Bristol Youth Offending Team

Introduction

YOT - A criminal justice multi-agency public organisation supervising young people who are also young offenders (and working with their parents/carers and their victims).
Our aim
We aim to prevent young people from offending or re-offending. We do this by developing consistent and effective responses to youth crime. We've listed how we do this in the section below.

What does a YOT do?

We work together with young people in the criminal justice system
Our team is made up of workers from a range of organisations including the city council, the police, the health service and the probation service 

• Responding to police reprimands and final warnings
• Providing appropriate adults - trained adult volunteers who accompany young people who are in police custody and whose parents are unavailable
• Attending and reporting to courts dealing with young people. Our reports provide information and professional opinion to help the courts deliver swift and well-informed justice.

Supervision

• Providing bail support and supervision for young people awaiting sentence
• Supervising young people serving their sentence in the community including intensive supervision surveillance programmes (ISSP)
• Supervising and staying in contact with young people in custody.

Reparation

• Showing offenders the impact of their offending by involving them with victims and, where possible, arranging for them to make good the result of their crimes.

Helping parents 

• By including them in what we do and supporting them to understand and respond to their responsibilities.
• Offering Voluntary Parenting interventions to provide support.

Preventing offending

We've developed strong partnerships across the city to help prevent offending. This type of work is called Diversion. We are involved in a range of initiatives like: 

• Youth Inclusion Programmes - helping young people to play a positive part in their communities

We've also developed our own approaches to preventing offending. These include:

• "Opening Doors Project" - addressing the drug and mental health problems that lead to offending
• Opportunity Plus - working with young people who are out of school to make sure they get appropriate education
• Education, Training and Employment team - getting more of the young people we supervise trained or employed

[back to top]