CAIRO, June 12, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – A confidential official report, conducted on the instructions of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, recommends that children should be targeted as “potential criminals” from the age of three, a leading British paper reported on Sunday, June 12.

The Home Office report argues that such toddlers can be singled out by their bullying behavior in nursery school or by a history of criminality in their immediate family, said The Sunday Times.

The report, entitled Crime Reduction Review, proposes training nursery staff to spot children at risk of growing up to be criminals.

It claims that children who were not “under control” by the age of three were four times as likely to be convicted of a violent offence.

As a solution, the 250-page secret report proposes parenting classes and, in the worst cases, putting more children who are not “under control” into intensive foster care instead of care homes.

The report was drawn up on the instructions of Blair who wanted to identify the most effective ways of cutting crime by 2008, the Times said.

It was conducted against a bleak assessment by the Home Office that, without new measures, the crime rate would rise 8.5% by 2008.

The research found that 85% of inmates in young offenders’ institutions had been bullies at school, while 43% of male prisoners had children with a criminal record.

It proposes treating bullies, who can start from a very young age, as “aggressors” rather than victims of their social background.

The reports argues these bullies do not suffer from low self-esteem but act as gang leaders who “recruit” others to commit crime.

As they graduate to being juvenile offenders, aged 8 to 15, they act as magnets by drawing in followers one or two years younger than themselves, it adds.

Those who by the age of 18 reach this stage, according to the report, are best dealt with in young offenders’ institutions with “boot camp” regimes.

They are woken at 6 a.m. each day and made to undergo drug rehabilitation courses, education and social training before going to bed at 10 p.m.

According to the Times, measures such as increased street lighting and longer custodial sentences were judged in the report to have been expensive failures, with only a few exceptions.

Instead, it maintains that if potential offenders were spotted young enough, “soft” measures — such as improving their reading, language and social skills — could be enough to change their direction.

Results from Thorn Cross young offenders’ institution in Warrington show its reconviction rate is 12% lower than similar prisons, which do not use “high intensity” methods, the paper said.

The report, marked “restricted”, betrays the Home Office's anger at what it regards as blocking tactics by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and the schools system, thwarting efforts to tackle the causes of crime.

“There is perhaps too much concern about the potential negative impacts of targeting on children and their families,” the report says.