Youth Reoffenders

Part of 3. Questions to the Counsel General – in the Senedd at 3:11 pm on 23 April 2024.

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Photo of Mick Antoniw Mick Antoniw Labour 3:11, 23 April 2024

I think you make a very important point. I sat in the youth court in Cardiff recently and listened to a number of the cases there, and what was very clear to me was that, I think with every individual that appeared there, you could look at a background of either poverty or disadvantage. But you also saw that, in terms of the issues around the understanding, the engagement, the communication, quite often there were a lot of people who'd been failed by the education system, basically, who had dropped out of the education system. Hence the sort of approach we have of Intervention and support is exactly the right direction to go. It's got to be treating young people as young people, and also putting them first in their interest, and looking at how they can be kept out of the criminal justice system by the right sort of interventions, and recognition of that. That's also what I saw when I was in Scotland, and I'm sure exactly the same thing is happening in parts of England as well. There has been a very massive shift, I think, in our thinking about young people, certainly from when I was a teenager, to how the system is now operating, and in particularly to how it has changed, certainly in Wales, over the past decade or so with the move in that particular direction.

intervention

An intervention is when the MP making a speech is interrupted by another MP and asked to 'give way' to allow the other MP to intervene on the speech to ask a question or comment on what has just been said.