The Government's Approach to Crime Prevention - Tenth Report of Session 2009-10 - Report, Together with Formal Minutes (Paperback)

The Government's Cutting Crime strategy was introduced in 2007 to re-focus crime prevention activity on areas where progress on crime reduction has been slow, particularly youth crime, more serious offending, anti-social behavior, reducing re-offending and designing-out crime. To be successful in tackling youth anti-social behavior and ensuring perpetrators do not progress to more serious offending, enforcement must be coupled with support. A more effective long-term prevention strategy must focus on early intervention with young children and their parents. The Government has made a good start in this area, but needs to go further, ensuring that support reaches the most vulnerable and is available throughout the childhood years. Starting secondary school is a particularly formative time for children; mentoring would help those lacking support at home to manage this transition. Whilst the frequency of re-offending has been reduced there are still groups with very high re-offending rates, particularly young men and those serving short-term custodial sentences. Prisons must do more to ensure that training and employment meets the needs of individual prisoners and the labour market, and to ensure that a higher proportion of individuals benefit from resettlement support. The Government should also place more emphasis on measures to prevent opportunities for crime, including fast progress towards meeting its goal of introducing an early warning system to identify emerging crime trends.