use of custody for lower risk offenders, and fail to reward good practice locally. In the US, policymakers are experimenting with a host of different financial incentive models which we could learn from, including justice reinvestment and realignment in California, as well as thinking about how to frame the argument in terms of public safety. Denmark, too, have been experimenting with devolving the remand budget with mixed results. Finally the Vera Institute for Justice’s work on challenges with this approach provides helpful learning from fifty states that can support our learning here. There are quick wins in collaborating on different approaches, sharing what works and learning from others’ successes and failures in this field.

12. Establish a UK-US Financial Incentive Funding Collaborative. Share learning on financial incentive models within the criminal justice system, including the Pew Center on the States, NYC Criminal Justice Co-ordinator’s Office and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

13. Set up a Cost-Benefit Knowledge Bank for England and Wales. Adapt the Vera Institute for Justice model to improve local practitioners’ and central policymakers’ ability to measure the financial benefits of different decisions.

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One in three children who experience the care system in England and Wales end up serving time in children’s prisons. The more people I talked to about this staggering statistic, the more intractable the situation seemed. Perhaps this was the inevitable state of things. Yet not very far away in Denmark this funnelling from care to custody does not exist so strongly at all. How could this be?

This conundrum fired up my interest in thinking about how other countries are approaching the same youth justice challenges that we face in England and Wales. I applied to the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for a travel fellowship to explore youth justice innovations overseas and spent four months in Denmark, the US and Brazil, between July 2012 and January 2013.

Why did I pick this combination of countries? Firstly, Denmark. The Danes are often seen to be leading the way in youth justice, and much more besides. I wanted to understand what lay behind their dramatically lower post-custody reoffending rates (42% 15-17 year olds reoffend within 2 years, compared with 70% after 1 year in England and Wales) and to find out why although high numbers of children grow up in care they don’t seem to get routed into the youth justice system – could it be explained by different custody thresholds or had they overcome these problems that everyone else was struggling to solve?

When I visited I was struck by the language practitioners and politicians used to talk about crime and youth justice – the strong sense of societal responsibility for crimes committed by children, the widely-held pride in the low numbers

in custody and the role of the state in investing in early intervention on a scale unheard of in England and Wales. Not everything’s perfect - volunteering in the justice system is struggling to take hold, and there are growing concerns over the number of new immigrants in custody - but there is much good practice we could transfer to our shores. The challenge will be to overcome some of the cultural and contextual differences, both real and perceived. This led me to want to go to the US. Yes, there are many aspects we would not want to adopt: 1 in 100 Americans are in prison and the proportion of young people locked up is far higher than in the UK; children are sentenced as adults for some crimes; New York and North Carolina regard all 16 year olds as adults in the justice system; black boys are more likely to be in prison than higher education; and the introduction of the three strikes law for juveniles led to a soaring custody rate in the state of California (although it has now been repealed). But this is, in a way, also part of the appeal. If within this climate there are innovative practices that are improving the way the system works, against the grain, then it seems that these are likely to be ideas that could have traction in the UK.

I like the idea of ‘positive deviance’ - success flourishing against the odds. If New York state can successfully implement small, local secure units against a backdrop of ‘prison works’, budget cuts and a system of large profit-making prisons, if Washington DC can support and scale-up innovation that is evidence-based and not driven by political desire to appease the press, then surely we could too? I was intrigued to see how they had done this, and meet the people pushing for change.

INTRODUCTION

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Finally, Brazil. Here’s a country that has decided to transform its youth justice system, physically knocking down prisons and courtrooms and starting afresh. I was intrigued to see how they would approach this - where would they start and what would they do?

Whilst the change is taking longer than anticipated (cue several trips to empty fields), the chance to talk to policymakers, prison governors and academics about the changes on the horizon and how they are going to get there was fascinating and challenged many of my assumptions. In Bahia, for instance, they are not investing in new buildings but focusing on staff as the most significant resource. Restorative justice is also central to new plans; there are calls for communities to take responsibility for young people in the care system; and focused programmes on building police relations with young people where trust has long ago been eroded. There is much fresh thinking to learn from their approach.

I have tried to distil down what I’ve learnt into the next forty or so pages and to come up with some practical recommendations for change. This is not supposed to be a detailed comparative study, just some reflections. There are obvious caveats about different legislative and cultural contexts and the unique nature of our youth justice system in England and Wales.

More than anything else, though, this trip brought to life the fact that scurrying around in all corners of the world, policymakers and practitioners are working with very similar groups of troubled young people to try to resolve the same challenges. Yes, the cultural context might differ, but the problems

are remarkably similar: how can prison make an impact on reoffending rates; how can we develop a system of restraint in prisons that will keep young people safe; how do you reintegrate a young person back into a community when they have decided to leave a gang behind; what materials can we give to sentencers to help them deliver the most effective sentences? We must find better ways to link up and share what we know.

I am indebted to everyone who spent time talking to me and showing me round prisons, courtrooms, cities and homes. Whilst I’ve tried to include the voices of many of the people I had the privilege of meeting, I haven’t been able to include you all, and especially not the many young people I spoke to.

I am incredibly grateful to James Balfour, Julia Weston and everyone at the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for giving me this opportunity. Thanks also to John Drew and all my friends at the YJB, to my family, and especially to Peter Baynton for designing this report and for joining me on this fantastic adventure.

All the opinions and any mistakes in the report are fully mine, and do not in any way reflect the views of the Youth Justice Board or the WMCT. If you would like any further information about any of the content of this report, please contact me at laurabaynton@gmail.com.

1: SHRINK THE COHORT

There is compelling evidence from the UK and abroad that being involved in the youth justice system itself can increase the likelihood of future reoffending (Petrosino et al. 2010, and McCara & McVie, 2007) and that most young people grow out of crime without intervention (Moffitt 1993 and Rutherford 1989). If one of the primary purposes of the youth justice system is to reduce offending and reoffending we need to balance the duty to intervene and hold young people accountable for their actions against the need to reduce net widening.

Programmes such as Brazil’s ‘scholastic acceleration’ help develop protective factors in young people without routing them through the justice system, whilst in Denmark the higher age of criminal responsibility means that young people aged below 15 who offend are diverted into the welfare rather than justice system, and the family court system is used as an effective alternative to the criminal court in some cases. The Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative has achieved promising results in reducing jurisdictions’ reliance on secure remand across the US and in generating an appetite for reform at a local and national level, such as Chicago’s after-school reporting centres.

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last five years and there’s been an accompanying drop in the overall youth crime rate. But this is not the end - our custody numbers are still among the highest in the Europe.

The John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York held a symposium in 2012 to explore ‘the risks and benefits of early intervention with justice-involved youth’. The discussion focused on how to navigate the competing risks of intervening early with young offenders (when they are most likely to respond to services and support) against intervening too early, knowing that many will stop delinquent behaviour on their own, before they are affected by the stigma of justice involvement.

One approach is for jurisdictions to provide intensive early intervention with ‘at-risk’ and low-level offenders and find creative ways to build key protective factors, rather than explicitly label them as criminals. Viva Rio, a non-government organisation working in Brazil, runs the innovative Scholastic Acceleration Programme to support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in catching up and completing school in less then a year. Their view is that educational qualifications are one of the most powerful tools in helping young people stay out of trouble with the law, find and keep a job and raise aspirations.

Viva Rio offers young people a chance to quickly recover lost time in their education (due to truancy, exclusion, problems at home or lack of support) and provides a focused way of promoting reintegration back in society. The programme is run by a team of specialist teachers who are ‘under rigorous pedagogical supervision’ and students are expected to complete their primary education in nine months and secondary education in eleven months, as well as guidance on citizenship and employment. Set up in 1996 in Rio de Janeiro, the approach has now been adopted as public policy across

Keeping young people out of the system

We have long known that being involved in the youth justice system itself can increase the likelihood of reoffending. ‘Labelling theory’ suggests that calling a young person an offender can reinforce a criminal identity, (Farrington D., 1977) the ‘risk principle’ adopted in Denmark decrees ‘minimum intervention with lower risk offenders’ on the basis that providing low-risk offenders with intensive interventions or mixing them in groups with high-risk offenders can increase future risk of offending, and Moffitt’s research shows that most young people naturally age out crime regardless of interventions (Moffitt, T., 1993).

Reports like the US Department of Justice’s ‘Pathways to Desistance Study’ which followed over a thousand serious youth offenders for seven years after their conviction, have shown that the use of custody can have a particularly detrimental effect on lower-risk young people, exacerbating other problems including poor educational outcomes, unemployment and behavioural health issues, and that custody should be reserved for high-risk offenders who need to be there for public safety (Mulvey E.P, 2011). There is also little evidence that the fear of going to prison acts as an effective deterrent. If we really want to reduce offending and reoffending rates and use public funds effectively, then custody should be focused on the small cohort of serious violent offenders, and effective community sentences should be available for all others with savings used to invest in effective early intervention.

In England and Wales there has been much progress in this area. The numbers of first-time entrants to the youth justice system has dropped by 71% since its peak in 2007, the number in custody has fallen by just over 50% in the

“In Brazil, we are looking at how young people can be diverted out of the youth justice system, and how restorative justice practices can be at the core of our approach. If young people are taught to take responsibility for their actions, rather than treated as passive recipients of a justice

system then this will help improve society for all.”

Professor Rosane Fagundes, Director-General of Campus Salvador and Restorative Justice Expert, Salvador

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the country. The methodology (created by the Roberto Marinho Foundation) is now certified by the Brazilian Department of Education and over 90,000 young people across Brazil have now taken part.

Raising the age of criminal responsibility Another way of avoiding drawing young people into the youth justice system is to route them through welfare services instead. This is the approach taken in Denmark, where the age of criminal responsibility is 15, compared to 10 in England and Wales. Young people who commit crimes under the age of 15 are handled by social services and are seen as a ‘child first, offender second’. These children’s crimes are generally seen as a societal failing rather than the responsibility falling wholly on the young person themselves, and the family is held to account for the young person’s actions in a way that does not exist elsewhere. Typical responses by social services might be to introduce intensive family interventions, to provide mental health support or to consider placing the young person into care, depending on their welfare needs. The Danish Government sees this approach as an effective way of stopping the escalation of many young people’s criminal activities.

Recently the Danish Government had a chance to reconsider their stance. The age of was lowered to 14

in 2010, and when a new government came in, they established a National Commission to decide afresh on the age of criminal responsibility. After much public debate, the Commission produced their report, recommending that the age of criminal responsibility should be raised back to 15. The Commission encouraged a public dialogue to rigorously explore the issue - should the age be aligned with the age of consent? Was there any evidence of a deterrent effect of having a higher age? What role should families play in the response to children’s crimes? What about the risk that young people will be ‘treated’ for offences when they haven’t stood trial?

The high profile of the Commission, the breadth of evidence they considered and the public nature of their work were all met with widespread approval, and as there are increasingly calls to challenge the UK’s age of criminal responsibility (one of the lowest in the world) we should consider opening up a similar dialogue in England and Wales. If there is no political appetite to do this, we could at least consider adopting the Danish approach of transferring cases where young people display high welfare needs from the youth court to the family court, and encourage crossover and dialogue between the two court systems.

