Oliver Letwin: The youth justice system isn't working as rehabilitation

From a speech by the shadow Home Secretary to the Centre for Policy Studies

The youth justice system in Britain today serves one purpose. It protects the public against some of the most persistent and serious young offenders for the periods during which those young criminals are locked up. Such protection of the public is, of course, enormously important.

But, alas, this protection of the public only occurs while the young people in question are in prison – and, all too frequently, a brief spell in a youth offenders' institution is followed almost immediately by their reoffending.

So the youth justice system isn't working as rehabilitation. But if a quarter of the pupils in our schools committed a crime last year – as recent surveys suggest – then the youth justice system isn't working as a deterrent either.

A youth justice system that offers some short-term protection to the public but neither deters nor rehabilitates is, to a very considerable extent, a failure. The system of local authority care is also a flop. We are failing to tackle this problem at its roots.

Academic research on both sides of the Atlantic is growing to support the evidence that the seeds of future offending are sown in infancy. The Head Start programme in the US is an example of the community-based, charitable organisations that have developed innovative programmes to meet local needs, often using volunteers.

The idea behind Head Start is to tackle rising juvenile crime, child abuse, neglect and poor education results by intervening with children under five, pregnant mothers and their families.

Since 1965, Head Start has served over 15.3 million children and their families, and it plays a major role in focusing attention on the importance of early childhood development. It draws together the major components affecting a child's development under one roof as part of a fully integrated service: education, health, parental involvement and social services.

Head Start is not perfect. But the Head Start principle is the right one – it uses both the state and the voluntary sector to try to prevent children in their early years from embarking on the conveyer belt to crime.