Eight leading children’s rights and youth justice charities – the Alliance for Youth Justice, Article 39, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Child Rights International Network, Howard League for Penal Reform, INQUEST, Just for Kids Law and the National Association for Youth Justice – have published a review of successive government pledges to reform child prisons, with an analysis of their impact using official sources, to help the new government pursue evidence-based policy and avoid the pitfalls of the past.
Latest statistics show that 81% of children in custody are held in prisons – four young offender institutions for under 18 year-olds and England’s one remaining secure training centre. Only 84 children (19% of those in custody) are in secure children’s homes, which are childcare establishments run by local authorities focused on providing intensive, expert multidisciplinary care and support to children and their families.
The review’s timeline starts with the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which promised more effective custodial sentences for children, and ends with this summer’s inspection report on Feltham young offender institution – described by HM Inspectorate of Prisons as the country’s most violent prison – and government data which shows that restraint continues to endanger children’s lives.
Written by experts whose knowledge of youth justice and child prisons spans four decades, the review examines 10 areas of policy and practice in relation to child imprisonment, including recurring government assurances that: children will be kept safe; solitary confinement will not be used for children; children will receive at least 30 hours of education a week; and restraint will only be used as a last resort.
The review’s “overwhelming conclusion is that, despite the best efforts of the many individuals and organisations involved, the evidence unequivocally shows that the multitudinous attempts to reform child imprisonment have ultimately failed, and continue to fail”. It makes five recommendations for urgent government action:
- Affirm the removal of children from the prison estate, and the closure of child prisons – following the findings of previous reviews, and the last government’s acknowledgement that child prisons cannot be made safe or suitable for children.
- Establish a wide-ranging independent review of the circumstances in which children may be deprived of their liberty – through criminal justice, health and social care routes – as a means of making it a genuine measure of last resort, for the shortest period of time, and consistent with established national and international childcare standards and knowledge.
- Publish a national strategy with a timetable for the expedited closure of child prisons which focuses on supporting children and their families within their own communities and using only childcare establishments when deprivation of liberty is demonstrably the only possible means of avoiding serious and immediate harm to the child and/or others.
- Use the forthcoming Crime and Policing Bill to introduce statutory provisions that restrict the criminal courts’ use of deprivation of liberty for children.
- Transfer ministerial and civil service responsibility for children deprived of their liberty through the criminal courts from the Ministry of Justice to the Department for Education. Completely move the Youth Custody Service out of HM Prisons and Probation Service, integrating it within teams responsible for secure children’s homes and other relevant children’s social care policy within the Department for Education.
Carolyne Willow, Article 39’s Founder Director and one of four contributors to the review, said:
“It’s always great when incoming government ministers and advisers bring with them years of subject knowledge and expertise. But this isn’t guaranteed. Civil servants regularly move around government, and don’t necessarily have a long-term view of what has been tried before, and failed. With this review, which started before recent ministerial appointments, we have succinctly shared the evidence of past reforms, many of them deemed urgent, so that government has the best chance of introducing and implementing policy that will work. The cumulative evidence that imprisonment causes children serious harm, and cannot be made safe, is incontestable. We don’t want to be still documenting and writing about children suffering serious abuse and neglect in child prisons in 10 or 20 years. Ministers can and must change this never-ending cycle of child harm once and for all.”
Dr Tim Bateman, a trustee of the National Association for Youth Justice who contributed to the review, said:
“The repeated government assurances, over the past quarter of a century, that child prisons will be reformed, accompanied by a multitude of policy documents, have, when measured against the evidence, demonstrably failed to achieve any improvement in the appalling conditions to which children are subject. This lack of success provides compelling confirmation that child prisons are simply beyond reform. It is, in this context, unfortunate that efforts by the last government to ameliorate young offender institutions and secure training centres took priority over implementing its stated vision of closing those institutions.”
Professor Emeritus Barry Goldson, from the University of Liverpool, also a contributor to the review, said:
“For almost two hundred years children have been imprisoned in a range of specialist institutions. The national and international evidence has persistently pointed to the myriad failings of such institutions. Child imprisonment is typically harmful, spectacularly ineffective as a means of providing community safety, and extraordinarily expensive. It fails its young captives and it fails the wider public interest. The time has come to end such abject failure by heeding the evidence and closing child prisons.”
Dr Laura Janes, a solicitor working with children and vulnerable adults in prisons, and a contributor to the review,said:
“After working with children in prison for almost 20 years, one throwaway comment from a child client, who said ‘everybody knows you stay the age you come in at’, sticks with me. The act of imprisoning a child is to freeze their development, with terrible consequences for their health and their future. The use of prisons for children must end.”
Jess Mullen, Chief Executive of the Alliance for Youth Justice, said:
“Prison is no place for a child, yet children continue to be sent into an estate lurching from crisis to crisis. The UK is consistently found to be in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child requirement that a custodial sentence must be a last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time. The new youth justice minister must make it his top priority to get to grips with addressing the challenges children in custody are facing, with an ambitious national strategy. This must set out clear timescales for closing young offender institutions and secure training centres and increasing capacity in more appropriate provision; and set out what the government is doing to ensure that custody is used only as an absolute last resort. Every day that goes by without doing so places the wellbeing of children at risk.”
Roger Grimshaw, Research Director at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, said:
“Youth prisons have been a blight on the criminal justice system for too long. Children deserve better and I commend this insightful report.”
Andrea Coomber KC (Hon.), Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said:
“The evidence is compelling: prison is no place for a child.
“When a child is in trouble, we should do all that we can to give them the help and support they need. As the Howard League has seen through its legal work again and again, prisons holding children fail to do this. They make things worse.
“Today we come forward with positive recommendations to break this cycle and give children a brighter future.”
Deborah Coles, Executive Director of INQUEST, said:
“Despite the violence and neglect behind the unconscionable deaths of children in the care of the state, cruel and inhumane treatment and conditions continue. Child prisons have proved themselves incapable of reform and are dangerous and harmful. We need to rethink the health and welfare of some of society’s most marginalised children. These are children failed by every other system. We need community support and services that protect and nurture.”
Louise King, Co-Lead of Just for Kids Law, said:
“Child prisons are costly, failing institutions that are unsafe and ineffective. This review clearly evidences how numerous attempts to reform child imprisonment have failed. We call on the new government to end child imprisonment and fundamentally rethink when and how a child can be deprived of their liberty. Without such radical action, extremely vulnerable children will continue to remain in harm’s way.”
