Prisons minister Damian Hinds recently announced that he was going to “move away” from the practice of “presuming automatic transition” for young people to adult prisons on their 18th birthdays.
Elizabeth Haslam, a former nurse, founded the Michael Sieff Foundation in memory of her late husband in 1987. Immediate motivation came from the publication of the report into the death of Jasmine Beckford some four years earlier. Jasmine had been beaten and starved to death by her stepfather.
Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. The other week, on the radio during primetime news, I listened to one of the most disingenuous debates I have ever heard that confirmed this mantra to a tee. Regrettably, it concerned the sensitive and emotive topic of deaths in custody.
In all sorts of areas, the savings imposed by the Treasury are driving government policy, except, of course, when it is unacceptable to the tabloid press.
Among the myriad challenges of transforming young lives, rehabilitation of young offenders will always be among the toughest. The number of 16- to 25-year-olds behind bars has soared by one-third in the past decade while the majority go on to reoffend, reflecting the enormity of the task.
Basing policy on evidence seems straightforward. But we continue to see politicians speak out on issues with the scantest of evidence and with particular audiences in mind. The most extreme example of late was the coverage about gangs after the summer unrest.
They say that a week is a long time in politics. Quite. As predicted in these pages for many months, the new Tory Secretary of State Michael Gove has renamed the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) as the Department for Education.
There are always attempts at slick alliteration in the policy field, such as the four Ps that inform The Children's Plan. And there are plenty of alternatives to the traditional three Rs. Two sets are currently pertinent: the Responsibility, Restoration and Re-integration that has framed youth justice over the past decade; and the Respect, Revenge and Revenue that are sometimes used to explain the rise of gang culture and the use of knives and guns. They are not quite mirror images but they are, arguably, close.
I had in many ways a privileged middle-class childhood. As well as a smattering of rather poor exam results, my upbringing gave me huge dollops of unconscious bias, particularly in respect to people of different backgrounds, races and ethnicities. Over the last 50 years, I have worked at expunging this bias, often slowly and painfully.
Amid the media maelstrom surrounding the snap general election that now isn't to be, the government last Friday slipped out an announcement that the Respect Taskforce and accompanying Respect Action Plan has been disbanded (see p6).
Jack Straw's proposal to send in "experts" to take over failing youth offending teams (YOTs), contained in last month's progress report on the Youth Crime Action Plan, flies in the face of a fundamental principle of the youth justice system after it was reformed in 1998. Straw himself was paradoxically the pioneer of those reforms.
The Real IRA and the Continuity IRA claimed responsibility for the recent murders of soldiers and a police officer in Northern Ireland. But as they are perceived to be destabilising the peace settlement, it is important to hold on to the phenomenal progress that has been made in the province since the darkest days of the Troubles.
The recent pressure on the "juvenile secure estate" - the young offender institutions, secure training centres and secure children's homes where remanded and convicted young people are sent - should have concentrated many minds.
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