“After much public discussion, we concluded that the age of criminal responsibility should move back up to 15. We believe that children are less responsible for their behaviour than adults – the very same reason why children cannot get married or drive a car or smoke. We also believe that

most of these young people have high levels of need which lie behind their criminal behaviour and a welfare-based response to address needs will be more effective in stopping future crime than bringing them into the criminal justice system.”

Mayor Mikkel Warming, Mayor of Social Services, Copenhagen

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‘Narrowing the Pipeline’ - The Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative

One of the most well-known youth justice initiatives in the US is the ‘Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative’ (JDAI) run by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Set up in 1992, it aims to reduce the number of young people drawn into the youth justice system unnecessarily - what they refer to as ‘controlling the front gates’ - as well as safely reducing the numbers of young people remanded to custody (called ‘detention’ in the US).

In the decade before JDAI was launched, secure remand populations in the US increased by more than

70 percent, even though there was no corresponding increase in youth crime. In 2011 the Foundation published the influential report ‘No Place for Kids; The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration’, which reviewed 40 years of evidence and argued that detention should be reserved for the most serious and violent young offenders, and robust community alternatives are

preferable for both reducing re-offending and saving taxpayers funds.

JDAI has now been adopted by 27 US states, and covers nearly a fifth of all young people in the US and growing, focusing attention on first detention decisions, and encouraging investment in alternatives to secure remand and custody. Recently the Annie E. Casey Foundation conducted a one-day census of all active JDAI sites across the US and found that among the sites that participated, the total detention population was 35% less than the average detention population in these areas prior to joining JDAI, alongside improvements in public safety with reduced arrest rates for young people.

Attributing reductions in crime and recidivism wholly to

this initiative is disingenuous as the youth crime rates across the US are dropping even in areas not involved. Moreover, as the use of remand falls across England and Wales it could be argued that there is little to learn from this initiative. But the JDAI’s success in managing to persuade so many jurisdictions to support this scale of youth justice reform, and sustain this level of support

Embed change through visionary leaders and open dialogue

1 Create objective admissions criteria and instruments to replace subjective decision-makers at all points where young people are being drawn into the youth justice system

4Be bold in introducing new or enhanced non-secure alternatives to custody, operated by local organisations in high custody areas

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Reduce racial disparities through targeted strategies aimed at eliminating bias at each decision-point in the system

2Beware the ‘Hawthorne effect’ – short term improvements that don’t arise from new practices themselves but instead as a result of extra scrutiny

3Gather and share better data, and hold agencies accountable for public safety results

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Reducing first-time entrants: lessons from JDAI

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over the past two decades is hugely impressive. The initiative’s impact on the US youth justice system is likely to continue and grow as they now look to expand the programme to reduce numbers sentenced to custody, specifically black and minority ethnic young people.

Introducing after-school reporting centres

Part of the JDAI’s success has been in encouraging and sharing emerging evidence on alternatives to secure remand and custody. Cook County, Illinois, for example, signed up to the JDAI in 1993 to address overcrowding within their secure facilities. They developed a plan that included adopting and innovating with new alternatives to custody and they now have several schemes in place, including a home confinement programme, the Sheriff’s Work Alternative Program for Juveniles (SWAP), a community outreach supervision programme, and improved data collection systems to monitor outcomes. These alternatives to secure remand have improved public safety, generated sustained cost-savings for Cook County and have served as a catalyst for change in the wider probation service.

One of the most successful initiatives has been the introduction of ‘after-school reporting centres’ as an alternative to secure remand. Young offenders who do not pose a high risk to the public, but would typically be remanded into custody can instead be sent to an after-school or evening reporting centre to ensure they do not break their bail conditions, abscond or reoffend before their trial. The centres tend to be run by non-profit community organisations, often using school

buildings, and young people attend every day after school for one or two months. At around 9pm they can return home, where they must follow their curfew order. These centres provide supervision and ensure they return to court without any further violations, but staff also engage the young people in pro-social activities, teachers provide help with homework, and some centres provide access to substance misuse treatment, family therapy and links to local community services.

An evaluation of the Cook County Reporting Centers (by the Annie E. Casey Foundation) found that 90% of the young people involved make their court hearings and remain arrest-free whilst in the programme, and were able to continue their normal school placement. Cook County halved the number of young people sent to custody on remand between 1995 and 2005 and at a cost of approximately $33 per young person per day to include them in the programme, compared to an average bed price for detention of $100 a day, the savings to the state are considerable. There are lessons to be learnt from this model; how can their success be replicated in England and Wales particularly now that remand costs are being devolved to local authorities, and could Attendance Centres be utilised better to achieve these outcomes?

“I was involved in setting up after-school reporting centres in Chicago and San Francisco. I believe they offer a powerful alternative to secure detention. Keeping young people out of trouble, and their communities safe, by allowing community workers to engage these young people

within their communities rather than placing them into secure detention, can produce better outcomes for youth at lower costs to the public.”

William Sifferman, Chief Probation Officer, Juvenile Probation Department, San Francisco

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CHAPTER 1 RECOMMENDATIONS:

Establish an independent commission to consider raising the age of criminal responsibility to 14 Encourage public dialogue on this issue, based on Denmark’s Parliamentary Youth Commission, or as a minimum consider transferring cases involving high welfare need from the youth court to the family court.

Transfer learning from the Chicago’s after-school reporting centre modelUse the lessons learnt from this model to inform the development of Attendance Centres in England and Wales.

2: GROW THE EVIDENCE

Whilst there is a growing focus on effective practice in our youth justice system, we need to develop a more comprehensive strategy for nurturing innovation, rapidly evaluating new approaches, having the space and political distance to allow projects to fail and to learn from them, and to use this evidence to support central and local decision-making. We tend to rely on a small group of evidence-based practices (such as Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care and Multisystemic Therapy) rather than looking to proactively invest in and expand the evidence-base for other programmes and practices in order to improve what we know and do. In the US in particular there are compelling examples of encouraging innovation and using evidence more intelligently to inform decision-making, equipping practitioners and policymakers with cost-benefit analysis tools, using data to tell compelling narratives and improving outcomes for young people in the system.

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Improving the evidence

In New York City organisations like the Vera Institute for Justice and the Center for Court Innovation are leading the way in working with the Government, courts, police and community organisations to encourage, develop and scale-up effective practice and bring evidence to the forefront of policymaking. At the Vera Institute, for instance, nearly half the employees are researchers, which shapes their approach to evidence and evaluation. These organisations, and others like them, are working to find innovative solutions to problems in criminal justice. They are quick to collaborate with partners to trial, adapt and assess ideas through demonstration projects, rapidly evaluate these projects, focus on collecting useful data to document results and ensure accountability. They then step back, drop those that fail and support successful demonstration project develop

into fully formed independent projects or self-sustaining practice.

This model has resulted in impressive results. For example Esperanza (a successful New York community programme that provides therapeutic services in the young person’s home for repeat young offenders and their families, alongside ongoing case and crisis management) began as a Vera Institute demonstration project. Similarly, the Center for Court Innovation has led the way in pioneering new types of court (mental health courts, specialist drug treatment courts, and peer courts) as well as alternative approaches to resolving non-violent cases such as Bronx Community Solutions.

This appetite for innovation is shaping the youth justice landscape across the US. The non-profit MacArthur Foundation has spent more than $100 million since 2004 developing blueprints for youth justice reform across 16 states through their ‘Models for Change’ initiative.

Every year they bring together several hundred judges, practitioners and policymakers to explore effective practice, problem-solve and establish collaborations, generating new ideas, networks and tangible change across the system. Recent themes have included tackling the mental health needs of young people in the youth justice system, and ensuring appropriate legal access for all young people who need it.

On a smaller scale, individual states and cities are also using innovation and evidence to change practice. For instance, as part of New York’s ‘Close to Home’ initiative in 2012, Commissioner Schiraldi gathered together a group of experts - academics, sentencers, educational specialists, youth justice practitioners - called them the ‘Dispositional Reform Steering Committee’ and asked them to develop a graduated set of community interventions for sentencers, based on evidence of

effective practice. So far they have developed and scaled-up three new programmes AIM (an intensive mentoring and advocacy programme), ECHOES (a life coaching and employability programme) and PEAK (a day treatment model).

The costs involved in running the youth justice system are vast, and yet too little time and resource is dedicated to taking risks with new ideas, or effectively evaluating practice. We should put aside some of the £350 million it costs annually to run the youth justice system to create an innovation fund to encourage and rapidly evaluate innovative practice. Supporting innovation does not require large centralised funding models - we should learn from models used in education - to explore the intelligent use of seed funding to support local innovation, fast prototyping of new ideas on focused areas of practice and collaborating with local areas to scale-up and replicate promising ideas to improve local practice. The justice system needs to play a key role

‘This would be like saying that since you discovered that your two-year old son will eat grapes, you can stop buying other food...we are a long way from having a full and balanced menu of juvenile justice interventions.’

Dr Jeffrey A. Butts, Director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY)

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in this endeavour as part of the ‘What Works’ agenda, generating better links between policy-makers and academia, leading in investment in demonstration projects and increasing the use of evidence-based policy at all levels of decision-making.

Evidence versus innovation

One emerging challenge in the US is how to encourage the use of evidence-based practices within financial incentive models, without stifling the development of new practices. Some state legislators have enacted Bills, for instance, which state that counties are only eligible for justice reinvestment funding if they can show that they are spending the money on projects or programmes with an established evidence-base. In some ways, this is a very positive development - raising the value of evidence in practice and ensuring that money is being spent in a cost-effective way. However, there is a risk that this approach stifles new innovation - particularly

when the current list of ‘evidence-based practice’ is fairly limited.

Perhaps a better approach is to encourage areas to either invest in evidence-based practice or to try out new innovations, with a requirement that some funding is set aside to evaluate their practice. This would help to broaden the knowledge base on ‘what works’ and what does not.

‘Fast Second’ strategy

There is also a need to increase our engagement internationally. Most of the programmes and practices that we are most proud of in our system now - from restorative justice to intensive fostering - are modeled on schemes developed abroad. Whilst not everything will translate into the specific context of the youth justice system in England and Wales, some will. We

FROM EDUCATION TO RESTRAINT - THE NEED FOR A YOUTH JUSTICE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK

The majority of young people in custody have previously been excluded from school, and many of these teenagers have a literacy level comparable to the average 7 year old. There is a growing interest in England and Wales in improving educational outcomes to encourage desistance, and there are many models we could learn from overseas. In Denmark, for instance, young people in custody attend mainsteam school accompanied by a custody officer, whilst secure units like Sølager focus on links to industry rather than classroom-based education. In the US, private providers like ‘Rite of Passage’ and the ‘See Forever Foundation’ deliver a bespoke in-custody curriculum, whilst the New York ‘Close to Home’ model is exploring linking education in custody to the New York City school credit system. Some young people will be bussed to brand new ‘Passages’ schools, and others will return to mainstream schools before leaving custody.

