My Lords, I support these amendments wholeheartedly. We are talking about punishment. Punishment must, as a fundamental, be appropriate, proportionate and likely to succeed. I suggest that the provisions have none of those things right. It is entirely wrong to have a sanction which involves the potential imprisonment, which is the ultimate sanction for breach of a CBO, of children between the ages of 12 and 18. A detention and training order, which is a possible likely outcome, can be given to such children for breach for a minimum of four months and a theoretical maximum of 24 months, half of which would in fact be intervention, supervision and the rest.
Children who fail to comply with a police dispersal order can also get up to three months. We are looking at a whole range of options to incarcerate young people. It has already been referred to tonight that children routinely breach ASBOs—about two-thirds of them do. Once they get into the world of breach, we are in very dangerous territory. All the successful work that we have seen and in which I have been closely involved with the Youth Justice Board has been to avoid the incarceration of children. This is simply because it does not succeed; the noble Earl has indicated why. In all cases, incarceration should be for the most dangerous, severe and violent behaviour. Those are the kinds of criteria that we should apply to anybody going to prison. In other words, the criteria apply to adults, too, but how much more do they apply to children?
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We want a society that turns children away from crime and does not encourage them to stay in it. Down the years I have seen some good work in youth detention, but we know that detention harms children in the long term. It is counter-productive and on the whole confirms, as we have heard, a criminal future. With these long-term
ASBOs, compliance over a long period is difficult. For young people around the ages of 12 to 18, up to 12 months is an impossibly long time. In my side of the criminal justice business, alternatives to custody for people who have got into offending behaviour have been the absolute driving force. The range and skills of what is now increasingly available in working with young people, children as well as adults, are producing the results that we need to see. We do not need to see children being drawn into the world of the criminal through detention. We should be looking at where we can develop and encourage alternatives to custody. Where restorative justice is also involved in that process, we have the best possible outcomes for the victims.
We keep being reminded that while we are looking at what we do with young people, whom we perceive to be such a problem, we are always thinking about the victim. There are ways and means of making a far more positive outcome for those who have been affected by crime if they can go through a restorative process. We should be looking at and developing this. This amendment proposes that, instead of incarceration, a youth rehabilitation order would be the constructive way forward. I urge my noble friend the Minister to look at these kinds of option very seriously.