Transition to Adulthood (T2A) Alliance

The Transition to Adulthood (T2A) Alliance is a broad coalition of organisations, that evidences and promotes ‘the need for a distinct and radically different approach to young adults in the criminal justice system; an approach that is proportionate to their maturity and responsive to their specific needs’.

Convened by the Barrow Cadbury Trust, T2A is a coalition of 12 leading criminal justice, health and youth organisations: Addaction, Catch22, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Clinks, the Criminal Justice Alliance, the Howard League for Penal Reform, Nacro, the Prince’s Trust, the Prison Reform Trust, the Revolving Doors Agency, the Young Foundation, and YoungMinds.

The T2A Alliance was born from the Barrow Cadbury Trust’s ‘Commission on Young Adults in the Criminal Justice System’, published in 2005, which recommended systemic change including the establishment of ‘young adult teams’ in each locality to directly address and support the points of transition faced by young people as they approach maturity and full adulthood. Though three pilot projects running since 2009, the T2A approach has been shown to enable desistance through a reduction in offending behaviour, an increase in compliance with court orders, improvements to employment and accommodation outcomes, better family relationships and healthier lives.

Full footage of the 2011 T2A National Conference can be viewed here and all of the T2A publications can be downloaded at: www.t2a.org.uk/publications

To build the evidence for the T2A campaign, the Barrow Cadbury Trust  established three pilot projects, running since 2009, which are testing different approaches to improving services for young adults in the criminal justice system. The projects have enabled demonstration of different community interventions, all tailored to the needs of the individual, with the aim of reducing both the risk of reoffending and social exclusion.

The three pilots are in Birmingham, West Mercia and London, and are delivered by Staffordshire and West Midlands Probation Trust, YSS and the St Giles Trust respectively. The pilots were subject to a formative evaluation by the University of Oxford’s Centre for Criminology, completed at the start of 2011, which identified promising early results and highlighted the pilots’ success in engaging young adults in actions which will help them towards better lives. An outcomes evaluation and a cost-benefit analysis will be completed during 2012.