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Introduction. Point-of-arrest youth diversion gives young people the chance to avoid both formal criminal justice processing and a criminal record, in return for the completion of community-based interventions. Youth diversion is an increasingly well-embedded practice in England and Wales: research by the Centre for Justice Innovation in 2019 ...
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- Executive summary
- The evidence base
- Efective practice
- Eligibility criteria
- Referral into diversion
- Induction into the diversion programme
- Case Work
- Programming
- Outcomes and monitoring
- What commissioners of youth diversion want
- Commissioners want to see evidence of impact but maybe not always in the way you expect
- The complexity of the commissioning landscape provides opportunities for co-commissioning
- Help shape what is commissioned
- Making the case for youth diversion
- How we can help
- Who the toolkit is for
- About this toolkit
- About the Centre for Justice Innovation
- What we don’t know
- Section 2: Principles of efective practice
- Core principles of youth diversion
- Commissioners want to see evidence of impact but maybe not always in the way you expect
- The complexity of the commissioning landscape provides opportunities for co-commissioning
- Help shape what is commissioned
- Conclusion
- Section 4: Making the case for youth diversion
- 1 Orientate the audience
- 2 Explain the evidence against formal processing
- 4 Explain the evidence for youth diversion in terms of outcomes
- 5 Explain the evidence for youth diversion in terms of cost saving
- 6 Talk about your work locally, and how it fits with the evidence base
- 7 Monetise the cost avoidance contribution your scheme makes
- 8 Monetise longer term benefits
- Overview
- What is the tool?
- Who is it for?
- The aims of the tool are:
- The tool is based on the following principles:
- Data Points
- Estimates
- Speaking with Police to generate an estimate
- “Standard” Process
- Key messages for Police
- Costs
- What it says
This toolkit is for any practitioner who is involved in, or considering creating, a point-of-arrest diversion scheme for young people in contact with the criminal justice system.
For the majority of young people involved in crime, formal criminal justice processing makes them more likely to commit crime again. There is a strong evidence base, nationally and internationally, that clearly shows that youth diversion is a better way of addressing low-level criminal behaviour— multiple studies show that youth diversion can reduc...
Our work with practitioners over the past two years has clearly indicated that there is not a settled consensus on which specific youth diversion models and strategies work best. This publication seeks to provide you with as clear a view as possible about what the evidence suggests efective practices are:
You should set eligibility criteria as broadly as possible. Specifically, young people should be given more than one shot at succeeding. In doing so, you should avoid net-widening by only working with young people who would otherwise receive a formal criminal justice disposal. You should therefore be empowered to turn down inappropriate police refe...
Speed of referral is important. Efective schemes ensure diversion happens as soon as possible after arrest occurs. Therefore, you should make referral of young people in a diversion scheme as simple and straightforward for the police as possible. A good way of doing this could be to formalise referral into a shared protocol with the police. Diversi...
Schemes should assess young peoples’ strengths and needs on induction, particularly to match them with appropriate interventions. You should also make their expectations of young people clear, and ensure that young people fully understand the consequences of non-compliance.
Where possible, you should separate youth diversion work from statutory operations, by holding sessions physically of-site and by avoiding mixing diverted young people with those under statutory supervision. There are reasonable evidence-based grounds for believing that dedicated diversion caseworkers may be preferable to statutory caseworkers. Div...
Rather than focusing on control or surveillance, the programmes you ofer via youth diversion should be evidence-based and therapeutic. Use of the wrong programme modalities can make re-ofending more likely. For most diverted young people, interventions should be relatively light touch and informal, proportionate to the initial ofending behaviour. I...
You should regularly report back on youth engagement to the police and to referring oficers. This underlines that the original case requires no further action, and ensure that frontline police are kept updated on the scheme’s success. Schemes should also determine whether they are meeting their objectives through evaluation.
Youth diversion is not a statutory requirement of Youth Ofending Teams (YOTs). A Ministry of Justice-commissioned stocktake of YOTs reported that practitioners anticipated further budget reductions are leading to YOTs “moving away from preventative work towards just fulfilling statutory commitments.” However, we strongly believe that you have the o...
Commissioners want to know that services are seeing an impact as a result of your good use of their resources. But also commissioners recognised that being able to demonstrate clear, attributable outcomes is not straightforward. Qualitative information, case studies and stories all help to build up a picture of what you are achieving. Growing recog...
With limited resources, a key consideration for commissioners is how they can generate or contribute towards achieving a bigger impact than they would be able to gain solely from their own funds. Demonstrating impact around a variety of local priorities, showing added value or securing matched financial/in-kind contributions from other commissioner...
All the commissioners we spoke with indicated that, when undertaking needs assessments and designing or reviewing strategies and priorities, they were keen to hear from you and your beneficiaries on what works and what is missing from local provision. They wanted to hear from the frontline, so organising regular forums to seek feedback from young p...