There are many other areas where we could also benefit from sharing lessons and ideas around youth justice practice and policy. The use of restraint in custody, for instance. A couple of years ago the British Government committed to developing a safer way to restrain young people in custody. An expert panel was formed, and a rigorous process began looking at the medical, practical and ethical implications of different holds and how to best train staff to de-escalate volatile situations. Over in Denmark, a team of medical experts were undertaking a pretty much identical process. After several years of investigating and intensive resource-investment, the Danish experts came to remarkably similar conclusions and the new restraint systems are now being implemented in both countries. Despite working on exactly the same conundrum, there was no dialogue or collaboration at any point. Not only might this have saved time and resources, but also could ultimately have resulted in a safer, better system. Whilst international justice networks already exist, it would be of real value to be able to explore specific policy and practice challenges within our criminal justice system with experts overseas through an International Youth Justice Network.

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need to proactively look to foster these international networks, to share and develop ideas, both encouraging fresh innovation and taking on second-hand ideas that have flourished elsewhere - what Markides and Geroski called ‘fast second’ strategy (Markides, C. and Geroski, P., 2005). There are many promising examples worth exploring further. A few are shown below.

Using evidence to change the narrative

On President Obama’s first full day in office in 2009, he wrote a memo on ‘Transparency and Open Government’ in which he declared that information held by the Government is a national asset and encouraged agencies to ‘disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use’. This has led to an explosion of data sharing in the US public sector, and the UK has been through a similar open data revolution. Whilst initiatives like the publication of street-level UK crime maps and the recently launched Justice Data Lab have shown the potential for what can be achieved, there is currently a wealth of untapped youth justice data and information which we should consider opening up. Partly this is

about improving information sharing systems between youth justice agencies. In San Francisco, for instance, the Shared Youth Database, colloquially referred to as ‘Sneakernet’, is an attempt to link up information between foster care, youth justice services and mental health services to improve outcomes for this cohort of crossover youth.

We should seize these opportunities to improve local data sharing, but there are also opportunities at a national scale to share data better that we are currently not grasping. We should think afresh about all the centrally-held youth justice data, and consider how best to collate and share it in a simple, relevant format that enables it to be understood and used to its maximum potential by practitioners, commissioners and policy makers.

There is much to learn from the US’ focus on using youth justice data as a tool to tell complex stories more clearly, share evidence in accessible ways and provide targeted information which can directly be used to improve decision-making and outcomes. This is what Dr John Laub, Former Director of the Institute of Justice in the US, called ‘translational criminology’ - bringing research,

Project READY Respite

Currently being piloted in New York as a voluntary alternative to secure remand for those who do not post a high risk to public safety but cannot return home. Specialist foster-carers work with young people for 21 days, with intensive interventions to improve family functioning, blending elements of Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care with after-school programming.

Wraparound Milwaukee

A Wisconsin programme which encourages families of court-involved youth to identify and address their own needs from mentoring to mental health care, engaging over a hundred providers paid on a fee-for-service basis.

‘Short Lease’

A Danish intensive community sentence focused on re-entry into education, with a compulsory requirement for parental involvement, focusing on supporting young people back into mainstream education and addressing wider family issues.

‘Living Classrooms’

Used in the US as part of a Day Treatment Model to strengthen communities and inspire disengaged young people to achieve potential through hands-on education and job training, using urban, natural and maritime resources as ‘living classrooms’.

Four bright ideas

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data and evidence to decision-makers in the field. We could benefit from strengthening links with the academic community and increase the role of academics and non-government experts in ensuring evidence informs practice and policy more effectively.

A good place to start could be to improve the quality of information provided to sentencers to improve confidence in the use community sentences.

The Magistrates’ Association in England and Wales and others have repeatedly said they would welcome better information on evidence and outcomes for different community and custodial disposals (see for instance House Of Commons Justice Select Committee 2013 report on Youth Justice). There are many examples across the US of this approach - from the Pew Center on the States’ data visualisations, to the California Sentencing Institute’s work in mapping county disparities in sentencing decisions, to New York’s recently launched Structured Decision-Making Model to provide evidence-based advice to improve the court’s decision-making.

Building on these approaches, we could provide visually arresting, accessible information to consolidate evidence on outcomes to ensure that sentencers are provided with the most accurate, useful and accessible information on the efficacy of different sentences and the impact of their decision-making. We could also work with the public and third party developers to help think creatively about how public data is configured and presented to make it more useful. ‘NYC Big Apps’ for instance, has been running an annual competition since 2010 to encourage the public to use New York city data sets to use data creatively to make government services more accessible and encourage government accountability, and similar models are being developed here. We need to make sure youth justice is on the agenda.

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“The more information we have in court, the better our decisions as judges can be. In San Francisco over the past few years, we’ve been exploring different models of court and different ways of sharing data and evidence on different sentences to try to make our court and justice systems stronger, fairer

and more just.”

Judge Patrick J. Mahoney, Supervising Judge of Unified Family Court, San Francisco

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CHAPTER 2 RECOMMENDATIONS:

3 Create a youth justice innovation fund Encourage innovation in priority areas where little is known about what works, and use the fund to replicate, scale-up and evaluate promising practice.

4 Consider creative ways to make rich data sources on youth justice more accessible and useful Support evidence-based decision-making by practitioners, the judiciary, policymakers and the public, starting with improved data sets for sentencers.

5 Set up a youth justice academic panel to strengthen links between academia, policy makers and local decision-makers Increase the role of academic and non-governmental experts in challenging and shaping policy.

6 Establish an international Youth Justice NetworkEncourage dialogue and collaboration on shared youth justice challenges – such as improving education outcomes post-custody.

3: STOP THE CARE-TO-PRISON PIPELINE

Young people growing up in children’s homes in England and Wales experience worse outcomes than other children across a range of measures – from lower levels of educational attainment, to higher levels of unemployment, teenage pregnancy and homelessness. Young people who spend time in care, especially those in children’s homes, are also significantly more likely to enter the youth justice system. Between a quarter and a half of children in custody today have previously been looked after by the state and children in care are more than twice as likely to be cautioned or convicted as other children.

Most of these findings are attributable to negative pre-care experiences, with the correlation between the care system and offending largely the result of shared risk factors. However, experiences within the care system can exacerbate problems. Young people in children’s homes can end up being over-criminalised when poorly trained staff rely on the police to manage challenging behaviour (resulting in a criminal record for very minor offences). They can also end up facing disadvantage when moving out of care without any support (Schofield, G. et al., 2013), and can face disproportionately harsh sentencing decisions by judges. These factors all contribute to the state failing in its role as corporate parent and unfairly funnelling young people in care into the youth justice system.

Perhaps surprisingly, this correlation between the care system and the youth justice system does not seem to exist to the same extent in other countries such as Denmark. Here, most experts see the emphasis on social pedagogy methods as effective in reducing the over-criminalisation of young people in care. Transitional housing models like San Francisco’s ‘Larkin Street’ offer one option on how to support young people transitioning out of care, whilst the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute’s Center for Juvenile Justice Reform’s ‘Crossover Youth Practice Model’ provides a useful template for how agencies can collaborate to improve outcomes for young people in care with a tangible action plan for change. Finally, novel approaches to working with the courts, such as ‘dedicated dockets’ and ‘Project Confirm’ in New York, demonstrate what can be achieved.

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Denmark’s use of ‘social pedagogues’ within residential care homes

The Thomas Coram Research Unit ran a study back in 2007 to compare outcomes for young people growing up in residential care settings in England, Denmark and Germany (Cameron. C et al., 2007). They concluded that:

“Young people in England, compared to Denmark and Germany, were more likely to be out of education and/or employment, and at greater risk of teenage pregnancy and/or engagement in criminal activity … Care entry characteristics differed across countries, but did not account for significant variation in outcome indicators, once staff characteristics were taken into account … Young people in Denmark consistently offered more positive replies about their experience in care than those in Germany and England. Staff turnover, recruitment and retention, caused greatest concern in England, least concern in Denmark.”

Supported by other evidence, it seems that young people growing up in residential care settings in Denmark are likely to achieve overall better outcomes. These findings may be in part be due to the diversity of care provision available in Denmark which means that individual needs may be better met. Use of part-time foster carers and respite care is far more widespread than in the UK. Different options such as emergency accommodation, ‘Skolefritidsordinger’ (after-school care provision attached to schools with specialist staff), the

use of residential boarding schools, increased use of therapeutic care models and greater flexibility out of the care system which often extends until 21 or beyond, all contribute.

Of greater importance, though, is the approach to workforce. The Danish view is that one of the few things evidence tells us about ‘what works’ is the importance of positive relationships in transforming behaviour. Hence ‘Socialpaedagogik’ or social pedagogy is the cornerstone of their residential care system. Social pedagogy can be best understood as a holistic approach to the care and education of young people - staff strive to be positive role models and aim to develop young people’s sense of self-respect, responsibility and agency. Staff share the living space with young people, and use everyday activities as opportunities to build authentic and trusting relationships. They tend to use restorative approaches to resolve challenging situations rather than relying on calling in the police, and have the confidence, skills and autonomy to act in the best interests of the children they work with.

In Denmark, training as a social pedagogue takes at least three and a half years at university and additional training beyond, and it is seen as a highly skilled (although not particularly well-paid) profession, granted respect and status in a way that does not currently exist for children’s care staff in the UK.

Social pedagogy is also used within the youth justice system. At Stevnsfortet, a secure facility for young offenders near the town of Køge, for example, 60% of staff are trained social pedagogues and the staff and young people there speak openly about the transformative effect of living and working in an establishment with staff trained in this way. Young

people are able to build genuinely close relationships, can see and model behaviour, and according to staff there, this approach is a major contributor in changing young people’s behaviour as it is about encouraging responsibility, rather than exerting power through control.

“There are few greater responsibilities that a state can take on than deciding to remove a child from their parents and raise this child. The state should feel compelled to put its very best people in charge of raising these children; we need to provide exemplary care - be ‘parents plus’ not just staff”

Social pedagogue, Stevnsfortet, Denmark

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Whilst there is still an over-representation of looked-after children within Denmark’s youth justice system, it is not to the same extent as in England and Wales. Wider cultural differences also impact, but the value of social pedagogy is cited again and again by Danish policymakers and practitioners as central to their effectiveness. This conclusion is supported by the Coram researchers who reported, ‘better life chances were associated with a smaller, more stable and professionalised workforce, and a reflexive, child-centred approach to working with children.’

We could benefit from investing in the children’s care workforce, following Denmark’s approach to social pedagogy. Initial costs may be high, but they would be recouped rapidly if only a few young people from care were diverted from the youth justice system, plus the Danish homes tend to employ fewer members of staff, who are granted greater autonomy and require less oversight. The Department for Education has explored the idea of introducing social pedagogy into England’s care system before (Berridge et al., 2010). Whilst the results were promising, the approach taken was to import a team of (mainly inexperienced) social pedagogues to work within the English care model, which was never likely to achieve dramatic improvements. Deep-rooted cultural change would be necessary, led form the top, along with a genuine commitment to system reform.

