The Vauxhall Centre for the Study of Crime

School Exclusion and Youth Crime

2001 saw the completion of The Independent Effects of Permanent Exclusion from School on the Offending Careers of Young People, a study undertaken for the Home Office by John Pitts and David Porteous (Vauxhall Centre [VC]) and David Berridge and Isabelle Brodie (Child and Family Welfare Research Unit [CFW]) (£60,000) (Berridge et al 2001).

This study was commissioned at a time when the link between youth justice and school exclusion was a key policy issue and the findings, which point the complex relationship between social disadvantage, school exclusion and youth crime, have influenced both educational and criminal justice policy.

In 2001-2003, the Centre undertook evaluations of Bail Support and Mentoring Schemes for the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales (£210,000) and CSV (Porteous 2001, 2005) and also collaborated with Tim Bateman at Nacro, a part-time Senior Research Fellow at the Centre, in researching Nacro’s highly influential sentencing survey for the Youth Justice Board (£10,000) which revealed, amongst other things, that the youth justice reforms had yet to make an impact upon the problem of ‘justice by geography’ (Bateman & Stanley 2002, 2004).

These studies have influenced the development of both policy and practice within youth justice and, through our ensuing publications, generated new knowledge about the impact of modes of intervention and disposal (Pitts 2002, Bateman & Pitts 2005).

At present John Pitts and Penny Turner are engaged in YJB studies of the impact of a junior Youth Inclusion Programme (YIP) and the criminal victimisation of offending and non-offending children and young people in a shire county (£26,000).

Policing

A major strand of the Centre’s work has been policing in general and the policing of young people in particular. In 2001-2 Alan Marlow in association with Margaret Melrose of the Vulnerable Young People’s Research Unit undertook a series of ground-breaking evaluations of Targeted Policing of Street Drug Misuse and Vice for the Metropolitan Police (£65,500).

In 2002-3 John Pitts, David Porteous and Marilyn Wolfson undertook a study of multi-agency crime prevention initiatives in Northamptonshire (£15,000) and in 2005-6 John Pitts, Margaret Melrose (VYP) and Alan Marlow embarked on a study of a Police Stakeholder Initiative on two high crime estates in Luton and Dunstable (£32,000).

Street-based Youth Work with Socially Excluded Young People

In 2001-2003 John Pitts (principal investigator) Fiona Factor (VYP) and research assistants Carole Pugh and Penelope Turner (VC), (Pitts, Pugh & Turner 2002) in partnership with researchers from the universities of Durham and Lincoln, embarked upon a two-year study entitled The Contribution of Detached and Outreach Youth Work to the Involvement of Socially Excluded Young People in Education, Training and Work, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (£147,500).

The study involved the mapping and analysis of the nature and scope of detached and outreach youth work with offending and non-offending socially excluded young people and how these approaches might articulate more effectively with government’s Connexions initiative.

The report, published in 2004 (Crimmens et al) by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the National Youth Agency, under the title Reaching Socially Excluded Young People, has become a key point of reference in the current debate about the role of youth work and has influenced the development of the Youth Matters Green Paper.

Transnational Comparative Research

In 2002-2004 John Pitts, David Porteous and Fiona Factor were commissioned to undertake an action research study of a 5-nation initiative concerned with the re-introduction of socially excluded ethnic-minority youth into education, training and work, funded by the EUDG12 (£25,000) (Pitts & Porteous 2005, 2006).

The study revealed that multi-level initiatives which addressed the relationship between school, home, and employers as well as the neighbourhood factors which placed young people at risk of crime and truancy held the greatest promise.

With rising rates of youth incarceration from the mid-1990s, professional and scholarly attention has turned to the ways in which young people in trouble are dealt with in other EU states.

This has revealed that Finland incarcerates fewer juveniles in the penal system than any other EU state but, thus far, there have been no studies of how troubled and troublesome youngsters are handled there.

It was for this reason that, in 2003, John Pitts and Tim Bateman (Nacro Youth Crime Section) embarked upon Incarcerating Young People: An Anglo-Finnish Comparison (In collaboration with HUMAK, Finland’s largest youth work training agency, the University of Kuupio’s Department of Law, the Finnish Ministry of Justice.

Funding and staffing in lieu of funding to the value of £85,000 was secured for the first stage of this project from the Esme Fairburn Trust and the Finnish Ministry of Education.

The findings reveal that the Finns incarcerate young people at a similar rate to the UK but utilize a far broader range of institutions and institutional regimes.

A funding bid for stage 2. is currently with the ESRC (£85,000), an article based on the initial findings is in press (Pitts & Kuula, 2006) and a chapter on these findings will appear in an edited book to be published by the Finnish Ministry of Justice in 2006.

The Professional Doctorate in Youth Justice

In September 2005 the Centre welcomed its first intake to the new, part-time, Professional Doctorate in Youth Justice.

The doctorate has been jointly developed by the Centre and Nacro and Tim Bateman of Nacro has been seconded to the Centre in the role of Senior Research Fellow on a .4 basis to share leadership of the award and to collaborate on the Anglo-Finnish research.