Lawyers 'turning children into career criminals'
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The Government's youth crime tsar has called for the scrapping of defence lawyers for child offenders amid fears that coaching by solicitors is leading young people to become career criminals.
Lord Warner, the chairman of the Youth Justice Board, said lawyers were treating offenders as young as 10 as if they were adult clients, advising them to plead not guilty despite evidence to the contrary, and coaching them not to comment in interviews.
Too often, he said, solicitors were acting against the best interests of children aged between 10 and 16, denying them professional help to change their behaviour before they became long-term criminals. He also warned of an emerging gang culture in Britain, and said the peak age of offending had risen from 16 to 23 in a decade, with thousands of young people becoming career criminals as a "lifestyle choice".
Yesterday, David Blunkett admitted there was an "almost exponential" increase in 11- to 15-year-olds getting involved in street robbery and mobile telephone thefts. The Home Secretary said street crime across Britain soared by 26 per cent last year. In London, it rose by 40 per cent in January alone and was up nearly 30 per cent overall in the past year.
Mr Blunkett spoke of moves to "reclaim the streets" when he announced plans to halt the rise in street crimes in 10 urban areas within six months, which include deploying large numbers of police officers on the streets after schools close to target youth crime. He said the high priority being given to the problem was indicated by Tony Blair's decision to chair the first meeting of a new Cabinet-level action group on Wednesday.
The initiative was brought forward from July because of public concern about safety on city streets. Additionally, juvenile gangs are said to be operating extortion and sex rackets and "graduating" from organised street robbery to gun crime. Lord Warner told The Independent that, in a pioneering pilot project, police would patrol certain primary schools and a secondary school to identify youngsters "at risk" of criminality.
Lord Warner warned that the long-held view of police and probation officers that offending was a "phase" most teenagers "grow out of" had been disproved. He called for a new system of approved "juvenile lawyer panels" to replace ordinary lawyers.
"You would have a specialist group of lawyers dealing with children. The outcome would be that, as a professional requirement, they would have to show, in addressing their clients, what was in their best interests," he said. "That would make it much harder to argue it was in their best interests to plead not guilty when the alternative would give access to programmes which might change their lives."
David McIntosh, president of the Law Society, denied that lawyers were acting inappropriately. "Solicitors always act in the best interests of their clients, young or old, and are charged with doing so in their code of conduct," he said.
Lord Warner has been warned by youth justice professionals that lawyers are "reinforcing a mind-set of denial" in young offenders, making it harder to tackle their criminal behaviour.