Blog

How Young Adult Intervention transforms lives

27 Aug 2024

Young adults are disproportionately represented within the criminal justice system.18-24-year-olds represent 22% of those serving community sentences or suspended sentence orders; but are only 10% of the general population (source).  

Young adults in the justice system are often the most vulnerable in society, with a long list of factors impacting their developmental outcomes such as poverty, violence, abuse, exploitation, discrimination, mental ill-health and neurodevelopmental disorders (source). Work with young adults sparks a particular passion amongst practitioners, a passion that brings with it a range of perspectives and opinions on the best way to respond to these challenges and make an impact on their lives.  

The potential rewards are great and this period (the transition to adulthood) offers a key opportunity for desistance, as people often stop offending as they get older (source).  

With the right opportunities, a young adult can make changes sooner and this can make all the difference for their future, and potentially even the lives of those around them.  

One must wonder too, in amongst all these voices and possibilities, where the voice of the young adult is to be heard?  

Ingeus’ Justice division are placing young adults front and centre of their journeys. By working in collaboration with our Youth division’s Youth Voice, we have reimagined the journey through our service from their perspective. This enables us to better understand the part we play and where both growth potential and limitations lie. It also allows us to continually reflect on all aspects of a service that we might control or influence, including the often-overlooked aspects of their transition into our services and their exit at the other end.  

Our work with Youth Voice has involved co-facilitating focus groups across the country, meeting separately with service users and staff. Time and again young adults have told us they want to be heard; they want to work with someone who has got their back and can keep them safe. Ingeus focuses on meeting these needs as early as possible by creating and nurturing a relationship, which subsequently benefits the statutory support provided by the Probation Service and other related services, but most importantly, the individual themselves. 

Tom, from Leeds, was referred to our Personal Wellbeing service in 2023. During his focus group, Tom told us he didn’t know who Ingeus were, and simply came along as Probation had told him this would help with his mental health. Tom cited how meeting Peer Mentor, Peter, at his initial face to face appointment made him feel heard, was a key factor in his engagement with our service, and then his desire to follow in Peter’s footsteps and become a peer mentor himself. Tom took an active part in the focus group, describing how he was now inspired to support people on probation by sharing his experiences, telling them how Ingeus helped him and exploring what benefits engaging with our services might bring them.  

Peter has since gained employment as a personal wellbeing mentor and has put himself forward as a local young adult specialist, which means other people will benefit from the empathy and relatability which first inspired Tom. Together, and in collaboration with the Probation Service, Peter and Tom are trialling a pre-referral triage service that we believe can help relieve some of the pressures and over-reliance on probation practitioners during the Commissioned Rehabilitative Services (CRS) referral process. The trial puts the young adult at the heart of their journey and ensures their views and opinions are consistently heard. 

Our approach is person-centred, trauma-informed and takes full account of neurodiversity, brain development, maturity and care experience. Supported by specialist training and a team of specialists, it is applied across all our Justice services. This includes our Commissioned Rehabilitative Services (CRS), Creating Future Opportunities (CFO), and programmes such as Reflect which offers early interventions and which Jahzeal talks about in the video. 

Ingeus has a commitment and proven track record in utilising lived experience to help create, develop, and deliver interventions. We have an amazing group of employees and volunteers who know what it’s like to sit in the other seat. We are confident that this is just the beginning of what we hope will snowball into increasing numbers of young adults tilting their own corners of the universe in the right direction, their right direction.