NCJ Number
212208
Date Published
2004
Length
60 pages
Annotation
This report presents the results of a national evaluation of the Youth Justice Board’s mentoring program within the youth justice system of England and Wales.
Abstract
Recently, mentoring has become established in the United Kingdom as an important mechanism for working with disadvantaged youth with a marked increased seen in the number of mentoring schemes or programs nationwide. Today, mentoring support is a key feature in many programs designed to combat social exclusion and tackle crime. Over a 3-year period, from 1999 to 2002, the Youth Justice Board funded a number of intervention programs. One of which, was the mentoring initiative. Financial support was provided to 43 mentoring schemes with 39 included in this report. Based on aggregate data from the 39 mentoring intervention schemes, this report presents findings from a national evaluation study examining the effectiveness of mentoring schemes in reducing youth crime with reoffending forming the principle outcome measure. At the practical level, the evaluation highlighted the problems of setting up and running schemes. Data were made available in 359 cases with three-quarters of the cohort male. Highlights of key findings include: (1) within 1 year of joining the program 198 or 55 percent of the young people had committed a further offense; (2) females were much less likely to reoffend than males; (3) whereas around 30 percent of first offenders reoffended, nearly 80 percent of those with at least 10 previous offenses committed further crime; and (4) there was no clear evidence of any change in the seriousness of offending following participation in the program. The evaluation of the schemes showed some lack or failure in communication between the Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) and the scheme, a problem with the length of time between referral and the young person being matched with a mentor, a shortage of mentors, and lack of sufficient feedback on the performance of the young people. Tables and references