Unlocking Children

There are two strong reports out today arguing for radical change to the use and practice of custody for children in England and Wales. The End Child Imprisonment Campaign (ECI) has called for the immediate closure of Young Offender Institutions and Secure Training Centres as it launches its "Principles and Minimum Expectation for Children Deprived of their Liberty". The Parliamentary Human Rights Committee wants to see action to reduce the need for restraint and separation, in all secure settings.

But it’s a third report- an inspection of the Young Offender Institution at Cookham Wood in Kent that shows the fundamental absurdity of locking up children in custody. Young people are brought together from across Southern England into an establishment where “complex and dynamic keep-apart restrictions that sought to keep numerous individuals away from each other had a serious detrimental impact on the services provided to young people and arguably the culture of the institution”.

In truth, there is a limited amount of new information or argument in any of the reports- how can there be when the shortcomings and contradictions of locking up children are so well known? If the parliamentarians are right that there are about two and a half thousand children in one type of detention or another in England and Wales, those on remand or under sentence – 834 at the end of February- nowadays account for only a third of them. As the ECI report says “the restriction of liberty is harmful to children, irrespective of their circumstance”, so more credit should arguably be given to youth justice practitioners for driving down the numbers in penal custody over the last ten years; and more attention should be given to the children locked up for other reasons and in other types of institutions.

Curiously, the End Child Imprisonment Coalition make no mention of the proposed Secure School which is due to open in Autumn 2020, a stone’s throw from Cookham Wood. Will it be part of the answer to phasing out prison custody or, like STCs, simply end up adding to the problem? The new school will be more than twice the size of ECI’s proposed maximum of 30 places; and it won’t be close to home for most of its residents. Whether it will meet other child care principles remains to be seen, perhaps soon - bids to run it  were due in by 1^st of February.

Secure Children’s Homes are generally considered the most acceptable form of closed facility. They provide very much better levels of care than YOIs and STCs but even so are not immune from the deep- seated flaws common to all institutions. Recent inspections have found in one a particularly high number of sanctions of single separations for some young people “resulting in significant periods where young people would have been in their rooms on their own”. In another managers did not consistently critically assess the threshold for the use of physical restraint to make sure that this is required to protect young people, or others, from harm.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) found 242 allegations made in secure children’s homes between 2009 and 2017- lower in absolute terms than were found in in YOIs (440) and STCs (297) but not necessarily when population is considered.   IICSA reported on the number of incidents of alleged sexual abuse as a percentage of the average population of STCs in 2016 but when I asked them to provide the equivalent data for each of the three types of secure institutions - STC, YOI and SCH- ideally for each of the years 2009-2017 or for the whole period, disappointingly they said they were unable to do so.

What all this suggests is that a much more vigorous strategy- and some fresh thinking - is needed to keep children out of institutions of all sorts. End Child Imprisonment want a system in which children should only be deprived of their liberty when they pose a serious risk to themselves or others, and there are genuinely no alternative options for mitigating that risk in the community. There are dangers of unintended consequences in a purely risk- based approach and some high threshold relating to harm already caused will be essential to prevent net widening. Where the Campaign is undoubtedly right is that “the duration of any episode of detention must be as short as possible”.

To achieve that, what’s needed is a recasting of secure custody not as any kind of end in itself but as a very short term means of planning community- based interventions. This should certainly be the approach for the 300 young people currently serving Detention and Training Orders and many of the 250 on remand. A different approach might be needed to those serving longer term sentences for grave crimes – particularly those who will be transferred into the adult estate when they reach 18.  

     

Back at Cookham Wood YOI, the inspectors found some young people, because of keep-apart restrictions, spent almost as much time each day being escorted to and from activity as they did in the activity. In their view “there needed to be some new thinking about how to challenge this restrictive culture and the causes of it”. They are certainly right about that.