FIT FOR CHILDREN?

Prisons are no place for children, says Charlotte Day of the Howard League. Rather than pumping money into failed institutions, we should be investing in intensive community alternatives

Angela Neustatter's recent articles on the treatment of children in prison (Out of sight and Inside right) struck a dangerously optimistic note. Imprisonment, she suggested, can be a positive, or even therapeutic experience for young people. Given sufficient investment, she argued, it would be possible to fulfil the vision of Martin Narey, director general of the prison service, and to run 'prisons fit for our children.'

The research that the Howard League has recently conducted within the new juvenile prison units, and interviews with over 60 young people post-release, has led us to radically different conclusions. The research examined conditions from a rights-based perspective, using the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Beijing Rules, the Riyadh Guidelines, and the United Nations Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty as the benchmarks for care of children in custody. In a series of reports, we document the ways in which prisons fail to meet basic expectations of standards of care. Almost all aspects of regimes are covered within the reports, but for the purposes of this short article I will focus on a few of the more glaring concerns.

Despite all that is known in terms of the role of the influential adult and the importance of intensive personal support, children in prison are held in wings of between forty and sixty. The size of units and the low ratio of officers to boys means that staff are hard pressed to supervise and officers simply do not have time to engage with young people, let alone gradually to build trusting relationships. A principal officer at one institution told us: 'If you have 60 boys on a wing with 4 officers, then it's nigh on impossible to have meaningful dialogue.' Another officer at the same jail put it even more bluntly: 'You can't talk to them, you've got to be looking round, keeping your eyes open.'

The low levels of staffing means bullying can flourish. The scale of the problem varies between institutions, but almost all the boys we spoke to regarded verbal abuse, taxing and even assault as inevitable aspects of prison life, which could best be avoided by being prepared to retaliate in equal measure. New arrivals can expect to be 'tested' by other youngsters, as Kyle, an 18-year-old prisoner, explained: 'Once you give someone something, or get someone something from the canteen, then everyone sees, then everyone turns and you'll have them all after you?hey only listen one way and that's fighting. In order to avoid being bullied, you need to come across as intimidating. You've got to act stupid just to get along and don't take nothing or else'.

Rasheed, who admitted that he used to bully other inmates, told us: 'It's like this: if you don't bully someone else, then someone will be bullying you - it's either them or you. I weren't proud of it but that's prison. They test you when you first come in and if you stick up for yourself then you'll be alright, but if you don't or if there's anything different about you, then that could make people pick on you.'

The Howard League believes prison is an intrinsically damaging institution for young people. While new structures and the imposition of standards have improved provision, the fundamental characteristics of the prison environment remain. Children are still held in large groups and given precious little individual care. They are supervised by prison officers who have virtually no training in how to deal with this difficult age group - and in some cases, have little interest in them. The underlying causes of the children's criminal behaviour remain unaddressed. Those with particular emotional or psychological needs are unlikely to receive the support they need, and at the end of their sentence all are released back into exactly the same circumstances in which they began to offend in the first place. It is scarcely surprising, then, that 85 per cent of children are reconvicted within two years of release.

What is particularly concerning about the tenor of the current debate is the way in which prison is being reinvented as a specialist institution for children. This is a dangerous initiative as it sets up incarceration as a positive avenue for accessing education, training and welfare services for disengaged young people. Already magistrates have responded to the 'training' rhetoric by imposing custody with unprecedented zeal and, if this trend is allowed to continue, it will mean more and more young people being locked up.

The Howard League believes that prison can never be fit for children. Rather than pumping increasing resources into a failed institutional approach, we should instead be investing in intensive community alternatives and small scale custodial options for the most serious offenders.

CHARLOTTE DAY

Charlotte Day is Policy Officer at The Howard League for Penal Reform

The Children in Prison reports are available from the Howard League at £5 each, tel. 020 7249 7373