Working With Offenders
Crime Prevention Projects
This is a summary of the national evaluation of the Youth Justice Board's crime prevention projects.
Title: Crime Prevention Projects
Author: Helen Powell (Youth Justice Board)
Date published: August 2004
Number of pages: 46 (summary 8)
The projects are designed to equip young offenders and young people seen to be at risk of offending, with the skills, knowledge and opportunities they need to build purposeful futures.
Projects
The Board funded 16 prevention projects over 3 years:
6 worked with young people on a pre-court and court disposals basis
7 were diversionary projects (either school-based or worked with young people at risk of offending or being excluded)
3 were development and co-ordination of multi-agency partnerships in response to youth crime (e.g. education, health, social services)
The number of young people referred to the projects during the funding period ranged from 80 to 8,500. Many of these were involved on a voluntary basis.
The majority of the young people were white, male and aged 15, and the common offences committed
were theft and violence against the person.
Types of interventions
The projects delivered interventions either on a one-to-one basis or in group sessions. The types of interventions offered included:
attendance at an interactive safety centre
community reparation
educational and employment support
anger management
recreational activities.
Evaluation Findings
Most young people said that they were satisfied with the service provided by the projects and thought that their project had done as much as it could to prevent them from reoffending.
Offenders better understood the victims feelings.
Positive feedback from stakeholders:
Magistrates had confidence in the projects that worked with those on court orders.
Schools participating in the diversionary projects reported improvements in the levels of offending, truancy and exclusion.
Recommendations
Multi-Agency Working
The existence of a multi-agency steering group is essential. Full local representation from a range of agencies ensures that the needs and concerns of the young people on the projects can be identified and tackled collectively by relevant organisations. The group should include not only a range of statutory organisations, but also voluntary agencies and community representatives.
Agreed objectives and protocols need to be established at the start of programme
development to ensure that agencies work together in targeting young people and offering effective interventions.
Staff Recruitment
It is important there are sufficient staff skills in place before the project starts to deliver the project effectively.
Referral and attendance
Information days held by projects for magistrates, YOTs and other statutory and voluntary agencies contributed to high levels of appropriate referrals. Where action plans were established and agreed with the young person and their parents/carers from the outset, and where regular review meetings were held to determine progress, projects achieved high attendance levels and undertook more effective work with young people.
Interventions
Interventions offered must be flexible, but designed to address identified risk factors in the young person's life. An effective programme must also use a combination of structured and recreational activities.
Locations
Projects based within Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) allowed for staff to liaise more closely on the progress and work of the young person, and improved the sharing of information.
Projects based externally to YOTs were thought to appeal more to those people attending on a voluntary basis and not wanting to be seen as attending a project based in a criminal justice setting.
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Summary
report on Crime Prevention Projects 
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Full
report on Crime Prevention Projects
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