The Young Criminal Lives project examines the life course outcomes of juveniles admitted to four industrial and reformatory schools in northwest England between 1850 and 1920. The project, funded by Leverhulme under the name After Care and inspired by Dutch and US studies, has succeeded in gathering ‘cradle to grave’ ...
(Show more)The Young Criminal Lives project examines the life course outcomes of juveniles admitted to four industrial and reformatory schools in northwest England between 1850 and 1920. The project, funded by Leverhulme under the name After Care and inspired by Dutch and US studies, has succeeded in gathering ‘cradle to grave’ data on 500 individuals using a range of digitised and documentary sources including institutional records, census, birth, marriage and death records, military documents, criminal registers, and newspapers.
One of the major findings of Young Criminal Lives has been that young offenders in the late 19th century were far less likely to reoffend than those today. Today, re-offending rates among young offenders stand at 73%, according to the UK’s Ministry of Justice (
www.gov.uk, April 2013). By contrast, the traceable reoffending rate among the Young Criminal Lives subjects was just 22 per cent.
Efforts to discover ‘what works’ in youth justice continue to dominate debates amongst policy makers and criminal justice agencies across Europe, but these ‘evidence-based’ debates rarely consider historical data. The Young Criminal Lives team argue that these late 19th century lower reoffending rates can be attributed, in part, to the impact of post-release apprenticeships. Given this, is it possible (or indeed desirable) to use such evidence to inform current policy discussion and practice? If so, how?
This paper draws on the public debate generated by the Young Criminal Lives project (in the UK and US media and within the UK penal-voluntary sector) to show how historical evidence might be used – albeit with caution - to shape more effective interventions.
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