Harmful, Expensive and Criminogenic: The Case for Abolishing Detention and Training Orders in England and Wales

Children who offend generally receive community sentences, to help them overcome difficulties whilst naturally addressing offending behaviour; however, children can also receive custody, which has a plethora of known harms. Children’s rights instruments call for custody to be reserved as a ‘last resort’ response to extremely serious offending. However, in England and Wales this is demonstrably not the case, meaning that children still receive short custody orders (in the form of a Detention and Training Order [DTO]) for relatively minor offences. We argue that legislative change should abolish the DTO because of the harms custody wreaks, from several different perspectives (their rights, moral treatment of children, sentencing guidelines, practical and financial considerations), to leave the use of custody only possible for very serious offending, and thus reaching the goal of ‘last resort’.