JUSTICE secretary Chris Grayling unveiled plans this week for an £85 million secure
young offender unit in Leicestershire, which will hold up to 320 inmates between
the ages of 12 and 17. He said it would put “education at the heart of custody”
and would move away from the traditional approach of “bars on windows” when it
opens in 2017.
But the plans, which are part of the Criminal
Justice and Courts Bill, also appears to support the use of physical force
against children.
Paola
Uccellari, director of the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, said:
“Allowing prison officers to use force to make children behave themselves is
dangerous and carries a risk of injury. The Government is putting children’s
lives at risk by pushing ahead with its unlawful plans. It must listen to
parliamentarians and remove these powers to use force from the Bill.”
It is, of course, unacceptable. Many of these
young people will be without any caring adult to fight their cause. Yes, they
will have committed crimes but they are still amongst the vulnerable in society.
And what adult should be using force on a 12 year old?
There are horrendous crimes committed by
juveniles but the Jon Venables and Robert Thompson’s (the 10 year old killers
of toddler Jamie Bulger in Merseyside) are rare. The majority of the young
people will be petty criminals, dragged up in care homes or by parents who won’t
or can’t look after their children properly.
The bill says the new Secure College option
will focus on education. It will also cut costs and this is the crux of it, isn’t
it?
The Bill says: “By taking a wider cohort of
young people aged 12-17, the Secure College will allow us to close expensive
Secure Training Centre provision and a number of places in Secure Children
Homes, as well as Youth Offender Institutions.”
The government says 69 per cent of young people
leaving custody go on to reoffend within 12 months, and in Young Offender
Institutions young people receive an average of only 12 hours contracted
education a week.
The average cost of a place in custody is
£100,000 per annum, but in the case of Secure
Training Centres (STCs) and Secure Children’s Homes (SCHs) it is upwards of £170,000 and £210,000 a place each
year respectively. Effectively the secure college option cuts the bill by more
than half.
The new Secure Colleges will be put out to
tender for private contractors. There
are currently around 1,350 young people in custody in England and Wales. Are we
going to hand these young lives over to a private business, which will
obviously be aiming to make money, and may not have a system of monitoring in
place to judge whether the use of force was appropriate? In the light of all
the historic child abuse cases coming to light from children’s homes dating
back decades, is this not a step backwards?
Perhaps the reoffending rate could be brought
down by introducing proper support for young people, not only when they leave
these institutions but how about before the need arises or at least when the
majority of these kids are in ‘general’ children’s homes.
This bill is expected to receive Royal Assent
at the end of the year. There are many other parts to it, including sections on
terrorism, extreme pornography, raising the upper age limit for jury service
and dealing with low-level crimes by trial by a single magistrate rather than a
bench.
But the secure college option, or at least the
green light for violence against young inmates, must be re-examined.