The ‘Crossover Youth Practice Model’

Unlike Denmark, the US experiences similar problems to the UK in the over-representation of looked-after children within the youth justice system. The Center for Juvenile Justice Reform (CJJR) at Georgetown University Public Policy Institute in Washington DC estimates that up to 30% of young people aged 10 or older involved in the US care system are subsequently arrested and referred to the juvenile court, with over 25% of this group then held in secure remand prior to court hearings. This is a significantly higher percentage than non looked-after children (see Crossover Youth Practice Model, 2010). Research published by CJJR found that these children are perceived as higher risk by judges and youth justice practitioners, and tend to receive harsher dispositions than children not in care. The CJJR, led by Shay Bilchik, have been working with Casey Family Programs since 2007 to try to reduce the number of young people who cross over between the child welfare and youth justice systems (‘crossover youth’) and are

placed in out of home care. It also has set ambitious goals to improve permanency outcomes, increase the use of diversion, and reduce secure remand and rates of recidivism for those who do end up in the youth justice system.

Shay and his team started by working with local practitioners on a ‘Breakthrough Series Collaborative’, running ‘tests of change’ in several pilot jurisdictions trying out different approaches to see what worked, and what didn’t. They took the most promising aspects from these pilots - such as the greater focus on alternatives to secure remand for looked-after youth, and more meaningful family engagement in casework - and used them alongside findings from wider research to develop the ‘Crossover Youth Practice Model’ (CYPM). This innovative model provides a step by step template of specific practices that local areas can put in place to reduce the number of young people who crossover between the child welfare and juvenile justice system, including:

• creating a process for identifying crossover youth at the point of crossing over;

• ensuring that practitioners in the youth justice system and child welfare system are appropriately exchanging information quickly and effectively;

• including families in all decision-making aspects of the case;

• ensuring that foster case bias is not occurring at the point of detention (secure remand) or disposition;

• maximizing the services used by each system to prevent crossover from occurring and intervene most effectively when crossover has occurred; and

• improving permanency outcomes for crossover youth.

In the US, African-American and Native American children are over-represented in both the child welfare and juvenile justice populations - as black and minority ethnic young people are in the UK - but even more so in this crossover youth population. This is also true for girls. This suggests that effective work to tackle this crossover cohort could have a disproportionately positive impact on these groups of children.

The model focuses on five practice areas and twenty-five practice elements running from the point of arrest through to planning for youth permanency, transition and case closure. The underlying approach is that welfare practitioners and youth justice practitioners working with this cohort of crossover youth need

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to collaborate - through joint case assignment, assessment, sharing data, coordinated case plans and case supervision - to improve outcomes for this group of young people (see Crossover Youth Practice Model report, 2010 p.10):

“In the juvenile justice system, the young person is often seen as a perpetrator, and, historically, the provided services seek to remediate the delinquent behaviour. The child welfare system views the young person as a victim and works to nurture and protect them… thus creating tensions when working with a young person who is involved in both systems. Implementing a practice model for serving crossover youth… can impact how the two systems serve crossover youth, and rapidly impact outcomes for this population.”

What makes the model so innovative is that academic research and practice-based findings are distilled down into a straightforward toolkit, which any local area can adopt. Jurisdictions that want to participate can either work directly with CJJR’s Crossover Youth Practice Model

(CYPM) academic team in their home community or begin their participation by sending along a team of practitioners to take part in a Certification Programme at Georgetown University, working alongside the academic team to tailor the model to their local area with technical assistance, peer-support from other areas and ongoing site-based consultation to aid implementation. The CYPM is now being used in over 40 counties in 14 states across the US, including California, Florida, New York and Texas, with four new states set to join by the end of 2013.

CJJR’s findings to date suggest that CYPM youth are far less likely to be detained at the time of arrest, are more likely to receive diversion and are less likely to have a new arrest six months after identification compared with non-CYPM youth. The model would need to be adapted to be used in England and Wales, but the CJJR is keen to extend the use of this model and its Certification Programme internationally. If the results and broad based excitement and acceptance in the US are anything to go by, this would be a fruitful collaboration.

THE MAN WITH THE PLAN

Shay Bilchik, the founder and Director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute has come from a distinguished background to set up the Crossover Youth Practice Model. After starting out as a trial lawyer, juvenile division chief and Chief Assistant State Attorney in Miami, Shay went on in 1994 to lead the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) in the US Department of Justice and then in 2000 became President and CEO of the Child Welfare League of America, the oldest and most influential child welfare organization in the US. He left in 2007 to establish the CJJR and to lead this work on crossover youth, an area in urgent need of reform.

“We made the decision when founding CJJR to focus primarily on this population of young people as a result of seeing the lack of effort to do more than just recognise the “crossover” phenomenon; in essence the failure to better understand the causes and correlates associated with their path and

address them in a holistic manner.”

Shay Bilchik, Director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute, Washington DC

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Changing court practice - Project Confirm

Evidence from the CJJR in the US shows that crossover youth are more likely to be remanded in custody than non-crossover young people, regardless of the severity of their offence, and there is anecdotal evidence that the picture is similar in England and Wales. One likely reason is sentencers’ lack of confidence in residential care-home staff in ensuring that young people do not break their bail conditions, which is often compounded when young people in care attend court unaccompanied, or when the staff member accompanying them does not seem to know or advocate for the young person in question. This issue is addressed in the Crossover Youth Practice Model, which offers a variety of solutions - such as ‘one family/one judge’, introducing special qualifications for lawyers working with crossover young people or establishing ‘dedicated dockets’. This last approach is particularly favoured in the model and involves designating a judge and court personnel to hear all cases involving crossover youth. The judge and their team receive extra training on the needs and risks of this cohort; cross-training is provided to the court staff, juvenile probation team and social welfare practitioners to foster better working relations; and the juvenile probation and child welfare case workers are both required to attend all hearings.

Project Confirm, set up in 1998 in Brooklyn, New York City, has successfully put this approach into practice. The team originally set up the project to tackle the disproportionally high number of foster youth held in secure remand. They wanted to increase the corporate parent’s role in advocating and supporting a fair outcome for young people in care, in the same way that a responsible parent would.

There are several strands to the project, including a notification system to keep an accurate tally of the number of young people in care remanded or sentenced to custody, and the ability to track them through the system - something currently lacking in the UK. They also provide high quality information to judges to inform their decision-making and training. When an ‘open case’ comes into the system, the Project Confirm team co-ordinate contact between all agencies with legal responsibilities towards the young person, both to ensure that they attend relevant court hearings and to encourage court conferences before the hearing, so that all the different agencies can share information, hold each other accountable and take steps to prepare for court.

An evaluation of Project Confirm (Conger, D. and Ross, T., 2006) found that it was a strong model, although interestingly, the results were not wholly positive - it seems that providing judges with additional information in some cases led to more risk-averse decision-making. The evaluators stressed the need to explain the information to the judiciary to avoid inaccurate perceptions of risk (e.g. wrongly interpreting a history of absences from the care home as a mark of high risk for offending). Once the programme had been amended to take this learning into account, the findings showed that foster case bias was reduced, and entirely eliminated for lower risk young people. Project Confirm has since been fully adopted by child welfare and youth probation in New York City.

We should consider following this example in England and Wales - finding out specifically why sentencers are making different decisions for children in residential care, and thinking creatively about how to put targeted measures in place to address this.

Larkin Street transitional housing San Francisco’s Larkin Street set up the highly regarded Larkin Extended Aftercare for Supported Emancipation (LEASE) programme in 2003 to try to stem the flow of young people becoming homeless or being involved in crime after leaving the care system at 18. The LEASE programme offers supported housing for seventy-five 18 to 24 year olds each year who have transitioned out of the care system, and provides them with the skills and resources to be able to live independently as adults. Transitioning out of care is a difficult process and the outcomes for youth who ‘age out’ of care in the US without a committed adult to support them are shocking - nearly 40% experience homelessness after leaving care, nearly 40% of those who are employed work in the fast food industry, and the majority fail to complete high school. Whilst outcomes in the UK may be better, lack of support post-care is a risk factor for ending up within the youth justice system (Schofield, G. et al., 2013). The LEASE project tackles this difficult transition period through practical support. Each young person is given their own apartment, allocated a caseworker and provided with wrap-around support from employment training to counselling, to help them succeed. The focus is on giving these young people the practical skills that they need - from how to manage money, to basic cooking skills and how to find and keep a job.

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CHAPTER 3 RECOMMENDATIONS:

7 The Department of Education should undertake a follow-up ‘social pedagogy’ trialAddress the limitations of the initial study to trial the introduction of experienced pedagogues into the senior staff structure in children’s care homes and youth custody settings.

8 Trial the ‘Crossover Youth Practice Model’ in two local authorities in England and WalesWork with the CJJR at Georgetown University Public Policy Institute to adapt the Crossover Youth Practice Model for use in England and Wales and pilot with two local authorities in 2014.

9 Use learning from ‘Project Confirm’ to improve outcomes for looked-after children in the youth justice systemImprove data collection on the number of looked-after children in custody, and introduce better systems to tackle disproportionate sentencing decisions for looked-after children coming to court.

4: RETHINK CUSTODYFor the most serious and violent young offenders, custody may be the only option to protect public safety. Locking up young people is expensive (with the average bed price in England and Wales costing about £100,000 per year and up to £200,000 in some cases), especially considering that it does not seem to be working - 73% of young offenders who are released from custody re-offend within 12 months. There is no simple answer to this. Most young people in custody arrive with a troubled and complex history, often including substance misuse, mental health problems, disrupted education, family breakdown and bereavement. Trying to address all these needs and ensure that these young people are effectively resettled into their community upon release is a difficult challenge, particularly when most young people are serving an average sentence of 77 days, surrounded by negative peer influences and detached from the communities to which they will soon be returning.

What if custody looked different? In Denmark, the MultifunC and similar models like the ‘Flying Dutchman’ turn the traditional prison model on its head – rather than institutionalising young people behind closed doors, the MultifunC model focuses intensively on local resettlement from day one. Across Brazil, different ways of incentivising reduction in sentence length are underway, along with the development of specialist training centres for staff. A different approach, the Missouri model, has been gaining momentum in the US. Providing a graduated set of residential options for offenders, only a small group of the highest risk offenders are placed in secure custody, and are held in small, local units where they receive individual care within a group-treatment model to try to change behaviour and reduce re-offending.

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Copenhagen’s MultifunC

The ‘MultifunC’ custodial model was created by Norwegian psychologist Tore Andreassen in 2005. It challenges traditional assumptions about what a prison can be, by blurring the lines between a secure facility and a resettlement programme. There are now eight MultifunC institutions for high-risk offenders in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, with another in the Jutland region of Denmark due to open soon. It is also being used in Denmark to accommodate young people placed for welfare reasons (similar to welfare placements in Secure Children’s Homes in England and Wales).

The very point of custody is that it removes young people from their home environments. This may enhance public safety in the short term, but at some point these young people will return straight back to the communities they came from, with exactly the same (if not a worse) set of challenges and environmental risks that led them into custody in the first place. These include gang affiliation, exclusion from school and lack of job, difficult family relationships, and no stable accommodation. All this combines to make re-offending fairly likely, however much progress has been made within the walls of an institution.

The MultifunC approach is to use every day of the young person’s sentence as an opportunity to focus on reducing their likelihood of re-offending. Young people sentenced to the MultifunC spend their first few weeks undergoing assessments and are confined to the centre (although currently staff have little ability to keep young people from leaving - unlike in the Swedish version which is a more secured unit). The centres are all located within the communities where most of the young people come from, and the young people are gradually allowed to spend increasing amounts of time outside of the facility’s

walls, often accompanied by a staff member through a process of ‘normalisation’. The intention is that by the time their sentence is complete (usually between 9 to 15 months) they have the skills, resources and support in place to live successful lives - access to education and employment, mental health support, somewhere safe to live, improved family relations and reduced gang affiliation.

