Toddler tearways targeted - Sunday Times - Times Online

Toddler tearways targeted - Sunday Times - Times Online

Another alleged government initiative in the Sunday papers (reproduced below).

Toddler tearaways targeted

A CONFIDENTIAL Home Office report recommends that children should be targeted as potential criminals from the age of three. It says they can be singled out by their bullying behaviour in nursery school or by a history of criminality in their immediate family.

It proposes parenting classes and, in the worst cases, putting more children who are not “under control” into intensive foster care instead of care homes. Nursery staff would be trained to spot children at risk of growing up to be criminals.

The 250-page report, entitled Crime Reduction Review, was drawn up on the instructions of Tony Blair, who wanted to identify the most effective ways of cutting crime by 2008.

Its leak coincides with an expected announcement tomorrow by Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, of a £430m package to provide out-of-hours clubs at schools for children aged four to 14.

The Home Office strategy unit, which spent five months compiling the report, concluded that “from the simple perspective of reducing crime . . . the arguments for focusing resources on the children most at risk are ‘overwhelming’”.

Children who were not “under control” by the age of three were four times as likely to be convicted of a violent offence, it warned. It adds: “Getting schools to tackle bullying, exclusions and truancy effectively is key to diverting more adolescents from crime”.

The report was conducted against a bleak assessment by the Home Office that, without new measures, the crime rate would rise 8.5% by 2008.

Last July the government used the review’s findings on what worked and what didn’t to underpin a formal
commitment to reduce crime by 15% by 2008.

Measures such as CCTV, increased street lighting and longer custodial sentences were judged in the report to have been expensive failures, with only a few exceptions.

Instead, it maintained that if potential offenders were spotted young enough, “soft” measures — such as improving their reading, language and social skills — could be enough to change their direction.

Kelly’s £430m is intended to provide breakfast clubs and after-hours sports and arts; some children could be at school from 8am to 6pm. The sessions will be run by private sector and voluntary groups, rather than by the schools’ regular staff.

Research in the report found that 85% of inmates in young offenders’ institutions had been bullies at school, while 43% of male prisoners had children with a criminal record. In a verdict likely to anger leftwingers, the report suggests that bullies should be treated as aggressors rather than victims of their social background.

It states that bullies, who can start from a very young age, do not suffer from low self-esteem but act as gang leaders who “recruit” others to commit crime. As they graduate to being juvenile offenders, aged 8 to 15, they act as magnets by drawing in followers one or two years younger than themselves.

Those who by the age of 18 reach this stage, it states, are best dealt with in young offenders’ institutions with “boot camp” regimes.

They are woken at 6am each day and made to undergo drug rehabilitation courses, education and social training before going to bed at 10pm.

Results from Thorn Cross young offenders’ institution in Warrington show its reconviction rate is 12% lower than similar prisons, which do not use “high intensity” methods.

The 250-page report, marked “restricted”, betrays Home Office anger at wt it regards as blocking tactics by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and the schools system, thwarting efforts to tackle the causes of crime.

“There is perhaps too much concern about the potential negative impacts of targeting on children and their families,” the report says.

It adds: “Most of the levers for intervention rest within the overall control of the DfES.” A senior Home Office source said that during discussion of the review, a DfES civil servant accused his counterpart of trying “to criminalise our children”. The DfES was, in turn, accused of “sticking its head in the sand”.

Michele Elliott, director of Kidscape, the anti-bullying charity, confirmed the schism between the two departments. “The DfES appear to favour the ‘no blame’ approach to bullying which we think is dangerous. The bullies think they’ve got away with it and grow up to be bigger bullies,” she said.

Other more radical ideas floated in the report — which was completed in May 2004 but not published — include a recommendation for the government to consider prescribing heroin to cut drug related crime by 12.5%.

It also advocates that the drinks industry should replace glasses and bottles with safety glass and states that “binge drinking does not cause crime”.

It argues that while a hard core of 20% of heavy drinkers have four or more convictions for violence, alcohol abuse is not the original cause of their violence, although it may trigger specific incidents.

The report recommends that the large number of violent people who drink to excess should be dealt with by year-long bans from all licensed premises.

This weekend a Home Office spokesman said: “We are not prepared to comment on a leaked document. It was one of a number of contributions of the thinking on crime reduction.”