Child Imprisonment

Debate between Ellie Reeves and Emma Lewell-Buck

Tuesday 25th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered abolishing child imprisonment.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie.

For decades, what has been happening to the forgotten children imprisoned across England and Wales is state-supported and state-sanctioned child abuse. Worse still, those in this place who have the power to stop it have not done so.

At present, 727 children are in prison: 81% in youth offenders institutions and 19% in secure training centres. The lives of many of those children before prison were marked by significant harm and suffering. Up to 92% of children in custody have suffered prior physical or sexual abuse, or neglect, and nearly half have been in the care system. Children in custody are three times more likely than their peers to have suffered the death of a parent or sibling, and three times more likely to have unmet mental health needs. A quarter of them identify themselves as disabled, with one in five having special educational needs. Children who identify as black, Asian or minority ethnic are disproportionately overrepresented. When there is a reduction in the size of the overall youth custody system but a rise in the number of BAME people represented in it, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) put it well when he said that there is discriminatory practice and institutional racism in the prison system and that something is just not working.

Children in such institutions have significant needs, which would be better met in a nurturing, specialised and therapeutic system modelled on the secure children’s homes ethos in which child welfare is the overriding concern, as recommended by the End Child Imprisonment coalition. At present, 65% of children go on to reoffend within a year of release. A child-focused environment, with an end to the slash and burn of austerity stripping away support and mental health services, is likely not only to reduce reoffending but to stop reoffending in the first place.

In 2016, the Government committed to closing youth offenders institutions and secure training centres for good. They know that the findings of the Youth Custody Improvement Board, the Youth Justice Board and Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons—that those institutions are not fit for purpose and not safe for children or young people—were right.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. Successive reports and inquiries have found that children’s prisons are unsafe and unable to meet even basic needs. The Howard League for Penal Reform reported that a child in Feltham spent 23.5 hours a day in a cell for 55 days in a row. Does she agree that we need to invest urgently in children’s centres so that children are not kept in such awful conditions?

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. She cites one of the examples that I will consider.

Three years after that 2016 announcement, those institutions remain. Only this year, the chair of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse stated that she was

“deeply disturbed by the continuing problem of child sexual abuse in these institutions over the last decade.”

Report after report shows that life for children in prison consists of systematic denial of basic physical needs such as nutritious food, fresh air, exercise, and warm and comfortable shelter. Children live in environments permeated with violence, uncertainty and fear, where meaningful adult contact and education are limited or non-existent.

Adults living in such an environment would struggle. For any child, living with those heightened levels of anxiety and fear, with no trusted adult to confide in or to seek help from, will surely result in trauma and mental health difficulties. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that incidents of self-harm increased by 159% between 2014 and 2017, or that the Royal College of Psychiatrists reported that up to three quarters of doctors specialising in mental health in prisons do not think that it is possible for them to provide adequate care because of the conditions in which they are working.

When children react negatively to such an environment, they are punished with segregation—solitary confinement, which the United Nations defines as being locked indoors for 22 hours per day—or pain-inducing restraint. Recently, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) led a debate on youth solitary confinement in which the Minister, as he may recall, said that

“children are never, and should never be, subject to solitary confinement in the UK.”—[Official Report, 2 April 2019; Vol. 657, c. 339WH.]

Instead, he said, they are “segregated” or “removed from association”.

Such statements are repeated in ongoing and lengthy correspondence that I have had with various Ministers from the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Education. As they tie themselves into semantic knots, the repetition of statements to the effect that solitary confinement is not used is simply at odds with the facts. In 2017, the Howard League advocated on behalf of that young boy who had spent 23.5 hours per day in his cell for 55 days in a row. Last year, an investigation by the “Victoria Derbyshire” show found that in the previous year, at least 40 children had been held in their cells for at least 22 hours per day.