Education, for instance, begins in-house, but staff focus on finding spaces for these young people in mainstream schools accompanied by specialist teachers from the centre who provide one-to-one support in the classroom. Others might be placed into ‘production schools’ that combine formal education with vocational training. Families are seen as key agents of change, and multi-systemic family therapy is central to the model, with parents or carers having to attend weekly meetings at the centre and staff encouraging overnight stays at home called ‘training visits’, to provide a stepped return to living back at home, if appropriate. Links with local vocational schools and employers mean that young people can start adjusting and settle into routines in college or employment whilst they are in the centre, receiving specialist support and oversight, rather than giving them a set of appointments to attend and arrange once they leave.

The MultifunC is a transformative institution with a genuine focus on resettlement, using the sentence as a time to address criminogenic needs and teaching responsibility. The vision is to put a structure in place step-by-step to help these young people lead successful crime-free lives back in their home communities. This is in stark contrast to our approach of institutionalising young people and then waiting until the sentence is up to see how the young person fares outside, handing over to a youth probation team who cannot provide

MULTIFUNC PRINCIPLES OF EFFECTIVE PRACTICE

THE RISK PRINCIPLE: intensive treatment gives best effects for medium to high-risk youth, and little or no effect for low risk youth

THE NEED PRINCIPLE: the targets of interventions should be known risk factors for recidivism which we know are modifiable e.g. substance misuse, mental health problems, family relations, peer relations and education

THE RESPONSIVITY PRINCIPLE: treatment should be matched to learning style

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intensive intervention and oversight day and night. ‘Release on Temporary Licence’ is currently used as a way of supporting resettlement, but with many young people placed far from home it is often accompanied release to undertake an activity near to the prison, rather than a graduated, planned release back into a home community. It may be unpalatable to have a prison with a blurred line between custody and community, but these are young people who will all be returning to their communities sooner or later, and it is far better that prison is used as a time to integrate young people into mainstream services, with intensive oversight and support, rather than spend a few months locked up and then reoffend within their first month of release.

Results are impressive, with findings suggesting that 70% of the 220 young people who have so far been to MultifunC in Norway do not re-offend. This is particularly impressive considering the establishment only takes the highest-risk young people and most serious offenders. Similar models - like the Flying Dutchman - operate across Denmark, and are all based on the premise of locally-based, small units which can focus on a graduated readjustment back into a young person’s home community. This system could help support improved outcomes for young people in England and Wales, particularly those for who environmental factors are likely to lead them straight back to custody and is an idea worth testing.

The main challenge for introducing a pilot would be the costs involved. In Denmark it costs £700 a day per placement mainly as a result of high staff costs (90% are trained social pedagogues, specialist teachers or psychologists), and the fact that these are small, local units. However, practitioners acknowledge that the

model can be readily adapted to be delivered more cheaply, and if it is successful in significantly reducing reoffending and reducing the number of times a young person returns to custody then costs will be recouped quickly. We should explore these cost-benefits and consider exploring the feasibility of a secure-to-community MultifunC pilot in a high-custody area such as East London.

Bricks versus staff - the Bahian approach

The Brazilian state of Bahia has previously run a punitive youth justice system, with harsh correctional facilities for young people, most of whom come from the favelas surrounding the cities of Salvador and Feira de Santana. Over the past three years the state authorities have made a concerted effort to transform their youth secure facilities, and focus on rehabilitation and reducing re-offending. This is part of the Brazilian Government’s vision that reforming prisons should be a top priority along with the upcoming Olympics and World Cup. New facilities have been built for young offenders with a focus on addressing health and education needs, and smaller housing blocks have replaced overcrowded and unsafe prison wings. The biggest focus, though, is on staff training. Officials have taken the view that the most critical factor in running an effective prison will be the quality and dedication of the staff, so last year they opened the ‘School of Sinase’ in the central unit of FUNDAC specifically to train up staff to work with young people in custody.

This stance of prioritising workforce over everything else seems so sensible and yet quite far removed from

“When young people enter the MultifunC they enter a very structured, predictable environment and through an incentive scheme which rewards personal responsibility, they gradually get to build links in their community over months and months. There is no great leap to

independence when they leave the institution. We help them develop the sense of internal autonomy and build their links with mainstream services to help them succeed.”

Ganja Galeano, Teamleader at the MultifunC, Copenhagen

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our system. Whilst there have been small steps to improve the situation, many prison service staff in Young Offenders Institutions transfer directly from the adult estate, with minimal additional training - they have never specifically chosen to work with young people, and it is not recognised as a distinct specialism requiring a highly-qualified workforce like school teachers or other groups working with children. It is expensive to train and recruit a specialist group of staff, and far cheaper to bring in staff from adult prisons - but if we really want prisons to be a place of transformation and we want staff to be equipped to deal with the most troubled and challenging

young people in society then we should follow Bahia state’s example and not just look at the ‘bricks and computers’.

The Missouri Model - replacing Boonville

Up until 1983 Missouri’s main youth correctional facility was the 650-bed Boonville Training School. Following a series of scandals and high rates of re-offending, the State of Missouri’s juvenile corrections agency, the

PEDALLING OUT OF PRISON - UNUSUAL WAYS OF REDUCING SENTENCE LENGTH IN BRAZIL

Last summer in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, local judge Henrique Mallmann suggested that prisoners should be offered the chance to reduce their sentence in exchange for generating power. The medium secure prison in Santa Rita do Sapucai took up the challenge and brought in stationary bikes, inviting prisoners to volunteer to cycle the bikes and use the power to charge-up converted car batteries. For every three eight-hour shift the prisoners spend on the bike, one day is taken off their sentence. Every evening the battery is driven into the town by a prison guard and used to power ten street lamps that illuminate the town’s riverside path, turning it from a no-go area into a safe and busy promenade for local residents.

Cycling is not the only way for Brazilian prisoners to reduce their sentences. The Brazilian Government recently launched a ‘redemption through reading’ programme. Adult offenders serving sentences in four federal prisons across Brazil are able to apply to the programme to read up to 12 books to earn a maximum of 48 days off their sentence each year. The Government have prepared an approved reading list and a special panel decide which prisoners are eligible to participate. Participants have up to four weeks to read the book and prepare an essay reviewed by a judge that must ‘make correct use of paragraphs, be free of corrections, use margins and legible joined-up writing’. Over four hundred imates are already on the programme, with the hope that it will help raise the skills and self-confidence of prisoners, reduce recidivism and tackle over-crowding in the country’s prisons.

“The bricks and computers are not as important as the staff that we employ. To work here, staff will have had to say, ‘yes, I want to work with young people’, and they will then have to go and study hard to get a distinct qualification. This means that we will have a well-trained group of staff who

are committed to helping these young people change their behaviour.”

Louiz Aranjo-Gerente, Director of Salvador’s four youth secure facilities, Salvador

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accrued from keeping lower and medium risk youth out of the secure care facilities also means there are more funds available to invest in intensive intervention with this highest risk group.

In the secure facilities, young people are placed in groups of 10 to 12, and these groups sleep in the same dorms, eat, study and exercise together, and attend daily therapy sessions together supervised by their assigned youth specialists. The focus is on open communication - young people are required to explain and discuss their past and present behaviour and emotions, and to support their peers. This group therapy approach aims to harness the typically negative peer pressure that exists in most custodial provision - what Dishion and colleagues (1999) call ‘peer contagion’ - into a tool for good.

Highly trained and specialist staff are seen as critical to the success of the model. Staff are recruited as ‘youth development representatives’ rather than correctional officers, reflecting a conscious change in the culture and ethos of the staffing group. The DYS has also led dedicated recruitment campaigns in college campuses across the state, taken action to ensure the staff group reflects the racial and ethnic make-up of the young people in the facilities and run intensive ongoing training courses throughout the first two years for all staff joining the team.

Division of Youth Services (DYS), began thinking anew about youth justice and experimenting with alternative approaches to community and custodial provision. They closed Boonville, and replaced it with a graduated set of residential provision, shown below.

At one end of the scale, day treatment centres offer both an alternative to custody and a community based intensive support programme for young people post-custody. Run as accredited day schools, these centres focus on providing high-quality education and job mentoring programmes, intensive counselling for young people and their families, and support to aid effective resettlement within local communities.

At the other end of the spectrum, the seven secure care facilities are small, secure children’s home-like facilities near to young people’s communities with the largest holding 36 high risk and serious offenders. They provide intense peer and professional counselling, emphasise positive youth development (relationships and activities designed to build on young people’s strengths and competencies) and encourage co-operative relationships between young people and staff to achieve behavioural change.

This graduated provision means that lower risk offenders can be kept within their communities and receive interventions appropriate to their risk level. The savings

Day treatment centres

Community supervision programme for low-risk young offenders

Group homes

7 non-secure group homes with 10-12 beds which young people may be sentenced to for 4-6 months

Moderately secure facilities

20 facilities either in residential neighbourhoods, state parks (with a focus on outdoor programmes) or on college campuses

Secure care facilities

7 secure facilities for young people who need to be removed from the community to protect public safety

Missouri’s graduated residential provision

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Group treatment is balanced with a focus on individualised treatment for each young person - case-coordinators create and oversee an individualised treatment plan with resettlement considered from the outset. Approximately a third of young people participate in family therapy whilst in the facility, and treatment often continues once they leave. There is a particular focus on ‘special interventions’ to facilitate school re-enrolment and as young people near the end of their sentences, they are encouraged to gain work experience in the local community, with their minimum wage pay used to pay restitution or contribute to the state’s Crime Victims Restitution Fund. Many institutions have created a panel of local residents and business leaders to support resettlement and provide employment opportunities for young people returning to the local area.

Missouri is currently spending far less on youth justice than previously, as although costs per placement are higher, there are far fewer young people placed in secure placements and therefore overall costs are reduced. As recidivism rates decrease the state is generating greater savings, both in terms of reduced victim costs and criminal justice expenses, as well as improved outcomes for the young people involved. Moreover, evidence from Annie E. Casey (Mendel, R., 2010) shows that 8.5% of young people discharged from DYS custody in 2005 were sentenced to prison or an adult correctional programme within three years of their release, compared to rates of over 20% in states such as Arizona, Indiana and Maryland. Its success is also evident in the fact that this unconventional approach to youth custody has sustained political support for nearly thirty years under governors

from across the political spectrum - including the notoriously ‘tough on crime’ former US Attorney General John Ashcroft in the early 1990s.

