AYJ Comment: Review of child sentencing must be bold to protect children from the harms of imprisonment
We welcome Lord Timpson’s announcement during the second reading of the Sentencing Bill in the House of Lords that the government will be reviewing youth sentencing. We have been calling for a dedicated sentencing review for children since the announcement of David Gauke’s review of the adult sentencing framework. A review of children’s sentencing represents a vital opportunity to reflect on relevant lessons for children from the Gauke review and to take meaningful steps towards meeting their distinct needs. This must include ensuring that custody is only used as a last resort for children.
A sentencing review for children is welcome and urgently needed. While the children’s estate may not be facing a capacity crisis like the one that led to the Gauke review, it is facing a crisis of its own: one of safety and well-being.
Children continue to be imprisoned in institutions that inspectorates have repeatedly found unsafe, with high levels of restraint and isolation, and minimal access to purposeful activity. In the past four months alone, multiple reports have raised significant safety concerns about establishments, with another urgent notification being issued and one institution being closed entirely. Too often, custodial sentences are not being used as a last resort, or for the shortest appropriate time, as required under domestic law and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Children in custody are extremely vulnerable, and negative custodial experiences may exacerbate and compound vulnerabilities, significantly affecting long-term development and life chances. Evidence does not suggest that custodial sentences deter crime, and the detention of children is incompatible with evidence on what brings about desistance from offending.
Deep and persistent disparities, driven by structural inequality and punitive policy decisions, continue to shape which children are most affected by custody. Children from racially minoritised backgrounds make up more than half of those in custody, while children with Special Educational Needs, care experience, and mental ill-health are significantly overrepresented. These intersecting vulnerabilities are too often overlooked. Many children are receiving long or indeterminate sentences — including life sentences — despite evidence that such approaches do nothing to reduce reoffending and cause lasting harm.
The review should consider relevant lessons for children from The Gauke Review, while crucially also recognising that children are not mini adults. Their rights, needs, and capacity for change are wholly different, and any sentencing framework must reflect that. Children are still developing physically, emotionally, and neurologically; they are more susceptible to peer influence, more likely to grow out of offending behaviour, and more responsive to support.
To be meaningful, this review must take a child-specific lens and engage thoroughly and openly with children and young people in contact with the justice system, as well as the wide range of organisations that support them. It must also draw from international examples, along with the clear evidence base on what works to reduce reoffending and support long-term wellbeing.
The review should:
Be ambitious in its scope and aims, with the intention of reducing the children’s custodial population sufficiently to close failing Young Offender Institutions.
Set out a legislative framework that ensures deprivation of liberty for children is only available for the most serious crimes, and where the child is assessed as posing a serious and continuing risk to the public, and where there is genuinely no way of managing that risk in the community.
Identify where and how current sentencing practices fail to uphold the UNCRC principles of custody as a last resort and for the shortest time possible. For example, review the use of long and indeterminate custodial sentences, including life sentences and joint enterprise convictions, as well as short sentences, including the use of mandatory minimum custodial sentences.
Consider how the intersecting vulnerabilities of children affected by sentencing — including race, SEND, care experience, and mental health needs — can be best addressed.
This review is a chance to reimagine justice for children, and to ensure the sentencing framework aligns with a youth justice system that prevents offending, upholds children’s rights, and gives every child a genuine second chance.
Jess Mullen, Chief Executive of the Alliance for Youth Justice, said:
“A sentencing review for children is not only welcome — it’s long overdue. Prison is no place for a child, and the children’s estate is in a dire condition, characterised by volatile establishments and failing regimes, where children have very limited time out of cells and very poor access to education and purposeful activity. Yet too many children continue to be sentenced to custody when it is not a last resort, despite the serious harm it causes and the fact that it is the least effective option for reducing reoffending. This review is a chance to reset the system: to ensure that children are treated as children and that their rights are upheld. We urge the government to be bold, ambitious, and child-centred in its approach so it can finally close Young Offender Institutions and the last Secure Training Centre and ensure custody is truly a last resort.”