Dr. Ian D. Marder:

It depends on what we are trying to achieve. Youth detention is extremely effective if what we want to do is make the child suffer, and if we want to do retribution, which is one of the rationales of criminal justice that a lot of people put a lot of weight on. It really depends on what we are trying to achieve. If what we are trying to achieve is reducing crime and helping people solve the problems in their lives that lead to crime in the first place, it is not going to be very effective. If what we want to do is incapacitation, as we have heard from Mr. Egan there are non-criminal approaches to this, whereby children can be placed in secure care that is not criminalising. If what we want to do and prioritise is retribution it is very effective, but this is what the Children Act is trying to avoid us prioritising and what all of these countries we have cited are increasingly moving away from. The Scottish sentencing guidelines for young people, which cover people up to their 25th birthday, state that in all sentencing for all young people under the age of 25 the priority should be assessing their maturity and then rehabilitation. How much weight we want to put on retribution determines how effective we think it is.