Third of youths re-offend within 12 months, new report reveals
More than a third of young offenders in the Black Country and Staffordshire go on to re-offend within a year, new figures have revealed.
Hundreds of youths aged under 18 went on to commit offences soon after leaving custody or being dealt with by the courts.
Ministry of Justice data showed of the 1,041 offenders aged under 18 in the region who either left custody, received a non-custodial conviction or were cautioned in 2017/18, 35 per cent went on to commit another offence within 12 months.
Between them, the 385 juvenile re-offenders racked up 1,346 new offences – an average of 3.5 each.
Express & Star comment: Justice system failing to address re-offending rates
Staffordshire has the worst rate for youth re-offenders at 43 per cent, followed by Sandwell at 41 per cent and Wolverhampton at 38 per cent.
The rate for Walsall is 30 per cent and Dudley 25 per cent.
The Government is being urged to avoid criminalising youngsters by diverting them from the justice system where possible, amid calls for the age from when a child can be arrested and charged to be raised.
Children in England and Wales are deemed to have criminal responsibility from the age of 10, meaning they can be arrested and brought to court for committing a crime. The Equality and Human Rights Commission last year called for the age to be raised "to stop very young children being exposed to the harmful effects of detention".
Nationally, 38 per cent of juvenile offenders in 2017-18 committed another crime within a year – compared to 41 per cent from 2016-17 – amid a steep fall in the number of juvenile first-time entrants to the criminal justice system.
However, Dr Tim Bateman, chairman of the National Association for Youth Justice, warned that the falling numbers of juvenile offenders and reoffenders nationally is only partly down to children being less likely to break the law.
He said: "The main explanation is a shift in how minor lawbreaking is treated – an increasingly large proportion of minor misdemeanours result in an informal response that doesn’t get into the figures."
The MoJ figures show that nationally, juveniles are also more likely to reoffend than adults.
Dr Bateman continued: "What we know is that drawing children into the justice system actually tends to increase lawbreaking.
"If we want to reduce the level of problematic behaviour by teenagers, then we need to be able to keep them in education and provide them with interesting activities which they can afford when they are not in school.
"We also need to reduce levels of poverty so that fewer children suffer various forms of victimisation – which is associated with later violent behaviour."
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “The number of further crimes committed by young offenders has fallen by 80 per cent in the last decade as a result of our work to support, rather than criminalise, children falling foul of the law.”
