Courts 'lock up too many youths'

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Of the 3,740 under-18s deprived of their liberty in 2006/07, youth offending specialists recommended custodial sentences in only 1,077 cases - 29% of the total.

Liberal Democrats said that the official figures, obtained from the Ministry of Justice in parliamentary questions, suggested that judges and magistrates do not have confidence in the non-custodial punishments available to them, such as community service.

In cases where courts are considering custody for a young offender, judges and magistrates must obtain a pre-sentence report from the local youth offending team (YOT) before handing down a punishment.

Figures compiled by the Youth Justice Board showed a wide variation across England and Wales in the courts' response to the reports' recommendations between April 2006 and March 2007.

In some areas, custodial sentences were handed down only when recommended by the report. But in many others, the courts ignored recommendations that individual offenders should not be put behind bars. In Wessex, the YOT recommended custody in only 21 cases, but 130 under-18s were locked up - 16% of the total. In Manchester it was 41 out of 151 (27%) and in Birmingham 41 out of 143 (29%).

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said: "It is deeply alarming that so many children are being locked up when youth experts think they shouldn't be, especially when we know there is a 92% re-offending rate after a young man's first prison sentence. We are schooling too many children in crime at the public's expense.

"Britain incarcerates far more children than any other European country and it is not working - youth crime and re-offending are not falling.

"I don't blame judges, who are operating in an environment where both Labour and the Tories are obsessed with looking tough on crime. Political posturing and the punitive demands of sections of the media are forcing us into treating many young people far too harshly.

"We need to move away from headline-grabbing rhetoric towards measures that will actually succeed in cutting youth crime, starting with effective community punishments that pay back damage to local communities and victims."