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Task 2 · Problem and solution · Crime

Why young offenders return to crime

A reoffending essay in which the band 9 answer treats release, not sentencing, as the moment where the policy actually fails.

The question

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task. Write about the following topic. Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. Write at least 250 words.

In many countries, a high proportion of young people who are released from prison commit further offences within a short period. What are the reasons for this, and how could the situation be improved?

A 250-word discursive essay — the half of the paper that carries two thirds of the marks. This prompt is original, written in the standard format for teaching purposes — it is not taken from any past paper.

What separates the three answers

The 6.5 argues about whether punishment should be harsher or softer; the 9 ignores that argument and looks at what a released eighteen-year-old actually has on the first Monday.

The three answers

Band 6.5

279 words (the task asks for at least 250)

The answer works. It addresses the task, the reader follows it, and the meaning survives — but ideas stay general, linking is mechanical, wording repeats, and small errors are visible throughout.

The answer

It is a fact that many young criminals are committing the crime again very soon after they are released from the prison. This is a serious problem for the society and in this essay I will discuss why it is happening and what can we do about it3.

Firstly, the main reason of this problem is that the young people can not find a job after the prison. No company wants to give a job to a person with a criminal record, so they do not have the money and they return to the crime for surviving5. Secondly, the prison itself is a bad influence. Inside the prison the young person is meeting with the professional criminals and he is learning the bad things from them. Moreover, many of these young people are coming from the poor families4 and broken homes, so when they are released, nobody is supporting them and they go back to the same bad friends.

To solve this problem, the government should do several things. Firstly, the government should give more education and training inside the prison, so the young people can learn a skill. Secondly, the punishment should be more strict, because if the young people are afraid of the prison they will not commit the crime again1. In addition, the society should not discriminate these people and the companies should give them a chance2.

In conclusion, the reasons of the reoffending are the unemployment, the bad influence of the prison and the family problems, and the solutions are the education, the strict punishment and the second chance from the society. If we do these things, the young people will have a better future.

What an examiner notices

  1. 1. Task response

    “the punishment should be more strict, because if the young people are afraid of the prison they will not commit the crime again”

    This directly contradicts the essay's own second cause, that prison teaches young people to offend. The contradiction is never acknowledged.

  2. 2. Task response

    “the society should not discriminate these people and the companies should give them a chance”

    An appeal to goodwill rather than a mechanism. Nothing suggests why employers would change their behaviour.

  3. 3. Grammatical range and accuracy

    “what can we do about it”

    Question word order inside a statement. The intended clause is 'what we can do about it'.

  4. 4. Grammatical range and accuracy

    “many of these young people are coming from the poor families”

    A permanent circumstance expressed as a continuous. The same tense choice recurs throughout, which makes it a pattern rather than a one-off.

  5. 5. Lexical resource

    “they return to the crime for surviving”

    Two slips in five words: 'the crime' as an uncountable abstract, and 'for surviving' where 'to survive' is needed.

One honest caveat

Band labels here describe what each piece of writing demonstrates against the four published assessment areas, paraphrased in plain language. They are teaching illustrations produced for this site, not official material, and no sample has been marked by a test provider. Real scripts are marked whole; two answers with the same label can still look quite different from each other, and nothing on this page can promise anyone a particular result.

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