Jail terms for young offenders to be scrapped
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Thousands of persistent young offenders will escape going to prison under government plans to scrap a flagship scheme to punish prolific teenage criminals.
The Youth Justice Board, attached to the Home Office, has recommended to ministers that it abandons the short Detention and Training Order (DTO), introduced by the former home secretary Jack Straw to tackle repeat offenders. The plan would mean that 3,000 teenagers who would have been jailed each year would instead be sent on community-based programmes.
The development follows research by Oxford University's department of criminology that found the DTO, which combines a custodial sentence with an equal period under supervision in the community, was ineffective. The report found that when such offenders returned home they were given an average of only 90 minutes supervision a week for up to three months, even though they were supposed to still be serving a sentence.
One official described the result as "pathetic".
As a result, the Youth Justice Board has advised ministers that the short DTO was a "waste of time" that should be allowed to "wither on the vine" as it was replaced by alternative punishments.
Officials said the dropping of the short DTO was not a cost-cutting measure, although it would lead to savings of about £14m a year and reduce the youth prison population from 2,800 to about 2,000.
The DTO originally proved attractive to magistrates as it combined a mixture of prison and community punishment and was seen to offer both a deterrent and rehabilitation. But the scheme was badly hit by the soaring youth prison population last year, when public alarm over street crime led to a sharp rise in use of custody and young offender institutions became heavily overcrowded.
Ministers are being advised to replace the short DTOs with a new year-long punishment called an Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme (ISSP). The Oxford research found that a six-month version of the ISSP, which includes offenders being given work-based training, literacy classes, anger management and drug treatment, as well as being taken by "mentors" to the cinema and football matches, was successful.