<p>Youth Justice</p>

Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Communities and Children – in the Senedd at 2:46 pm on 14 December 2016.

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Photo of Carl Sargeant Carl Sargeant Labour 2:46, 14 December 2016

Well, there are two aspects to this. One is the prison side of things, which is a non-devolved function, but the fact is, for me, nothing hurts me more than to see young people incarcerated. It’s a failure of the system that we have. We must get beyond—. We must operate our services before we get into that space. That’s why we’re investing in the advanced case-management programme with the youth justice board. We’ve had some great success, where we’ve had four pilots running across Wales. Twenty of the most prolific reoffenders among young people have been stopped from reoffending because we’ve treated the symptoms of adverse childhood experiences. So, we’ve looked back at the drug and alcohol issues, family breakdowns, and we’re treating those, rather than saying, ‘You can’t reoffend.’ It doesn’t work at that end, we’ve got to get into the system early on, and that’s why we’re shifting our proposals into tackling economic well-being, giving people jobs, growth and skills—and you’ll get fed up of hearing me talk about this, but actually we’ve got to this and tackle the well-being aspect of ACEs, because that’s where we have to invest our finance to make sure children don’t get into the youth justice system.