Transitioning Young Adults in the Criminal Justice System 

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The transition from the youth to adult justice system is recognised as a challenging time for young adults. Once they’ve turned 18, young people are legally recognised and treated as young adults, with the child-friendly ethos and services available to them as adolescents often coming to an end and being replaced by young adult led interventions, which are different.  For these reasons, HMPPS takes seriously the importance of ensuring young adults are transitioned with care and support. 

Community Transitions 

The unification of the probation service created a new opportunity to improve young adults’ experiences of the transition between Youth Justice Services (YJS) and Probation. 

London Probation region won The Butler Trust’s Kathy Biggar trophy for its locally developed ‘Transition Programme’ – this is an example of excellent local innovation and ‘Next Steps’ has now been rolled out nationally. The purpose is to ensure young adults understand and engage with their transition from children to adult services, alongside the support of families, carers and other key professionals. Delivered through a series of modules, it demystifies probation supervision for the young adult and ensures that timely information is exchanged between the two services so that a young adult focused sentence plan is delivered   It encourages practitioners to move away from treating transition as a purely procedural task and provides practical exercises that support relationship-building and engagement.  

Custody Transitions 

In March 2024, following an interim policy change involving the youth custody service retaining young people up to their 18^th birthday, HMPPS has introduced a new process for young adults being released from youth custody sites. For sentenced young adults aged 18 years at the time of release from youth custody, they will be supervised and managed pre and post release by the probation service. 

The transition of a young person from the YCS into the adult prison estate can be a critical period in the young person’s journey through custody. It is imperative that this is carefully planned, is focused on the young person, meets their needs, and takes place in a collaborative and multi-disciplinary way with the young person at the centre of it. 

Through enhanced partnership work, a centrally managed Transitions Policy Framework has been developed to improve the process for placing children into the adult estate with a person-centred and consistently applied approach, to ensure that the specific needs of the individuals are met. 

This process sets out how information will be shared between the youth and adult estate to ensure more streamlined and comprehensive sentence and care planning, thereby providing a smoother transition. 

It aims to improve the experience of all young people who will be in custody beyond the age of 18 and create a consistent and transparent process that will meet the specific needs required for each individual. The process enables the views of the child and their family/support person to be incorporated in decisions that are made about their future and increase awareness for staff involved in all stages of transition, of the specific needs of this age group. 

The probation and prison policies are available here:  

Transition of Young People from the Children and Young People Secure Estate to Adult Custody Policy Framework (publishing.service.gov.uk)  

Probation Service Management of Young Adults (publishing.service.gov.uk)