I don't think we do know the answer to your last question (well somebody may, but I have never heard it mentioned) One of the problems is that the tracking of young offenders is poor so individual YOIs don't know which, if any, of the the things they do makes any difference.There was one very interesting (quite tough!) family liaison officer I met in Ashfield who said that in ten years experience and with thousands of boys going through her hands, she had met only two whom she thought irredeemably evil. The exceptionally hard-nosed governor at the young womens unit in Sutton said much the same.The family liaison woman said she had better results if she could maintain family links - restore links with absent and sometimes unknown fathers and create and sustain any contact the young men had with their own children. She thought all those things inhibited re-offending - but could not be sure as there was no proper tracking or evidence-based research.I would be interested to hear what T Berne has to say post spending a few days in Feltham - I found it a profoundly depressing place even though I was visiting the best part: the Boris-funded, Heron wing where resettlement is top priority and where, when I visited, there had been NO re-offending. But then the young men are treated humanely, educated, resettled and have a worker assigned to them throughout their sentence and for six months after. One of the Heron "graduates" I met is about to start a university course while working on outreach at Arsenal and shows no signs of becoming anything but a fine role model (at least he has the experience to tell boys not to do what he did)
Sara Nathan ● 5904d