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LASPO cuts and young people in and leaving prison
The Howard League for Penal Reform has provided the only front-line national legal service for children and young people in prison for almost a decade. The team has traditionally dealt with the aftermath of the criminal justice process and the problems young people face in prison, including parole, treatment and access to the right courses. Another critical aspect of the team’s work has been to ensure that young people have suitable accommodation and support so they can be released into the community to lead a positive new life. Despite a strong legal framework, huge numbers of children are still failed by the system and require legal intervention to ensure that local authorities comply with their duties in preparing young people for release.
Most of this work has been funded, until now, through legal aid, which was not affected by the cuts introduced in April 2013 by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Act 2012 (although criminal legal aid for prison law and public law are both current targets of Ministry of Justice cuts). Therefore, the impact on young people in prison of the LASPO Act cuts to civil legal aid relates to their experiences before and after prison.
This impact has been significant: the clients of the Howard League for Penal Reform are those most in need of civil legal aid and the least likely to get it. This is demonstrated by our case files, which are catalogues of unmet legal need. For most children in the criminal justice system, their offending behaviour is the least of their problems. They are far more likely to be distressed by one of their parents being a victim of domestic violence, their siblings being taken into care or their family being evicted and separated with some siblings being forced to sleep in a women’s refuge and others to sofa surf with friends. On release from jail, the key to reducing the 70 per cent chance of reoffending is for the young person not to be released into the same network of chaos in which they started. Yet, this is precisely what happens in many cases, and lots of young people return to prison because life outside is just too stressful.
The Howard League for Penal Reform runs a youth participation project called ‘U R BOSS’, which is led by young advisers who have first-hand experience of the criminal justice system. Their report, Life outside: collective identity, collective exclusion tells the same story. The team also runs an advice line and access to justice service, which is complemented by a programme of public legal education on resettlement law. But there is a limit to how effective legal knowledge and one-off advice can be. There are many occasions where the best solution is for the young person to find a lawyer to resolve his/her problem. Through our access service, we try to ensure that every young person with a legal problem which cannot be resolved has access to a specialist legal adviser. We regularly need to find young people specialist immigration, housing and family lawyers to prevent their lives from descending into the chaos that led to their imprisonment, but as the LASPO Act cuts bite, this is becoming increasingly difficult and, in some cases, almost impossible.