We believe that you have the opportunity to make a strong case for continued investment. Therefore, in this toolkit, we include our cost avoidance tool, and guidance on how to use and present the data to commissioners, so you can better demonstrate the cost efectiveness of youth diversion through its local impact on justice system stakeholders. T...
This publication is intended to help you make the case for investment in youth diversion, and to inform your thinking as you develop practice in your scheme. If you would like more support, please feel free to get in touch with us.
This toolkit is for any practitioner who is involved in, or considering creating, a point-of-arrest diversion scheme for young people in contact with the criminal justice system.
This publication is a revised and enlarged edition of Valuing Youth Diversion: Making the case, originally published in the autumn of 2015. In that publication, we laid out the current evidence on youth diversion. Accompanying the toolkit was an ofer of one to one support to help you develop funding proposals to local commissioners to continue or c...
The Centre for Justice Innovation works toward a British justice system that reduces crime and in which all of our people can place their trust. We seek to build a justice system based on the values of fairness, accountability and problem-solving. The Centre is an initiative of the New York-based non-profit, the Center for Court Innovation. Our You...
The four most clichéd words in academic literature are “more research is needed.” Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that it’s untrue. There are a number of important unanswered questions and caveats to keep in mind. First, we don’t currently know at what point the benefits of diversion diminish. From what we know of the age-crime curve and the prope...
The evidence-based case for youth diversion – keeping people under the age of 18 away from formal processing through the criminal justice system where possible – is strong. But our work with practitioners over the past two years has clearly indicated that there is not a settled consensus on which specific youth diversion models and strategies work ...
Minimise labelling: Youth diversion schemes should take all reasonable steps to avoid stigmatising the young people they work with, and to prevent them from forming deviant or delinquent identities that may interfere with their development. Avoid net-widening: Ensure that the scheme operates as an alternative to the formal justice system, rather th...
Commissioners want to know that services are evidence-based. Commissioners also want to know that they are seeing an impact as a result of your good use of their resources, especially if it also is generating a saving. Commissioners want evidence of impact on outcomes rather than just evidence of activity. So far, nothing new. However, our interv...
With limited resources, a key consideration for commissioners is how they can generate or contribute towards achieving a bigger impact than they would be able to gain solely from their own funds. This means they seek to work actively with other strategic partners locally and in wider geographical areas both in designing and paying for services to e...
We realise we run the risk of teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, but engaging with commissioners is not just a question of placing a bid when invited to or when you spot it. In practice, commissioners provide many opportunities for you to influence the design of future provision. If you wait until you are invited to tender, many services will...
As we said at the start, some of this will not be new to you, maybe none of it. But now we know what commissioners want, we can turn to some practical support about how we can help you make the best possible arguments to ensure youth diversion is valued.
Now that we have reviewed the evidence, distilled a set of efective practice principles, and have discussed what commissioners want – how can we persuade them to invest? In this section, we provide a simple guide to what we recommend you communicate to them. On our website, you may also download template PowerPoint slides to adapt for this purpose.
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
We hope that schemes can use the results to build a defensible picture of costs avoided (broken down by partner agencies) through the operation of the scheme, based on a set of mutually agreed assumptions. (Please see accompanying guidance for more on communicating the value of point-of-arrest diversion schemes).
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This article will move from initial reflections on the origins and practices of diversion in youth justice, via a consideration of alternative diversionary methods and strategies, to unpack the ideological assumptions and conflicts underpinning these.
The Youth Justice System (YJS) in England and Wales, fundamentally reshaped by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, primarily aims to prevent youth offending. It advocates partnerships to ensure this aim, while maintaining child welfare as the primary concern. New approaches for first-time young offenders and
Jan 27, 2020 · Abstract. The 1980s decade of diversion in UK youth justice consolidated critiques of iatrogenic systemic contact and generated an abolitionist momentum that was significantly reversed by the 1990s punitive turn and ‘new youth justice’ strategies of modernisation, expansionism, interventionism and risk management.
- Stephen Case, Kevin Haines
- 2021
This article reports on a preliminary analysis of feedback from children who were diverted to a particular diversion programme, to determine key reasons for youth offending behaviour and to understand their engagement with the diversion process and the diversion programme itself.
People also ask
What is a point of arrest youth diversion scheme?
What is point-of-arrest youth diversion?
What is youth diversion?
Does youth diversion increase racial inequality?
How can youth justice services effectively implement diversion?
How do 'diversionary practices' affect youth justice outcomes?
Drawing on interviews with youth justice practitioners at two sites in England, we argue this is overly simplistic, since the ‘interventionist diversion’ they describe reflects the continued influence of New Labour reforms, as well as older approaches.
