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OVER three thousand children are currently behind bars in England and Wales. In France there are 530, in Italy 450 – and in Sweden just six. So why do the English deal so punitively with children who find themselves in trouble with the law?

‘There’s no correlation between crime rates and the numbers in custody,’ says OU Professor of Criminology John Muncie. ‘Crime rates have fallen dramatically but the number of children going through the justice system keeps growing. And the reoffending rate of those who are sent to the juvenile secure estate is around 80 per cent within two years of release. Whatever the system is trying to do, it is clearly failing’.

The question of why England and Wales criminalizes and incarcerates so many youngsters is the latest in a series of research projects undertaken into youth crime and youth justice by Professor Muncie. As Co-Director of the OU’s International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research, his work draws on cultural studies, media studies, social history, labour-market studies, the sociology of youth as well as social policy and criminology.

‘Magistrates have discretion when it comes to sentencing, and youngsters in, say, the south west of England are far less likely to be given a custodial sentence for similar offences than those in the north west,” said Professor Muncie.

‘But magistrates’ decisions reflect what they perceive to be public or political pressure – and custody figures are generally down to political pressure. They reached their peak in August 2002 – just two months after Tony Blair introduced his Street Crime Initiative (a scheme which targeted mobile phone theft) and put young offenders on the top of the news agenda. Similarly, while the number of children imprisoned up to the early 1990s during the Conservative government was significantly lower than under Labour, the figure first began to rise in 1993, just after the James Bulger case.’

Professor Muncie’s comparative research is to date based on bibliographical searches, international web searches and contacts via his membership of a New York-based international working group on globalization, youth and the law. He and fellow researcher Barry Goldson have published their most up-to-date findings in the Sage edited collection Comparative Youth Justice: Critical Issues. The hope is that dissemination through a number of social science and policy journals may at least bring the exceptionally punitive nature of English youth justice into public view.

‘Did you know that England and Wales is the only jurisdiction in Western Europe that routinely locks up 12-year-olds in secure training centres? Did you know that it has one of the lowest ages of criminal responsibility? Restoration and social inclusion simply can’t happen to the extent required when so much of the budget goes on locking up so many children’’.

“Youth justice needs to be rethought as a means to support and protect children, not criminalize and punish them.”