Too quick to condemn

25.08.09

The Guardian reports today of the supposed failure of a government programme  to help rehabilitate our most serious youth offenders.  Again, we are experiencing shoddy journalism with regard to  putting the facts across to the public in a  rational and fair way.  Vikram Dodd   chooses to only   focus on the comments of two offenders who rather blithely (and naively) suggest that they think prison would have worked better for them.  No mention of whether they had been to prison to see just how well that would work for them, no mention of those for whom such a programme had worked.  Frances Done quite rightly defends  the programme as how can researching 2 programmes  out of  100 be representative and an accurate reflection of what works?

Most importantly, this kind of  research must in no way impact on such a programme being improved upon – it remains absolutely essential to keep these young people out of prison where they are more likely to re-offend on release, having received nowhere near the kind of support that such a community programme can offer.     It simply  doesn’t make sense to rubbish a programme which is grounded in common sense values and reflects, in essence, much of what is good about work that is being carried out in the community to support young offenders out of crime.

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