Educationally Disaffected Young Offenders: Youth Court and Agency Responses to Truancy and School Exclusion

• NCJ Number: 185385
• Journal: British Journal of Criminology Volume: 40 Issue: 4 Dated: Autumn 2000 Pages: 594-616
• Author(s): Caroline Ball; Jo Connolly
• Editor(s): Geoffrey Pearson
• Date Published: 2000
• Length: 23 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom

Annotation

Links between educational disaffection and delinquency are well-established; in contrast, court and agency responses to school absenteeism among defendants have received little research attention.

Abstract

In the current study, the authors used data from a study of school-age defendants who were truants or who were excluded at the time of sentence to critically examine the provision of pre-sentence school-based information to courts and the extent to which supervision by youth justice agencies had any impact on the educational situation of or subsequent offending by the young people. The young defendants were primarily between 10 and 15 years of age and were representative of juvenile court defendants throughout England and Wales. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from court registers and files, pre-sentence and school reports, questionnaire responses from magistrates and supervising officers, group discussions with youth panel chairmen, and interviews with offenders and supervising officers. Data were collected on 522 young defendants sentenced between September and December 1995. The multifaceted nature of the interface between offending behavior and educational experience exemplified the complexities and ambiguities observed throughout the juvenile justice system in a earlier study in 1987. Data from the current study suggested the contentious debate surrounding the role of school reports in the decision-making process about sentencing in the juvenile court in the late 1970's and early 1980's not only survived the shift to a due process approach but also continued to influence the provision of educational information to the juvenile court in the more punitive 1990's. The authors offer a tentative taxonomy for assessing educationally disaffected juvenile offenders and conclude that a new approach to multi-agency collaboration will be necessary if youth offending teams and panels set up under the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998 and the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act of 1999 are to effectively address the problem of educationally disaffected offenders. 50 references, 11 footnotes, and 7 tables