New Statesman leader on the youth justice system

Two weeks ago we featured on our cover a story entitled "War on our youth". We documented the cases of several teenage boys who had got on the wrong side of the law, among them a 14-year-old who had been convicted of breaking the bra strap of a family friend. Then there was the 12-year-old put through the courts because his friend had given him a copy of the school master key.

The report was, as our correspondence has since showed, echoed by the experience of professional youth workers across the country. Rates for most crimes have fallen sharply over the past decade, and yet 210,000 children are put through the criminal justice system each year, a steep rise from the 1990s. A succession of home secretaries has stipulated that the authorities treat young people more punitively and rigidly than they do adults.

Now the Youth Justice Board, which administers that system, says the number of young people in custody - 3,350 - has reached a record high (an increase of 90 per cent since 1992). Rod Morgan, the board's chairman, warns that urgent action is needed to prevent "meltdown". He has described the situation as the penal policy equivalent of building more coal-fired power stations to combat global warming.

The incarceration crisis for young people mirrors the problem of adult custody, which has reached saturation point as well. Ministers have responded to the record numbers by calling for anything from extra police cells to prison ships - just to keep people locked up, tabloid newspapers appeased and communities supposedly safe.

By achieving their first goal, they will probably also succeed in the second (though newspaper editors are notoriously fickle), but they will continue to fail in the third. All the reliable data shows that prison is neither a disincentive to criminality nor a conduit for rehabilitation into society - certainly not when prison authorities have to deal with overcrowding. At present, many of those in youth offender institutions are being held hundreds of miles away from family and friends. There is no better way to turn a young miscreant into a hardened criminal. According to recent figures from the Howard League, 70 per cent of 18- to 20-year-olds given short sentences were back in jail within two years.

There can be no consensus on the solutions if there is no consensus on the cause, or the extent, of the problem. Official figures showing drops in crime tend not to be believed when set against personal experience. And although it is true that most victims, like perpetrators, tend to be from the more disadvantaged sections of society, almost everyone, it seems, has a story to tell - mostly of antisocial behaviour.

To coin a Blairite phrase: doing nothing is not an option. To achieve a more cohesive and law-abiding society requires, as ministers know, a variety of measures. After-school clubs have helped. Youth groups are vital. But they are too few and far between, and invariably underfunded. Police community support officers have been a useful innovation, notably where small teams are assigned specific streets and get to know the residents.

Governments cannot re-engineer societies, certainly not in a hurry. Labour has made some inroads into actual poverty, notably child poverty, but the wealth gap has never been greater. There seems little appetite to go further in addressing relative inequality. In other areas, such as the family, the government rightly fears to tread.

The primary function of state authority is surely to provide protection, especially for the most vulnerable. This involves not just physical protection, through the forces of law, but also moral protection. Instead, society - through politicians and tabloids working in tandem - is being whipped into a moral panic where young people (and foreigners, a subject we will turn to on another occasion) are being demonised. A society that treats ten-year-olds as criminals is one that treats aggression with aggression. In so doing, it forgets a cardinal rule: each person taken into custody may be removed from our streets, but is usually denied the prospect of self-improvement on his release. We all suffer in the end.

Having the time of our lives

What were you doing in 1987? The Tories had been in power for eight years. With the miners and print unions defeated, Margaret Thatcher led her sleaze-ridden party to a record third term and celebrated by jeering that there was "no such thing as society". The Great Storm laid waste to southern England and, days later, the stock market crashed.

History will record that 1987 was an awful year. But historical sweeps miss important details. For in that year came the release of Dirty Dancing, a schmaltzy teen pic about how a rough diamond (Patrick Swayze) teaches pure-of-body-and-soul Jennifer Grey to dance. It is reputedly the most successful independent film of all time, with a soundtrack bought by 41 million fans. When such a film, not marketed to break records, becomes a box-office success, it is called a cult movie and, as with many cults, this one's followers have tended to keep their devotions private. Indeed, we might all have kept our bath-time renderings of "I've had the time of my l-i-i-fe" to ourselves had it not been for the new West End stage version just launched. Before the lights dimmed at the première, advance ticket sales had exceeded 250,000, making it, yes, the most successful, etc . . .

Should the New Statesman be above such things? Maybe. We merely observe that the single press invitation delivered to the office was the most coveted freebie of the year.

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