‘New Beginnings’ - transferring the Missouri Model to Washington DC

In 2006 Vincent Schiraldi, working as Director of the District of Columbia Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, took action to reform Washington DC’s youth justice system and after exploring different options, decided to trial the Missouri approach. He wanted to ensure that only the most serious and chronic offenders were placed in custody and that the custody provision for this cohort was intensive and focused on reducing recidivism. He began by introducing a community-based continuum of alternatives to custody for all low and medium risk offenders, and by 2009 had replaced the notorious 220-bed Oak Hill Youth Center with a new $45 million facility, ‘New Beginnings’, which opened half a mile down the road with 60 beds divided into small housing units. Young people’s sentences were increased from around 70 days to 10 months, and the facility followed the Missouri approach of ‘positive youth development’ and guided peer interaction to promote behavioural transformation. As in Missouri, there is a strong emphasis on the quality of the staff working with the young people. They are bringing in consultants from Missouri to train-up practitioners and managers, running a specialist recruitment programme and introducing a six-week training programme for all staff.

The New Beginnings model has been widely seen as a success with crime rates, recidivism rates and costs

“Safety is best promoted by the development of strong relationships between staff and youth, consistent structure and proactive engagement of youth, not correctional hardware and passive supervision. National statistics on Missouri’s system, and studies of the replication of the approach in

other jurisdictions have revealed consistently lower rates of facility violence and youth recidivism, and high rates of youth pro-social engagement in the community after release.”

Gladys Carrion, Commissioner, Office of Children and Family Service, New York State

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significantly lower than before, but it has not been a straightforward journey. The day after the facility opened a young person scaled a wall and escaped, the public have raised concerns about whether the approach is right for today’s teenage ‘superpredators’ and the Washington Post has run an ongoing campaign attacking the reforms for being too ‘soft on crime’. Nevertheless, over time the approach has won over many critics, mainly because of its promising impact on reducing crime and re-offending rates, and is now being cited as good practice by central Government. Some lessons learnt from the implementation of this model, supported by an independent evaluation (Daly, R. et al., 2011) are outlined on the opposite page.

In 2008 Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government named the Missouri Division of Youth Services winner of its prestigious ‘Innovations in American Government’ award in children and family system reform. Missouri have now established the Missouri Youth Services Institute to support jurisdictions across the US in adopting Missouri’s approach and many have taken up the offer.

CHALLENGES AND CRITICISMS

The Missouri model seems to offer a promising approach, but there are some controversial elements that have posed difficulties to some others jurisdictions choosing to adopt the model. These include:

• Group Education: All young people attend 6 hours of education every weekday as a group, regardless of educational ability. Critics have argued that this approach to group learning could disadvantage both the most and least advanced students.

• Sentence length determined by staff: Once the judge has committed a youth to DYS custody, over 80% hand over the power to decide where to place the young person, their sentence length and the length of aftercare supervision. There are also no fixed rewards or sanctions scheme, and no standardised approach to breach – staff respond to the young person on a case-by-case basis. This creates a powerful incentive to encourage the young person to participate in the programme, as their release date is dependent on their perceived progress. It also illustrates judges’ confidence in the expertise of the staff. There are concerns though that release dates contingent on completion of the programme means some young people may serve sentences out of proportion to the severity of their offence or risk level.

• Use of ‘peer restraint’: In Missouri staff train young people to help apply physical restrain on other peers who are risking harm to themselves or others. Restraints can only be called by staff, but when they are, it is other young people who physically hold down the other young person. As yet, none of the jurisdictions replicating Missouri’s approach have adopted this policy of peer restraint. (New York is adopting the ‘Safe Crisis Management’ system).

• Different offending population: Some critics have argued that most young offenders in Missouri are sentenced for minor infractions and that the success in reducing recidivism would not be replicated in high-crime states. The DYS has rebutted these claims, stating that nearly two-thirds of young people in their facilities do have a history of felony offending, and many of the young people come from St Louis, which has one of the nation’s highest homicide rates.

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‘Close to Home’ - New York’s next steps

Vincent Schiraldi has since been promoted to become Commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation and in 2012 New York State announced the ‘Close to Home’ initiative, stopping all placements of young people into state-run secure facilities in upstate New York, and replacing them with a continuum of alternatives to custody and small, local secure units for those who need to be held securely. The majority of the units will be run using the Missouri approach, and the others will be adopting the not dissimilar ‘Boys Town’ model developed in Nebraksa. There will be thirty-three sites across the city, run by eleven providers, with all

the institutions linked to local school provision, closer to young people’s home communities to aid effective resettlement and with a focus on ‘aftercare from the moment of entry’.

The enlightened move in New York towards a diverse estate of small, locally based secure residential units with a specialist workforce and a focused approach to resettlement seems to be resulting in a reduced reoffending rate, and significant long-term savings to the state. In England and Wales, the general move seems to be in the opposite direction towards less diversity within the estate, and a focus on larger institutions with lower staff ratios, and less separation from the adult estate. All this is predicated on the need to save funds by reducing

Learn lessons quickly during implementation and work flexibly to ensure that the model can be readily adapted

5

Do not under-estimate the importance of cross-party political support – in this case elected officials and the Blue Ribbon Commission

4

Use cost-benefit data analysis to demonstrate financial benefits of working more intensively with a smaller cohort in custody

2Collaborate with local stakeholders to make use of expertise from the outset

3

Implementing reform; lessons from ‘New Beginnings’

1 Establish a clear narrative about the need for reform and interrogate available data to understand the current picture and measure ongoing performance

Implementation is a lengthy process if it requires cultural change; strong leadership is critical

6

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bed-costs per night. Schiraldi’s argument (similar to that made by the Danish Government) is that bed-night costs are short-term spend for larger cost savings down the road if reoffending rates are reduced. This seems instinctively to be the right approach - echoing the cases for investment in early intervention. Either way, it seems we are making decisions about value for money in the dark. More evidence is urgently needed to better understand the cost-benefits of a more expensive custodial model and whether investing in a ‘Close to Home’ approach will have enough of an impact on reoffending rates to be the wise financial move for the medium and longer-term.

“If someone came down from Mars to New York - a state of nearly 20 million people - and was told that in that state, there were about 500 kids state-wide whose behaviours were bad enough for them to warrant confinement in locked custody… and that 90-95% of them hailed from 3

parts of the state, and was then asked what should be done with them - no reasonable Martian would develop a state-centralized, institution-based system in which those kids were taken out of those 3 places, and sent to other parts of the state, put in debilitating and violent institutions and then returned some 9 -12 months later, supposedly cured of what ailed them… The only reason such a system exists today is because it existed yesterday and all the yesterdays before that going back nearly two hundred years.”

Vincent Schiraldi, Commissioner of the Department of Probation, New York City

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CHAPTER 4 RECOMMENDATIONS:

10 Consider introducing a MultifunC secure establishment in LondonTrial a small, local unit in East London for high-risk young offenders, with a focus on effective integration back into their local community, building on Danish expertise at the Copenhagen MultifunC and the ‘Flying Dutchman’.

11 Invest in research to better understand the medium and long-term financial implications of commissioning different custodial modelsWork with academics to establish whether small, local secure units with specialist workforce results in significantly reduced reoffending rates (and thereby cost savings) to warrant the initial high investment.

5: WHO PAYS FOR WHAT? - INCENTIVISE LOCAL AREAS TO IMPROVE OUTCOMES

We should be striving to create a youth justice system focused on reducing re-offending and improving public safety. Our vision should be for a system that focuses on effective early intervention where the majority of young people who do offend are sentenced to robust community sentences that are proven to reduce recidivism, with a small cohort of high-risk offenders serving custodial sentences in high quality provision tailored to their needs. How can we ensure that the right financial incentives are in place to achieve this?

The youth justice system in England and Wales has traditionally been structured in such a way that local authorities bear the costs of overseeing young people on community sentences and for the cost of bail support packages, whilst central Government pays the full cost whenever young people are sentenced to custody. This can create perverse incentives that encourage the use of custody for lower risk offenders, and fail to reward good practice locally. The tide is changing with the Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board devolving remand budgets and trialling the use of different financial incentive models to try to improve youth justice outcomes. The results of these pilots will be critical in shaping future decision-making in this arena, but there are also lessons to be learnt from looking further afield to learn about how to implement these schemes so that they deliver the results we want.

In the US, policymakers are experimenting with a host of different financial incentive models. The legislative changes enacted in the youth and adult justice systems across the US provide many examples of different financial models we could learn from, including justice reinvestment and realignment in California, as well as thinking about how to frame the argument in terms of public safety. Denmark, too, have been experimenting with devolving the remand budget with mixed results. Finally the Vera Institute for Justice’s work on challenges with this approach provides helpful learning from fifty states that can support our learning here. There are quick wins in collaborating on different approaches, sharing what works and learning from others’ successes and failures in this field.

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Learning lessons from US approaches

Using financial incentives as a way to steer good practice and save taxpayers’ money is growing in popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2010 the Ministry of Justice launched a social impact bond at Peterborough Prison, aiming to reduce adult re-offending. This model is now being trialled in New York City (with the New York Times worryingly referring to Peterborough ‘as a London suburb’). In the New York version, investors, non-profits and government are working to finance and deliver an ‘Adolescent Behavioural Learning Experience’ programme which seeks to improve outcomes for black and Latino adolescents at Rikers Island jail. Goldman Sachs, with backing from Bloomberg Philanthropies, are lending $9.6million to MDRC, a non-profit organisation who are overseeing the work of two charities running the programme. Another non-profit will be evaluating the scheme.

If re-offending rates drop by 10%, Goldman Sachs recoup their money. If the target is exceeded, the bank could receive over $2 million in profit. Critics argue that with Mayor Bloomberg’s personal foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, guaranteeing over $7m of the loan, this set-up is not really testing the model’s commercial viability, and that in other circumstances investors will not see the bonds as an attractive investment option. Moreover, we will not know whether the Peterborough or New York models are a success for some time yet. On the other hand, these initiatives encourage a focus on outcomes rather than processes, and if the scheme fails it will be the investors - and not the taxpayer - footing the bill. As Mayor Bloomberg says, ‘they have the potential to be a new financial tool that can empower governments to innovate in ways they wouldn’t otherwise attempt.’

Other financial incentive models focus on financially rewarding individual prisons or probation teams for effectively reducing recidivism. This has historically been difficult to implement in the youth justice system in England and Wales due to challenges with assigning ownership for outcomes (the role of the prison versus the role of the Youth Offending Team in the community) and for the challenges of devolving financial risk to local authority level. One option would be to hand over responsibility for community supervision to secure establishments or alternatively to privatise the Youth Offending Team (YOT) model, but these would risk unravelling the unique and highly-regarded multi-agency approach of YOTs imbedded within local authority structures. A better approach in youth justice might be

to increase local authority accountability as a whole.

Currently, the youth justice system in England and Wales is structured in a way that local authorities meet the costs for all community services for offenders, but the Youth Justice Board centrally pays for the full cost of custody. A similar picture exists in the US, with counties paying for community provision, and custody costs covered at state level. This can create perverse incentives that encourage local decision-makers to use custody for lower risk offenders, and discourage heavy investment in early intervention, effective resettlement and innovative community sentences when custody exists as a ‘free good’. The Annie E. Casey Foundation in the US have argued that the ‘deep end’s availability as a ‘safety net’ for practitioners’ and the fact that it eats up much of the youth justice budgets, has ‘muted the creativity needed to develop innovative and effective alternative approach to youth crime’ (Annie E. Casey 2012).

