Almost 100% of juvenile offenders, who serve sentences at liberty, do not repeat offence

Three hundred and forty-eight teenagers, who served their sentences at liberty, participated in pilot probation projects for five years. Three hundred and forty-five of them have not committed repeated offences and returned to the normal life, thanks to the work with experts.

First Deputy Justice Minister of Ukraine Natalia Sevostyanova said this on Monday while presenting the results of pilot projects on juvenile probation, the press service of the Justice Ministry of Ukraine reports.

“The projects were launched in 2011 with the support of Canadian partners. Looking through the statistics for these five years, we can state that the number of minors convicted of criminal offenses decreased by 52%. Over 4,000 juveniles, whose sentences did not require imprisonment, were registered in the corrective services departments at the beginning of 2011. Now this figure has decreased to 1,800,” Sevostyanova said.

In her opinion, minors are the group of persons which has the fastest response to the probation program.

She noted that Ukraine had already adopted the law on probation, which covers both minors and adults. The motivation for the introduction of full-fledged probation service was the results of pilot projects involving minors.

According to the manager of the project “Reforming criminal justice system regarding juveniles in Ukraine” Yevhen Zahudayev, probation is a way to introduce individual approach to every teenager and, apart from formal control, to exercise meaningful oversight during the period of serving sentence.

“Such an approach will make it possible to teach a teen understand the responsibility for the committed offence and to form skills to overcome life’s problems. Therefore, to get a chance of a normal future,” Yevhen Zahudayev said.

Gail Steeds, the advisor on probation for juveniles in the project and the former probation manager of the Ministry of Children and Youth Services in Ottawa, informed about the system of juvenile probation in Canada. That Canadian experience laid the foundation for the development of pilot projects in Ukraine.

“We created a probation model at one of the corrective services departments in Melitopol [Zaporizhzhia region]. We used the same approaches that had been used in Canada, but with some adaptations to the Ukrainian legislation. We added a rehabilitation component. We taught the employees of the corrective services departments to diagnose what happened to a child and how to work to change a child’s behavior,” Gail Steeds said.

According to MP Andriy Pomazan, several legislative initiatives in this field, which were drafted in cooperation with Ukrainian and foreign experts, are now registered in the Parliament.

He also noted that comprehensive probation system for minors was an opportunity to turn teenagers, who made a mistake, to normal life.