Police and Justice Bill

moved Amendment No. 135: After Clause 45, insert the following new clause- ““Penal custody for children PENAL CUSTODY FOR CHILDREN (1) No child shall be detained in a young offender institution or a secure training centre. (2) ““Child”” means a person under the age of eighteen.”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I propose the insertion of a new clause whose purpose is to end penal custody for all children under the age of 18. I fear that this door may not be as wide open as it has been to some other proposals. We believe that those children for whom secure accommodation or custody is necessary and appropriate should be accommodated and managed in local authority secure children’s homes or their nearest equivalent, because this is about children, not adults who are young. The arguments that we deploy for incarcerating people aged 18 and over are essentially and crucially different for those under 18, the legal definition of a child. This means that the child’s welfare is the central issue and general childcare standards as applied by all those agencies which deal with children are paramount. Prison is simply not the appropriate professional or effective response to children who offend, where security and a quite different ethos maintains obtain. The many experts on this matter include the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who has a wealth of experience and is on record as saying something along these lines if not in these very words. Experienced experts and a range of childcare agencies sign up to the Children’s Rights Alliance for England. We believe that an age and needs-led approach to a child’s offending, compliant with the ECHR and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which also addresses the causes of crime and how to stop very young people offending or reoffending, must inform provision and practice. This is tough on all concerned. Penal custody—prison—is the place for dangerous, persistently offending adults, not children; for children it is unproductive and in many cases causes further damage. Of course all offending is unacceptable, and persistent offending is particularly serious, so the system must teach all offenders to stop and how to change. It is how we deal with children, however, that must be different. It is well known that, compared with those who do not offend, this group of children has had a disproportionate experience of being in care, of lack of education through exclusion, of special educational needs, of significant mental health and personality problems, and of serious issues with drugs and alcohol. The challenge is huge, and the specialist provision necessary to meet it is very great. The penal custody supplied by YOIs or STCs cannot provide this degree of specialist provision. At great expense it does little to make society safer, since somewhere in the region of 70 per cent re-offend within two years of release. Anyone who has worked with such children, as I have, and all experts in social care, healthcare or education know that. The Government know it; the arguments have been rehearsed in this place many times. The astonishing thing is, though, that the response by politicians, Government and sentencers is to commit roughly 3,000 children to penal custody at any one time. Indeed, during 2004 8,110 young people were received into custody, of whom 4,500 were 15 and under. That last fact takes some believing; that in this country we imprisoned 4,500 damaged and difficult children of 15 and under, some as young as 12, in that year. Over the years I have been in many YOIs, which hold the majority of these children. I know the dedication of the work of many of the people in them, and the successes they have had with groups and individuals in their charge. The work of the Youth Justice Board in facilitating and supporting improvements has also been impressive. At the same time, though, the YJB has assessed 56 per cent of 15 year-olds and 35 per cent of 17 year-olds in YOIs as ““vulnerable””. YOIs are part of the prison service and are essentially geared to adults. By comparison with local authority secure children’s homes, which I shall refer to as LASCHs from now on—a rather terrible acronym—the ratio of officers to prisoners in a YOI is one to 10, while in a LASCH it is two staff to three children. The scale of the institutions is up to 60 on a wing, compared with units of around eight in a LASCH. The provision is not child-centred. Training of nine weeks is not geared to the particular specialist requirements of children. Segregation is used, and the regulations on the use of force involving pain during restraint are not amended for children in YOIs. The latest Chief Inspector’s report shows that one-third of children say they feel unsafe, a quarter say they have been assaulted or insulted by staff, and 2 per cent say they have been sexually assaulted. Since 1990, 29 children have actually died. STCs, planned by the Conservatives but in fact a creation of this Government, now cater for around 275 children, some as young as 12, and have a strong emphasis on education. I have seen some very good work by dedicated individuals in these STCs, particularly at Hassockfield since its recent changes. The Carlile inquiry, however, led by my noble friend, illustrated unacceptable use of restraint—in the course of which one child died—and of segregation and forcible strip-searching. They do not have the trained staff to deal with the difficult range of needs I have described. Contact with parents, carers and families is often minimal instead of central, and contact with localities to which they will return often non-existent; they are, after all, often miles away, and logistics do not allow for easy or regular contact. A constant theme from those working in STCs is the difficulty of creating proper resettlement plans with the relevant agencies, and children sometimes leave with no idea of what is to become of them. It is these latter key elements of family contact, local contacts, appropriate staff training and living in an environment which is primarily child-centred and welfare based that are lacking. These are hugely expensive places involving resources which should be ploughed into the LASCHs which are predicated on these elements and which already provide a roughly equivalent number of beds and where it is generally accepted that the best level of care is to be found. That is what matters, but STCs over the past nine years have been expanded at the expense of the LASCHs. It seems that we have different standards when it comes to children who offend and are in trouble as opposed to children who are troubled but have not done anything wrong. My noble friend Lord Carlile said: "““Some of the treatment children in custody experience would in another setting be considered abusive and could trigger a child protection investigation””." The parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights in its report on the Convention on the Rights of the Child stated: "““There is abundant evidence that detention precipitates the loss of other fundamental rights. We have addressed only some of these rights such as the right to life, not to suffer inhuman or degrading treatment and the right to an education””." And we know that children in prison do, indeed, lose out on such rights. But if children had painful restraint used on them—as indeed occurred 768 times in the STCs, resulting in 51 injuries in 2004-05—or if children committed suicide in a school or hospital in the community, what then would our reaction be? We would find it appalling, would we not, and demand an immediate end to the places where that could occur? Think of our own children, grandchildren or others we know. When they have done wrong or get into trouble, what do we do about it? We want them to know that wrong has been done and there must be some appropriate way of paying back or making amends. We want them to understand what is wrong and why, and what the effect of what they have done has been on the victim or victims. We want them to say sorry, to mean it and to determine not to do it again. They must understand the consequences of their actions and do whatever is within their means to make amends. If I am right, if this is indeed true, would we then want to send them away far from where the event took place, far from the person or people affected and incarcerate them with other children, all of whom have also offended, detached from what they have done and with a multitude of other difficulties and issues into the bargain? Would we want them to be sent to a place where they are often unsafe, where there may be violence, including by those who are in charge of them or supposed to be caring for them? Would we expect our children or any child to learn positive lessons from such an experience, or why he should not do it again, and indeed will not do it again? I think not, yet we shut our eyes and minds to this reality of what we are doing today to nearly 2,000 children. It is now our turn to make amends. I beg to move.