How should the UK deal with child offenders?

Some of the country’s leading justice groups say children should no longer be put in prison – arguing that the system is beyond reform.

A review by an alliance of children’s rights and other legal campaign groups say responsibility for those who do need to be deprived of their liberty should be transferred to the Department of Education – which handles other areas of child welfare. They’ve cited a whole list of concerns – from poorly trained staff to continued use of restraint and solitary confinement. So what are the alternatives?

We spoke to the prison reform advocate Kamali Stevens – and Mark Fairhurst, who’s national chair of the Prison Officer’s Association.

Kamali Stevens: Thank you so much for having me on the show this evening. From a young person’s perspective, or talking from my own experience, when I was in custody as a young person, there wasn’t really the support into why I was there in the first place. Or the underlying issues that got me there. It was more around the fact that I was there to be punished. That really, I guess, reinforced the rhetoric that I was a bad person. So I really feel that, in this time, when so much is happening within the criminal justice system in terms of the underfunding of certain departments, I think that this call for the abolishment is in line with what needs to happen right now.

Ciaran Jenkins: Let’s turn to Mark from the Prison Officers Association. What is it like for you and your members specifically when they have to unlock a door in a young offenders institution and there are some extremely violent people?

Mark Fairhurst: I think what we’ve got to recognise is that there are very few people under the age of 18 who actually get sent to prison these days. When I worked with young prisoners in the 90s, it was 3000. Now it’s less than 700. So we’re actually locking up the most serious offenders in our communities. There’s no doubting that juvenile prisons are the most violent prisons that we deal with. For staff opening a cell door – you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Ciaran Jenkins: Can we just stop there a second because what you just said is extraordinary. So it’s more violent than adult prisons?

Mark Fairhurst: It’s more violent than adults yeah, that’s been recognised in consistent chief inspectors’ reports and the statistics that we publish on a quarterly basis. So for staff, you’ve got to keep apart separate gangs of different prisoners. They just attack each other all the time as soon as the door is unlocked, they’re anti-authority and they attack staff. So I think we can reform our prisons if we work together. And that investment is forthcoming from this Labour government.

Ciaran Jenkins: Gang culture and all sorts in the prisons. Kamali, I want to ask you about what actually goes on inside prisons. Because from the offender’s point of view, we’re hearing about these terrible cases of restraint, sometimes strip search and restrained at the same time. Solitary confinement. What’s going on?

Kamali Stevens: So in terms of young people, I feel that young people, they act out in violence when they’re not heard. I think the fact that there’s so much staff shortages within the estate right now is really impacting the regime. People don’t feel like they’re heard. They don’t feel like they’re understood. And this, I guess, is what makes young people act out in violence, because that is a form of them expressing themselves.

Ciaran Jenkins: This experts’ review, by four experts in youth justice, suggests closing prisons and supporting most people in the community. Is that plausible, do you think?

Kamali Stevens: 100% I think it is. If we look at how much it costs to incarcerate a young person in the criminal justice system in the UK, we’re talking anything from £100,000 to £200,000 per year. If those resources were put into the community to give holistic support, help around mental health and wellbeing and trauma-informed interventions, I think we’d get much better outcomes than what we’re getting from keeping people locked up within the estate.

Ciaran Jenkins: Mark, how many of the 450 or so children – young people – who are currently locked up, do you think could feasibly exist outside of that system, that could be supported in the community?

Mark Fairhurst: There are some people with complex needs who shouldn’t be in a prison because they need that support in our communities. But let’s not forget, there are some young people in prison who commit some absolutely abhorrent, heinous crimes. Prison is the best place for them. Kamali has hit some very good points there. We are severely short staffed, but when we’ve got that many ‘keep-aparts’ because of rival gangs, it’s very difficult to unlock people who are extremely violent all of the time. What I would much rather have is these charities and reform groups work with us, sit down and listen to the voice of the front line so we can invest in our prisons and make them safe places. Because there is a really good example of good practice within the youth custody estate, and that’s the Keppel Unit at Wetherby, which has high staffing ratios. It’s a self-contained unit and has low violence rates. That’s been proven during the last inspection.

Ciaran Jenkins: And Kamali, what about that balance between considering the needs of the young person but also keeping society safe? Surely there are cases where, absolutely, young people need to be behind bars?

Kamali Stevens: So I believe that the amount of young people in our youth estate reflects our society. Some of these people have been let down by the same systems that were put in place to protect society and have become their trauma. I think as a society we need to understand that and take accountability for that, and deal with them appropriately. I feel that in terms of the rhetoric of young people, a lot of them are angry. They’ve been let down. They have problems with authority. It’s only by building meaningful relationships with these people that we can really, truly, get through to them. I feel that the lack of training of new staff also hinders those interpersonal relationships that are key to reaching people. And again, in terms of the POA [Prison Officers Association], I totally understand what they are saying. This problem goes a lot higher than where they are, it goes all the way to policy. But in terms of young people, we have to understand that if we are failing them in the first instance, we have to be a lot more empathetic to why they got into that situation in the first place and look at interventions that address the reasons why people are falling into the criminal justice system rather than just the crimes that people are presenting with.

Ciaran Jenkins: Thank you Kamali. Let me just put that finally to Mark. Are young offenders coming out of these institutions better or worse off than they went in?

Mark Fairhurst: That depends on the individual, if they want to reform and if they want to lead a law abiding life or go back into criminality. We can only try and make a difference. Kamali is quite right – if we work together, if we invest in our prisons, if we increase staff training so it’s a speciality, then we can get through to some reform of our youth custody estate. I know there are proposals on the table with the government, as I speak, to make smaller, self-contained units with higher staffing ratios in geographical areas throughout the country so they can maintain family ties. We want to work with these reform groups, but I’m fed up with the same old, tired rhetoric that there’s no place for prisons. Prisons are here to stay and we need them.