Just this week, the children’s rights charity Article 39 informed me about two boys, one aged 15 and one 17. They both have serious mental health issues. They are waiting for medical care and are stuck in solitary confinement for between 22 and 23 hours per day. As they are confined to their cells, prison officers observe them in shifts through a perspex door. When the boys are allowed out of their cells, they are not permitted meaningful contact with their peers. Planned health appointments are missed due to staff shortages and doctors who do visit them can talk to and observe them only through a hatch. Reportedly, that level of confinement would be enough to induce a mental breakdown and possibly psychotic mental states. Article 39 told me about another young boy who was subject to solitary confinement. He was acutely psychotic and in need of urgent in-patient care and treatment, but he sat in his cell for more than four weeks until a suitable hospital placement was secured and he was transferred out of prison.

This year, the Joint Committee on Human Rights published a report stating that

“pain inducing techniques and solitary confinement…are…not compliant with human rights standards”.

The Committee called for such techniques to be banned. The report also states:

“Data…shows that children are restrained too often, with…thousands of unjustified restraints each year, and that separation is also used too often”,

adding that staff are too quick to use restraint or separation.

The permitted use of pain-inducing restraint is beyond comprehension. Prisons are the only institutions in which staff are trained and permitted to inflict pain deliberately on children. Adult staff are given a green light to cause significant harm to a child in their care. If a parent, foster carer or anyone else behaved in that manner, they would be deemed to be breaking the law and would be dealt with appropriately. In the stark and unforgiving world of children’s prisons, however, apparently it is okay for adults to cause significant harm to vulnerable and frightened children. In the past, I have worked with incredibly distressed and—some would say—violent children who have lashed out. I know that is difficult, but staff in those institutions are put in impossible situations. Their training and the option that they are given is always about restraint. Better training and support are needed for those staff as a matter of urgency.

The techniques referred to as minimising and managing physical restraint are put into four categories: low, medium, high level and pain inducing. The exact details of those techniques are kept hidden from the public, as the Government state that they reflect those used in adult prisons. We do know that sometimes children are kept in holds on the floor for more than 15 minutes, on their front or back. There are reports of children losing consciousness, with blue lips, fingernails and earlobes, having difficulty breathing and vomiting. One boy’s wrist was described as “snapping like a pencil.” Despite the screams, the restraint continued.

Data for the last year from the Ministry shows that medical attention was required in 668 use-of-force incidents. Of those, 30 were so serious that the young people had to be admitted to hospital. In the past, some incidents have even resulted in death, either directly or afterwards when children, unable to take any more, have taken their own lives. I know the Minister will be familiar with the cases of Gareth Myatt and Adam Rickwood. Their deaths led to MMPR, which we know is comparable to restraint used in adult prisons but, as I said, we cannot see. We do not really know the true extent of the pain being inflicted on those children.

The children who have been significantly harmed and are no longer with us deserve to have their stories told. Their lives mattered. For children who are in prison now and future generations, a whole new approach is needed. I respectfully say to the Minister that secure schools are not the answer. After all, 20 years ago that was what secure training centres were supposed to be but, as today’s debate shows, they have evolved into something far uglier than their remit of excellence in care and education. Furthermore, having Medway as the experimental site for this new model is not only grossly misguided, but smacks of a lack of understanding of how culture, custom and practice infect an institution and never leave. Rebranding while the centre is still classed as requiring improvement for child safety will not lead to the improvements for which the Minister hopes.

The campaign to end child imprisonment, of which I am sure the Minister is aware, is formed by a coalition of groups with a deep understanding of children’s prisons, child development and children’s rights. Those groups are campaigning not just for the closure of those prisons and a more child-welfare-based model, but for a move from responsibility for children’s detention towards children’s services. They want a change in the law so that deprivation of liberty is always an absolute last resort, and to remove punishment and deterrence as reasons for imprisoning children. I would like the Minister to respond to the campaign’s asks, and to outline the Ministry’s timetable for phasing out those institutions. I would appreciate it if he could tell us when we can expect the findings and recommendations of the review of pain-inducing techniques that began more than a year ago.

We are debating the harrowing and frightening lives that some children have to endure day in, day out. Those are children for whom the state has sole responsibility. I urge the Minister to take serious action: abolish child prisons before more harm is done. It is not only his professional duty but his moral duty to do so.