” “United Kingdom: service in prisons” “

Electronic tags to be worn 24 hours a day; curfew prohibiting adolescents from circulating after nine o’clock at night; compulsory special courses for parents of delinquent children who have been arrested for violating the law: these are just some of the measures by which the UK is trying to come to terms with a chronic and very serious problem in British society: youth crime. Adolescents at risk. In a recent study conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a foundation devoted to social studies, almost half of the secondary schools students interviewed in England, Scotland and Wales, aged between eleven and sixteen, admitted to having violated the law. In the sample of the 14,000 children interviewed 48.5% said that they had committed a crime at least once in their life. Almost one out of every four youths between fifteen and sixteen admitted to being in possession of a knife or another weapon in the past year and one out of five to having attacked someone with the intention of causing grievous bodily harm. Nor are the statistics on alcohol and drug abuse any more reassuring. A quarter of the students between the ages of thirteen and fourteen said they regularly consume five or more glasses of alcohol at go when they go out with friends, and between the ages of fifteen and sixteen the percentage doubles. In this same age group, 25% of girls and 30% of boys declared that they had smoked cannabis at least once, while 5% of the girls and 9% of the boys admitted to having made use of this drug three or more times in the past month. In the same group 4% of girls and 5% of boys admitted having used ecstasy at least once; 2.5% of girls and 4% of boys, cocaine; and 1% of girls and 2% of boys, heroin. A proposed reform. A proposal has recently been made by the Minister for Home Affairs, David Blunkett, to detain hundreds of adolescent criminals from the ages of twelve to fifteen while awaiting trial. Up till now, the law permitted criminals below the age of sixteen to be held in remand only if they had committed a very grave crime such as to involve a sentence of at least fourteen years in prison. Such a change would be very significant: it would signal how worried British society is about the problem of juvenile crime. The Catholic Youth Service. “The work of the Catholic Church on behalf of adolescents at risk is very significant in prisons”, explains Helen Bardy, of the Catholic Youth Service, the organization of the Catholic Church of England and Wales devoted to problems of youth. “It is the prison chaplains who follow adolescents who have violated the law”. But there also exist two other projects aimed at the rehabilitation of delinquent youth: namely, the Zacchaeus Project and the Bartimaeus Project in the north of England, targeted at young drop-outs and teenagers at risk, with problems of discipline. The two projects are aimed at improving their social skills, school performance and behaviour in general. The youngsters involved in these projects learn activities like sailing, experience community activities and attend courses on “anger management”, to learn how to control their violence and “seek to understand what it is that makes them lose self-control”. “These are courses that are organized together with schools – explains Helen Bardy – but that do not interfere with the school curriculum. Another similar project is called ‘Zero Plus’ and is organized by the Paul Trust. The Catholic Youth Service, for its part, plays a role in support of the dioceses, in collaboration with the young. It informs the bishops of the work performed and pursues national projects alongside European ones”.