Missed opportunities over rehabilitating young adult prisoners – report January 20, 2021, 12:05 am
The report claimed most young adults are held in adult prisons without any coherent strategy (Niall Carson/PA)
Haphazard ways of dealing with young adult prisoners must be urgently addressed to cut reoffending rates, a watchdog has warned.
The chief inspector of prisons said there had been missed opportunities in helping criminals aged 18 to 25 rehabilitate, which could put the public at risk of them offending again on release.
In a report, Charlie Taylor said changes must be made to the way the 15,000 young adult inmates are dealt with.
Currently the majority are held in adult prisons, despite warnings made more than a decade ago of the problems this could cause.
File photo dated 2/6/1998 of a female prison officer checks on inmates at Holloway Prison. WOMEN across South Wales were given 340 prison sentences last year – the highest across England and Wales. The 340 is equal to 62 people in every 100,000 who live in the area. This is down on the 2018 figure of 362, which stood at 67 per 100,000 but still much higher than the rest of England and Wales. And it is seven times the rate of female imprisonment in Surrey – at just nine per 100,000. But all of these women are in prisons outside Wales as all jails in the country are male-only. The Prison Reform Trust said that unnecessary imprisonment of women remained a ‘postcode lottery’ and found the figures showed a clear, significant geographical divide.