There is growing interest in tackling this perverse incentive. Justice reinvestment programmes differ in their details but are based on devolving some of the costs of custody to a local level. Local areas are encouraged to invest more funds in early intervention to divert young people from the youth justice system, and to develop evidence-based community sentences as alternatives for custody for low and medium risk offenders. The aim is to improve public safety outcomes through lower crime rates and recidivism, send fewer lower risk young people to custody (creating a smaller cohort in custody whose needs can be better met), and generate cashable savings for the state (through reductions in custody numbers and the closure of prison units). A proportion of these savings are then shared with the local area through a financial reward, to be invested back into evidence-based early intervention programmes and community based alternatives to custody.

In England and Wales new approaches are underway with the YJB overseeing the Youth Justice Reinvestment Pathfinder, and the recent Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Act devolving the cost of remand to local areas. However, there is much we could learn from the US where they have been trialling variations on these approaches since the 1960s. Momentum is growing - since 2003 eight states in the US have enacted legislation creating performance incentive funding (PIF) programmes using justice reinvestment approaches, with several more planned.

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California’s journey

The idea of the justice reinvestment model in youth justice began back in 1966 in California, when a probation subsidy was introduced to encourage counties to develop their community probation provision as an alternative to sentencing young people to state institutions. It was agreed that the base-line would be measured by looking at the current number of young people in custody from each county, and that any reduction in state custodial placements the following year would be rewarded with a financial payment of up to $4000 per person. In principle, this reward would equate to the savings made to the state purse for not having to pay for prison costs.

This subsidy did lead to a dramatic decline in the use of state facilities, with more than 45,000 adults and young people diverted from state institutions to local probation and rehabilitation programmes, and as a result three secure facilities closed. However, there was growing dissatisfaction with the subsidy - it did not take into account inflation, areas with historically low custody use were not given special baselines, and it was not necessarily leading to an overall reduction in incarceration, with many offenders simply being sent to state-subsidised local institutions rather than the state prisons.

Fast-forward to 1996, and public and political concern about the high incarceration rates for young people in state prisons once again began to mount. With around 10,000 young people in custody, some of the state’s 58 counties were accused of using the prison system as

a dumping ground for difficult young people that the county wanted off their hands. In an attempt to respond to these issues, the ‘charge-back’ was introduced that flipped the original probation subsidy on its head - this time charging a fee to counties who were seen to be relying too heavily on state incarceration, rather than rewarding those with low usage. Critically, the charge was only levied on counties who were using state prison as a response to low-level offenders - this was not an attempt to reduce public safety but was based on the notion that if local areas wanted to use the prison system for other groups of offenders then they should bear some of the costs on a sliding-scale of fees.

Before the law was enacted, counties paid a tokenistic $25 a month for any young person in state custody. Under the ‘charge-back’ counties still paid a small fee for the most serious offenders, but had to pay 50 - 100% for those sentenced for minor offences, such as drug possession. Whilst the introduction of the charge-back did again lead to a drop in the numbers in state prison - over half in the first seven years - it was not without its detractors. Chief among them was the judiciary, who felt that sentencing decisions should not be influenced by the need for budget savings. Also high-crime counties who were dealing with higher numbers of offenders felt disproportionately affected by the charges.

In 2007, the charge-back model was adapted into Senate Bill 81 (SB81), with funding provided up-front to local areas to invest in early intervention and community rehabilitation programmes for young people. To address earlier criticisms of the funding formula, relative arrest rates for felony offences for each county were used to

“Getting the best results possible with scarce resources is a challenge for every jurisdiction – within the United States as well as in Europe and elsewhere. If another country has found a successful strategy, we all can benefit. You see this with social impact bonds – their use started in the

United Kingdom and now New York City and other U.S. jurisdictions are piloting their use. Sometimes it takes another country’s perspective to help us think outside of the box.”

Alison Shames, Associate Director, Center on Sentencing and Corrections, Vera Institute of Justice, New York

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TX

KSCA

AR

IL

KY

OH

SC

ARKANSASPublic Safety Improvement Act SB750 (2011)• Grants awarded to 5 pilot areas for 50% of averted state costs of reduced prison numbers • Separate grant to reduce probation revocations• To receive awards, must also maintain/decrease felony conviction rate

CALIFORNIACalifornia Community Corrections Performance Incentive Act SB678 (2009)• Counties receive 40-45% of state savings for reducing probation revocations• High performance grants available if revocation rates +50% below statewide average• Began with $45m seed funding in 2010, rising to $136.4m last year in incentive payments and grants

ILLINOISIllinois Crime Reduction Act of 2009 SB1289 (2009)• Planning grants up to $30,000 to local areas to reduce prison commitments of non-violent offenders by 25%• Up to $1m implementation fund per area based on population and budget, with penalties if goals not met

KANSASRisk Reduction Initiative SB13 (2008)• Local areas submit plans and budget requests - grants awarded annually • Initially award based on reducing revocation rates by 20% from 2006 rates, with revised goal in 2012 for successful supervision completion rate of 75%

KENTUCKYPublic Safety and Offender Accountability Act HB463 (2011)• State Corrections Commission will approve 5 pilot sites with high revocation rates • Pilots rewarded with 50% of state savings from reduced probation and parole revocations

OHIOProbation Improvement and Incentive Grants HB86 (2011)• Probation departments apply for incentive funds to reduce probation revocations calculated at $1800 for each reduced prison commitment• 2012-13 $6.5m awarded for probation improvement, $1.7m for technology and training and $1.8m for incentive funding

SOUTH CAROLINAOmnibus Crime Reduction and Sentencing Reform Act S.1154 (2010)• State supervision agency will receive up to 35% of state savings produced by reduction in probation revocations

TEXASSB1055 (2011)• Local areas/regional partnership submit reduction plan to reduce prison commitments and probation revocations• Local area receives initial lump sum equal to 35% of state savings described in plan• Incentive payments out of the remaining 65% of savings for achieving agreed goals, with penalties if goal not met (no participants as of Oct 2012)

US Performance Incentive Funding Programs

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determine their funding level so that they were tailored to each area.

SB81 has been hailed by some as a great success in devolving funding and accountability to a local level. It has led to creative, thoughtful community responses by many areas - such as San Bernadino’s ‘Gateway Program’ that provides a halfway house ‘step down’ accommodation provision for helping resettle young offenders back in the community. However, there are concerns that local probation departments did not have time to prepare for the change and that there is little oversight on how local areas are using the funds. There are accusations that some areas are using the money that is assigned to early intervention for meeting deficits in other areas. Many counties have complained about a lack of advice and best practice information centrally available to help inform local decision-making. Nevertheless, California’s realignment is widely hailed as the most successful state-wide reform effort to date. Since 2010 the state has transferred responsibility for all non-violent youth to the counties, with local jurisdictions receiving nearly $100m annually to supervise and provide secure and community services for these young people.

Framing the discussion

The Pew Center on the States launched the ‘Public Safety Performance Project’ in 2006 which ‘seeks to help states advance fiscally sound, data-driven policies and practices in sentencing and corrections that protect public safety, hold offenders accountable and control corrections costs’. As part of this project they have been supporting the introduction of financial incentive models across the US. In their view, conversations about reducing numbers in custody have traditionally been framed around being ‘soft on crime’. They have helped shift the focus so that instead the aim is to enhance public safety at minimum cost to the taxpayer. If there is only a limited budget to spend on criminal justice then, as their Kentucky briefing says, ‘Concentrate expensive prison beds on serious offenders, reduce recidivism by strengthening probation and parole, and establish mechanisms for measuring government progress over time.’

As a case in point, Texas - a state not renowned for its forward thinking justice policy - is now leading the way in justice reinvestment approaches. In 2007 they opted to invest $241m in alternative programmes including mental health and substance abuse provision for young and adult offenders, rather than spend the planned $2billion on new prison building. As a result Texas saw a significant drop in parole revocations and crime rates have fallen back to the levels of the late 1960s.

RECLAIM OHIO AND REDEPLOY ILLINOIS

In 1993 Ohio launched RECLAIM Ohio to transfer the responsibility for youth custody to county level and to encourage local areas to use local rather than state provision. The financial incentive model initially involved giving each county a pot of money at the outset and then charging them 75% of the cost of every custodial placement and only 50% of the cost for every community placement. Judges fully retained control of whether or not to sentence young people to custody, but local areas were incentivised to present robust community alternatives to save funds. Its early success led to RECLAIM Ohio being adopted statewide in 1995, and the numbers of young people sentenced to custody decreased annually, along with a decline in Ohio’s violent crime rate. (Although falling crime rates will also have reduced demand for custody placements).

Redeploy Illinois was introduced in 2004, modelled on RECLAIM Ohio, and aimed to reduce the number of custodial placements for non-violent and short-term sentences. Under the scheme, counties needed to reduce the number of custodial placements by 25% in the first year. If they met this target, the state reimbursed them for the cost of providing community alternatives to state custody - averaging approximately $6000 per young person, annually. Counties had freedom to devise their own community alternatives as long as they followed certain conditions (such as protecting the community and holding young people accountable). Within three years, the pilot counties reduced the number of custodial placements in state institutions by 51%, saving over $2m in prison costs, and the initiative has since been expanded to incorporate more counties across the state.

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Devolving remand - a warning from Denmark

As well as look at promising new approaches, it might also be helpful to see where things haven’t gone quite to plan. In England and Wales, we have recently followed in Denmark’s footsteps and devolved some of the costs of secure remand to the local authority to increase local accountability for this group of young people and reduce the numbers of young people unnecessarily placed in custody.

The hope in Denmark was that local areas would think more carefully before advising the court to securely

remand young people and that there would be greater investment in bail remand packages and community alternatives. The reality is not quite as hoped, primarily because the charges to local areas for using secure remand are so high that they have become unaffordable.

The courts nearly always follow the municipality’s advice. However now that there is a financial implication municipalities rarely advise the court to sentence young people to closed institutions, and instead recommend cheaper provision like open institutions or ‘pedagogical observation’. There are growing concerns that higher risk young people are being placed in unsuitable conditions, and that decisions are being steered too heavily by what is cheapest rather than in the interests of public safety.

“States are more and more interested in these financial incentive models because they see them as running government more like a business, where they define the goals and then set up a system that uses the right carrots and sticks to challenge stakeholders to reach those goals. They don’t see this

as being tough or soft on crime. It’s about getting the most possible public safety out of every taxpayer dollar.”

Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, Washington DC

“Many youngsters are probably granted bail without enough high-quality support, and enough intensive intervention from their municipality. And in that way it’s a bad thing, if youngsters that really need intensive care are not sent to the closed institution. The learning from this is that

it’s very important how much of the costs you make the municipalities pay.”

