A decade of decline in young offender institutions

This week saw the publications of two reports on children in custody: a review of progress by HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) on the use of separation in young offender institutions (YOIs) and a joint report from HMIP and Ofsted on the declining quality of education. Both reports reiterated what the Howard League has been saying for many years – that prison is no place for a child.  

For the past several decades, the Howard League has worked to keep as many boys and girls as possible out of the criminal justice system. This is because academic research has shown that each contact a child has with the system drags them deeper into it, leading to more crime. For those children who are currently held in prisons, we have time and again emphasised the need for education, exercise and contact with other people. But these reports have shown that children are being failed across the board.  

HMIP’s review of progress, Separation of children in young offender institutions, comes four years after a 2020 thematic report found that children in prison were being subjected to widespread solitary confinement, spending more than 22 hours a day locked in their cells with no meaningful human contact or oversight. The findings at the time were damning. But years later, little has changed.  

In this review, HMIP found that high levels of violence and disorder have dominated YOIs in 2023-2024, with 479 children separated from their peers due to a risk to safety or their own concerns. The children were also found to be separated for exceedingly long spans of time, with 179 instances lasting between 21 days and 100 days. A staggering 21 children were kept separated for over 100 days. 

For those children who were subjected to solitary confinement, some only had a few minutes of access to education and other interventions per day, and some children did not leave their cells at all.  

There is simply no justification for this. Solitary confinement of children has been widely condemned by medics, parliamentarians and children’s rights experts. In the case of AB, the Howard League represented a child with serious mental health issues, who was kept in solitary confinement in a London prison for weeks on end. After fighting his case at every stage, the Government finally conceded last year that his solitary confinement had amounted to “inhuman or degrading treatment” in breach of his Article 3 rights.   

It is intolerable that, some eight years after the case of AB was first brought and four years after the last excoriating HMIP thematic report, this practice continues. Children are being locked up for hours and days on end, and denied the care and support they need. As a country, we seem simply to have accepted prisons that inflict such harm on children.  

Similarly damning, Ofsted and HMIP’s report, A decade of declining quality of education in young offender institutions: the systemic shortcomings that fail children, analysed inspection reports and reviews of progress across a decade to set out the steady decline of standards and practice in children’s prisons in England.  

The report found that educational opportunities and quality, work experience, and time out of cell were all decreasing, and that prisons were suffering from poor relationships between education providers and prison leaders, poor-quality resources and infrastructure, severe staff shortages and low levels of qualifications and training among staff.  

Also touching on the use of separation, the review of progress found that children were being allocated to education based on safety rather than ability or needs. Over a quarter of the youth population was found to be completely segregated, and of those, most were locked up for 23.5 hours a day in conditions amounting to solitary confinement.   

According to YOI rules, children ought to receive a minimum of 15 hours of education per week. Data obtained by the Howard League shows that this is simply not happening in children’s prisons in England.  In the six months to May 2024, children at Feltham received an average ranging from 7.79 hours a week to a maximum of 12.1 hours; children at Werrington received between 10.23 hours to a maximum of 13.7; and children at Wetherby received between 7.7 hours to a maximum of 11.75 hours. All three were significantly under the minimum standard.  

As Charlie Taylor, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, has remarked, despite a fall in the numbers of children in custody, and an increase in funding per child, standards of education in English YOIs are “worse than they have ever been”. 

These reports make for a sobering read, and they emphasise again why we do the work that we do. Our legal helpline provides much-needed free and confidential legal support to young people, and we hear daily of the many challenges faced by children in prisons.  

What struck me particularly in these reports was the fact that in the past decade, HMIP has made 85 recommendation or concerns about time out of cell, but less than a quarter were found to have been achieved. This is simply unacceptable.  

Every child deserves the chance to grow and fulfil their potential, but the conditions that children are being held in are having the opposite effect. Rather than providing the productive, rehabilitative regimes these children need to thrive and return to their communities, they are being locked away – often with no meaningful human contact. 

 It is crucial we finally acknowledge that prisons cannot safely hold or care for children, and I hope these damning reports will provide the wake-up call needed for a new government to address the legacy of failure in the youth estate.   

Gemma Abbott, Legal Director

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