Professor Alex Stevens:

I was hoping to comment on the Deputy's question about young people and draw the attention of the committee to the excellent research by Professors Susan McVie and Lesley McAra in the Edinburgh study, "The Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime". It has the fascinating finding that taking the example of 14-year-olds involved in low-level offending, the ones caught by the police have the worst outcomes in terms of reoffending. Much of that is around low-level drug offences. The problem with diversion is that it still includes adverse contact between young people and the police, which we want to avoid. The lesson from the Scottish research, which has been taken up avidly by the Scottish Government, is that we should reduce the involvement of criminal justice agencies in young people's lives if we want to avoid bad outcomes for those young people.