Nina Melina Suenson, Consultant at the Socialpolitisk Kontor, Copenhagen

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2 Selecting a funding mechanism• Kansas and Illinois use a grant-based funding mechanism with areas submitting a grant application with plans and predicted outcomes• Arkansas and Kentucky employ an outcome-based model with payments on achieving an agreed outcome - often a percentage of state savings resulting from reduced prison commitments• Texas and Ohio have adopted a hybrid model combining upfront funding with additional funding dependent on achieving certain outcomes

1 Choosing an administrative structure• Have confidence in an independent body to review outcome data fairly, allocate financial rewards, and hold areas accountable for poor performance• Balance the need for accurate and detailed data with the time and resource constraints at both state and local level

6 Estimating savings• Accurately estimate the financial savings that result from successfully reducing the number of prison placements• Ensure Government is not issuing financial rewards without making cashable savings – often only possible if a prison wing, or entire institution is closed

7 Engaging stakeholders• Collaboration required between national and local partners, the judiciary and the administrative bodies to effectively implement the scheme, ensure credibility and build public support e.g. California’s ‘Community Corrections Partnerships’

Seven steps for implementing performance incentive funding modelsbased on the Vera Institute for Justice’s learning from fifty US states

3

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4 Selecting outcome measures• Use multiple measures to evaluate performance so schemes do not focus solely on reducing prison placements, and lose sight of overall public safety aims e.g. California’s blended measures• Remove perverse incentives e.g. encouraging jurisdictions to keep high-risk young offenders in the community when they should be imprisoned in the interests of public safety, or selectively working with lower risk offenders• Some states link incentive funding to other measures e.g. Illinois link rewards to drug treatment programme completion rates, and Texas to the percentage of employed probationers • Balance outcome and process measures - private providers are reluctant to release this commercially valuable information

3 Deciding whether to provide seed funding• Some states provide seed funding or planning grants to help local jurisdictions begin implementing their evidence-based practices• Ohio is distributing over $8m to local areas to improve the availability of mental health and substance abuse programmes, improve counties’ data collection systems and support staff training in evidence-based supervision skills

5 Determining base-line measures• Carefully construct the baseline measure - using historical custody data can disadvantage previously high performing areas, and rolling baselines can mean unachievable targets as difficult to achieve ongoing dramatic reductions year on year• Changes in legislation, wider crime rate changes and anomalous events may mean baselines need adjusting

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What’s really saving money?

There is a danger that when budgets are tight, no-one wants to spend money investing in early intervention programmes and expensive community provision, particularly when it is difficult to see the results quickly. In the US, the Vera Institute for Justice have been promoting the use of cost-benefit analyses to help quantify the relative savings to taxpayers of different interventions or approaches and to support decision-makers understand the return on their investments.

Tina Chiu and her team at Vera have created the innovative Cost-Benefit Knowledge Bank (CBKB) for criminal justice (see www.cbkb.org) which provides resources including toolkits, data sources, research

papers, cost-benefit studies and webinars to help practitioners develop their capacity to promote, use and interpret cost-benefit analysis, and to help decision-makers understand the fiscal implications of their decisions. It has already been widely used, with everyone from local probation teams to the US Bureau of Justice using the tools to shape investment decisions.

We should consider working with the Vera Institute to create a similar knowledge bank for practitioners and policy-makers in England and Wales both to ensure local areas and institutions are gathering data in a way that makes cost-benefit analysis possible, to share realistic, reliable sources of data on costs and benefits and to use these tools more regularly in decision-making at a national and local level.

“We can increase public safety even as we decrease spending, as long as we direct our dollars wisely. We know more now, for instance, about what works in helping people change their behaviours, how to assess and target criminogenic needs, and how to supervise people on parole and

probation based on risk levels. And we have states like Michigan, Kansas, and Texas that are putting into practice what is known to work.”

Tina Chiu, Director of Technical Assistance, Vera Institute for Justice, New York

13

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CHAPTER 5 RECOMMENDATIONS:

12 Establish a UK-US Financial Incentive Funding CollaborativeShare learning on financial incentive models within the criminal justice system, including the Pew Center on the States, NYC Criminal Justice Co-ordinator’s Office and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

13 Set up a Cost-Benefit Knowledge Bank for England and WalesAdapt the Vera Institute for Justice model to improve local practitioners’ and central policymakers’ ability to measure the financial benefits of different decisions.

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Annie E. Casey Foundation (2012) Expanding JDAI’s focus to reduce commitments and placements: Program Summary Draft Discussion Paper, Maryland: Annie E.Casey Foundation.http://www.jdaihelpdesk.org/intersiteconf2012/Expanding%20JDAI’s%20Focus%20to%20Reduce%20Commitments%20and%20Placements%20(Annie%20E.%20Casey%20Foundation).pdf

Berridge, D. et al (2010) Raising the Bar? Evaluation of the Social Pedagogy Pilot Programme in residential children’s homes, London: Department of Education. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/181597/DFE-RR148.pdf

Cameron, C., Mcquail, S. and Petrie, P. (2007) Implementing the social pedagogic approach for workforce training and education in England: a preliminary study, London: Thomas Coram Research Unit.

Chen, D. (2012) Goldman to Invest in City Jail Program, Profiting if Recidivism Falls Sharply, New York Times, 2 August 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/nyregion/goldman-to-invest-in-new-york-city-jail-program.html?_r=0

Conger, D. and Ross, T. (2006) Project Confirm – an outcome evaluation of a program for children in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice Vol. 4, No. 1, 97-115.

Daly, R., Kapur, T. and Elliott, M. (2011) Capital Change: A Process Evaluation of Washington DC’s Secure Juvenile Placement Reform, New York: Vera Institute for Justice.http://www.vera.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/Capital-Change-process-evaluation-DC-FINAL2.pdf

Dishion, T., McCord, J. and Poulin, F. (1999) When Interventions Harm: Peer Groups and Problem Behavior, American Psychologist, Vol. 54, 755 – 764.

Farrington, D. (1977) The effects of public labelling, British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 17, 112-125.

Georgetown University: Center for Juvenile Justice Reform and Casey Family Programs (2010) Crossover Youth Practice Model, Washington, DC. http://cjjr.georgetown.edu/pdfs/cypm/cypm.pdf

House Of Commons Justice Select Committee (2013) Youth Justice: Seventh Report of Session 2012-13, The Stationery Office Limited: London. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmjust/339/339.pdf

Markides, C. and Geroski, P. (2005) Fast Second: How Smart Companies bypass radical innovation to enter and dominate new markets, San Fransisco: Jossey Bass.

Mendel, R. (2010) The Missouri Model: Reinventing the Practice of Rehabilitating Youthful Offenders, Annie E.Casey Foundation: Maryland.http://www.aecf.org/~/media/Pubs/Initiatives/Juvenile%20Detention%20Alternatives%20Initiative/MOModel/MO_Fullreport_webfinal.pdf

Mendel, R. (2011) No Place for Kids: The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration, Annie E. Casey Foundation: Maryland. http://www.aecf.org/OurWork/JuvenileJustice/~/media/Pubs/Topics/Juvenile%20Justice/Detention%20Reform/NoPlaceForKids/JJ_NoPlaceForKids_Full.pdf

McCara, L. and McVie, S. (2007) Youth Justice? The Impact of System Contact on Patterns of Desistance from Offending, European Journal of Criminology, Vol. 4:3, 315-345.

Moffitt, T. E. (1993) Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course-Persistent Antisocial Behavior: A Developmental Taxonomy, Psychological Review, 100:4, 674-701.

Mulvey, E.P. (2011) Highlights from Pathways to Desistance: A Longitudinal Study of Serious Adolescent Offenders, OJJDP Pathways to Desistance Fact Sheet 4, OJJDP.http://www.ojjdp.gov/publications/PubAbstract.asp?pubi=253020

Petrosino, A., Turpin-Petrosino, C. and Guckenburg, S. (2010) Formal System Processing of Juveniles: Effects on Delinquency, Campbell Systematic Reviews, 2010:1.

Rutherford, A. (1986) Growing out of Crime, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Schofield, G et al. (2012) Looked After Children and Offending: Reducing Risk and Promoting Resilience, Norwich: University of East Anglia.http://tactcare.org.uk/data/files/resources/lac_and_offending_reducing_risk_promoting_resilience_fullreport_200212.pdf

SELECTION OF REFERENCES

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Denmark Mayor Mikkel Warming (Mayor of Social Services, Copenhagen); Ganja Galeano, Mette Vinther Wæhrens and all the staff and young people at the MultifunC, Copenhagen; Nina Suenson (Consultant, Socialpolitisk Kontor); Mette Vestergaard and Allan Nelsen (Sølager Secure Unit); Peter Jørgensen, Steffen and all the staff and young people at Stevnsfortet Secure Unit; Henrik Holst (Director, “den flyvende Hollænder” - the Flying Dutchman); Katrine Due (Academic Employee, Copenhagen Social Services Department) and the EXIT team; Mikkel Krog-Toft and Mette Helweg Andersen (“The Short Leash” Programme); Anne Okkels Birk (Criminology Lecturer) and Britta Kyvsgaard in the Research Department of the Danish Ministry of Justice.

San FranciscoGena Castro Rodriguez (Executive Director, Youth Justice Institute); Judge Patrick J. Mahoney (Supervising Judge, Unified Family Court); William Sifferman, (Chief Probation Officer, San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department); Dan Macallair, Catherine McCracken and Selena Teji (Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice); Maria Su (Director, Department for Children Youth and their Families at the Mayor’s Office); Judge Hitchins and Clerk Tony Gavarra (Juvenile Division, San Francisco Superior Court) and the staff and young people at San Francisco’s Juvenile Hall.

Washington DCShay Bilchik (Director, Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute); Adam Gelb and Richard Jerome (Public Safety Performance Project, Pew Center on the States); Akiva Liberman (Senior Fellow, Justice Policy Center, The Urban Institute) and Tracy Velazquez (Executive Director, Justice Policy Institute).

New YorkDr Jeffrey Butts (Director, Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY); Michael Jacobson, Evan Elkin, Tina Chiu, Alison Shames and Jim Parsons (Vera Institute for Justice); Vincent Schiraldi (Commissioner, Department of Probation, NYC); Ana Bermudez (Deputy Commissioner for Juvenile Operations, NYC Department of Probation); Larry Busching (First Deputy Criminal Justice Coordinator, NYC Office of the Criminal Justice Coordinator); Jenny Kronenfeld (Executive Director, Esperanza); Gladys Carrion (Commissioner, New York City Administration for Children’s Services); Eric Brettschneider and Felipe Franco (New York State Office of Children and Family Services); Raye Barbieri (Deputy Commissioner of Youth & Family Justice, NYC Administration for Children’s Services); Pili J. Robinson (Director of Consulting Services, Missouri Youth Services Institute); Judge Michael Corriero (Executive Director and founder, New York Center for Juvenile Justice); Alfred Segal, Nancy Fishman and Aubrey Fox (Center for Court Innovation); Sandra Bryce and the staff and young people at the Brooklyn Residential Center.

BrazilLouiz Aranjo-Gerente (Director of Salvador’s four youth secure facilities); Professor Rosane Fagundes (Director-General, Campus Salvador); Guilherme Guimarães (Director, Rio, British Council); Charles Siqueria (Community Leader); the young people involved in the Esporte Seguro project in Morro dos Prazeres, Rio de Janeiro; Renata Dutra (Projeto Legal, Rio do Janiero); staff and young people at CASE CIA secure establishment; Wanderlino Nogueira Neto (Member of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child).

Special thank you to James Balfour, Julia Weston and the team at the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for awarding me this Fellowship, and for their ongoing inspiring advice, support and encouragement.

THANK YOUI am very grateful to everyone who gave up their time to meet with me, answered my endless questions and went out of their way to make me so welcome in their cities and homes. In particular, I would like to express a big thank you to: