bookmark us

click me to order your dissertation
UK Dissertation Guarantees

Free Dissertations - Social Work Dissertations

Historically, How Has The Uk Youth Justice System Responded To The ...


Historically, how has the UK Youth Justice System responded to the problem of mental illness in young offenders who are currently serving custodial sentences in young offenders' institutes?
As noted earlier, ‘In the UK, mental health care was for decades provided only in large ‘asylums' - keeping ‘mentally ill' people out of society believing this to be for their own good and that of their communities. Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating at the end of the 1980s, government policy switched to providing more services in the community and in most cases limiting hospital treatment to when it is needed most acutely' [All-Party Parliamentary Group on Prison Health, House of Commons, November 2006, p2].
During the 1950's and 1960's the link between mental ill-health and criminality had arguably never been stronger; all prisoners were regarded as patients who could be effectively ‘treated' to prevent them from re-offending in the future and whilst little specific attention was paid to the individual mental needs of offenders, the types of treatment reforms which were offered by the Criminal Justice System at this time were very similar to the kinds of group treatment therapies being offered to those mentally disordered and mentally ill patients in the mental asylums and hospitals of the day. During the 1970's this paradigm of offender treatment was abandoned primarily as a result of research studies conducted into the success of some of these treatment reforms: conclusions from several research studies into the effectiveness of these criminal treatments on reducing criminal behaviour strongly suggested that ‘nothing works' (Thomas-Peter, 2006, p29). These embarrassing findings caused the pendulum to swing away from rehabilitation towards a firmer commitment to incapacitation and punishment through positive custody.
During the 1980's, the wave of ‘new public management' was born (Thomas-Peter, 2006, p30). This movement focussed heavily upon the procedural roles of the Prison and Probation Services in reducing re-offending. The Prison service started to contract out some of their primary responsibilities in a quest to encourage more efficient service from both their private sub-contractors and also their remaining state Prisons who would have to meet their performance targets to avoid being privatised in the same way as so many other Institutions had been. Likewise, the Probation service was reorganised and reintegrated to encourage greater efficiency of performance: ‘[The Probation Service, rather than] a loosely co-ordinated collection of individual social workers [became a unified and managed service] with a clearer sense of direction and purpose, which was more able to engage on equal terms with other services and to contribute and give effect to national policies' (Faulkner, 2007, p7).

Please note: The above dissertation snippet was written by a student and then submitted to us to display and help others. Thanks to all the students who have submitted their work to us.