Youth justice chief attacks jail policy

The new head of the Youth Justice Board has attacked local councils for misusing anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos), saying they are undermining efforts to keep teenage offenders out of jail.

Professor Rod Morgan, who took up his post last week, said there was growing evidence that local authorities were treating the orders as a short-cut to justice, and that their actions could be behind the worrying rise in the number of young people now in custody.

In some cases the authorities were imposing conditions so rigid the teenagers were "set up to fail", he said.

Professor Morgan added: "We are going to be looking very critically at this because it does appear it's contributing to a reversal of what we regard as a very considerable achievement in keeping the numbers down and ensuring that custody is a very last resort."

Ministers, especially David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, see Asbos as a key initiative in tackling persistent offending by young delinquents. About 1,600 of these civil penalties have been imposed since they were introduced in 1999. Those who break the terms of an Asbo face up to five years' jail or a stint in a young offenders' institution.

Increasing numbers of councils have been using these orders, a trend expected to accelerate as new laws extending the powers of the police and councils to impose them come into force.

Professor Morgan, a former chief inspector of probation for England and Wales, and one-time criminologist at Bristol University, said he supported the appropriate use of Asbos, but it appeared the orders were not always being accompanied by the same "careful police assessments" made in criminal cases where a greater degree of evidence was required to bring a conviction.

"What we mustn't do is use them as a short-cut to get kids into custody - in the sense that a very large number of conditions are attached to Asbos so that we, in effect, are setting up youngsters to fail. Despite the fact that it's a civil order, in the event of a breach it can very easily result in custody." He added that custody was often the outcome.

Until now, he said, the youth justice system had been successful in reducing the number of imprisoned young offenders. But over the past three months the number of teenagers locked up had risen from 2,590 at the start of the year to 2,811 by the end of last week. This meant that the young offenders' institutions were running at 99 per cent capacity, compared with a normal level of 85-90 per cent, an increase that is "very serious", said Mr Morgan.

One of his first priorities will be to hold a summit with ministers, judges, magistrates and civil servants to look at why young trouble-makers are being sent to custody even though Asbos were introduced with the intention of keeping people out of jail.

"There is no evidence that there has been a surge in offending behaviour, so I'm looking to see why it is that the measures the Government introduced, which should act as an alternative to custody, are apparently not being taken up."

He said the Youth Justice Board wanted to look closely at how Asbos were being issued and at whether some of the original orders might not have been appropriate in certain cases.