Improving Practice

A strategy to reduce the harm that prolific and other priority offenders cause to our communities and to themselves was introduced on 30 March 2004.

The Prolific and Other Priority Offenders Strategy focuses on the relatively small number of people who cause a disproportionate amount of crime, disorder and mayhem in our communities, damaging people’s confidence and increasing feelings of unease and the fear of crime.

The strategy has three complementary parts:

• Prevent and Deter
  to stop people (overwhelmingly young people) engaging in offending behaviours and graduating into prolific offenders

• Catch and Convict
  actively tackling those who are already prolific offenders

• Rehabilitate and Resettle
  working with identified prolific offenders to stop their offending by offering a range of supportive interventions – offenders will be offered the opportunity of rehabilitation or face a very swift return to the courts.

The strategy is not intended to change the youth justice system’s existing work on the swift administration of justice, including reducing delays for persistent young offenders.

The new strategy, implemented nationally from 6 September 2004, is led by Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs), with schemes set up to cover every CDRP in the country. The emphasis is on a multi-agency approach to tackling the problem, with local criminal justice board (LCJB) co-ordination to effectively catch, convict, monitor and manage these offenders in the community or custody, and work towards rehabilitating them.

Guidance

The YJB has developed the guidance document Prolific and Other Priority Offenders Strategy: Guidance for YOTs [162Kb Word document, opens in new window] to advise YOTs on their role in the implementation of the strategy. This should be read in conjunction with the Home Office guidance on the PPO strategy [opens in new window], which was published in July and September 2004.

The YOT PPO guidance will be reviewed to enable us to learn from the experience of YOTs in implementing PPO schemes locally and to gather examples of good practice, which can be included in the revised guidance.

Prolific and Other Priority Offender Strategy: An update on Prevent and Deter for youth offending teams

This document, published in June 2008, provides further details and information on the Deter part of the PPO Strategy, including how to select the Deter cohort, following the publication of the Counting Rules 2008/09.

The Counting Rules 2008/09 state that the Deter cohort should be selected from young people with a recent Asset score of 21 or greater. This document provides details on this, as well as further guidance on allowing local flexibility in selecting the Deter cohort.

If an Asset score of 21 provides a Deter cohort which is too large or too small, the criteria can be adjusted locally to achieve a more appropriate number. This year, the Deter cohort should be selected from young people who meet the criteria between 1 January 2008 and 31 March 2008 (or 1 October 2007 and 31 March 2008 if fewer than 12 young people) for submission on 31 July 2008.

Note that the Counting Rules for the Deter cohort should refer to 'community-based penalties', but refer to 'community penalties' in error. A correction has been issued and is available in additional guidance on the Counting Rules.

Click to download Prolific and Other Priority Offender Strategy: An update on Prevent and Deter for youth offending teams [58Kb PDF, opens in new window].

Prevent and Deter operational guidance

Further guidance is available in Prevent and Deter Youth Justice Interventions Operational Guidance, which was produced by Crime Concern, commissioned by us and funded by the Government Office for London (GOL). Despite the guidance being primarily aimed at London YOTs, it can also be applied across England and Wales.

The three main messages in the guidance are:

• a Prevent and Deter multi-agency panel should be set up in each borough to oversee prevent and deter cases – sharing information and allocating resources
• all local agencies (YOTs, housing, education, social services, police, etc.) have a role to play in providing ongoing support to young people who have completed their youth justice interventions – the guidance details how each partner can contribute to help these young people lead more productive lives
• local agencies need to target resources at these high risk young people in order to have most impact on local crime rates.

Click to download the guidance from GOL's website [opens in new window].