Another Year, Another Woeful Report on Youth Custody

 

Another year, another troubling report on a child prison. This time it’s Werrington, a small former Industrial School near Stoke which takes teenage boys mainly from the Midlands. The Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) explain in their Annual Report how last summer they considered the Young Offender Institution to be such an unsafe environment that they had to alert prison chiefs in London to their concerns.  

The watchdog found Werrington “often a dangerous place” with an atmosphere of threat and intimidation. 328 weapons were fashioned by young people in the year to August 2021. In February, a violent hostage-taking incident led to £50,000 worth of damage. The IMB were understandably dismayed to learn that a “conflict resolution team” had been disbanded in late 2020, leaving staff and young people without a route to solving problems. They also point to a worrying lack of trained negotiators.

Part of the explanation for the rising violence is the frustration caused by extended periods of 22-hour lock-up – something the Board consider amounts to prolonged solitary confinement of children (prohibited under international law).  The IMB see the disturbingly short time children were out of their rooms especially at weekends as a form of torture.

Due to construction works, some very emotionally distressed young people have been unable to access a unit providing a greater level of support and as a result “created chaos” on the normal wings. “Staff were sometimes seen mopping up flooded water with plastic bags over their shoes and trying to dispose of insanitary water”.

The Board report that for many young people, the rooms in which they spent so much time “were not fit for habitation.” Young people regularly requested that their family photographs (including themselves) be displayed, but this was not allowed due to security issues, a response which the IMB finds inhumane.

The IMB does not consider the educational provision adequate, in part due to lack of facilities but also because of the regular outbreaks of violence. Throughout his time at Werrington, one young person was unable to read and write so could not access the menu to order what he wanted to eat.

It’s not all terrible. The IMB point to good, professional care by the staff, the installation of phones in all boys' rooms for improved contact with family and friends and regular contact with healthcare, chaplaincy, and social work staff. And of course the pandemic lies behind some of the serious problems, restricting regimes and creating staff shortages

But what this report confirms is the fundamental unsuitability of the young offender institution as a model for dealing with children in custody- something which in truth has been known for decades and even accepted by the government for years. 

We still await the first secure school heralded as a new way forward; and for details of a promised expansion of places in secure childrens homes which have inexplicably been allowed to dwindle. The number of secure beds for children in the health service also fell between 2018 and 2021- from 257 to 188. This is hard to justify, not least in the light of last month's IMB report on another YOI, Wetherby, which, for the sixth year running, asked the Prisons Minister  "what is being done to increase the number of beds for those young people for whom prison is clearly not the right place?"  

Covid notwithstanding, the failure of youth custody to cope with a historically low population does not bode well for a future in which more children are projected to enter closed institutions.  

Spending watchdog the National Audit Office have started some work in this area  - their first foray into youth justice for over ten years.  It's a quarter of a century since a report by their now defunct sister organisation -the Audit Commission- published the influential report Misspent Youth . It paved the way for far reaching youth justice reforms. Could something similar be on the cards this year?