Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

moved, as an amendment to Amendment No. 71, Amendment No. 73: 73: After Clause 9, line 3, leave out ““18”” and insert ““21”” The noble Lord said: All of us in the Committee should be grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, for the wide scope of things she brings to these debates—her experience is pretty unrivalled—but particularly for having tabled Amendment No. 71. She referred to the unacceptably large number of young people being incarcerated in one way or another. With that statistic goes the reality that the facts speak for themselves: it is not a successful process. The rate of reoffending remains deeply disturbing. Even if there were no other grounds, any sane society would say that we had better look at this because what we are doing is obviously not effective. The noble Baroness has put the case very well. On the amendments immediately following, we shall touch on the danger to children in custody as well. I therefore applaud Amendment No. 71 and plead with my noble friend the Minister to take it seriously. The purpose of my amendment is simply to say that I am at least as concerned about the 18 to 21 year-old age group. This was brought home to me in the context of the YMCA’s work in young offender institutions, prisons and the rest. That age group is in many ways a particularly vulnerable section of the population, because it is so easy for staff and others to regard them as adults and they are not. Just think of our own children—as I wish we would more often in this situation—and how dependent they are. They may not want to admit it, but they are terribly dependent and reliant. We must therefore be particularly careful about consigning anyone in that age group to custody unless—as we shall come to on later amendments—we are certain about the form of custody into which we are putting them. My amendments are therefore in a spirit of welcoming the amendment of the noble Baroness, but propose that it should be extended to cover this other age group as well.