Private jails for kids top the league table of shame for restraining kids

This press release from the Howard League for Penal Reform makes very depressing and grim reading. They have revealed that 3 of the 4 privately run secure training centres (STCs) which hold children as young as 12 top the league table for using restraint. There have been campaigns to abolish physical restraint used on kids.

The degrading and violent assaults on children and young people in STCs is widespread. It is estimated that between April-December 2007,  physical restraint was used on almost 5,000 occasions in young offender institutions and secure training centres. This resulted in 154 injuries that included loss of consciousness and damage to internal organs.

And during the early part of this year, Anne Owers (HM Chief Inspector of Prisons) found physical force had been used at the G4S run Oakhill STC 757 times over the previous nine months, with 535 occasions involving the “highest level of restraint”. She stated that Oakhill has a,“staggeringly high level of use of force by staff”. And she called for its temporary closure.

This latest press release from Howard League, between Oct 2006 and June 2008, the top 3 institutions to use physical restraint on kids are: Oakhill STC with 1,493 restraint incidents, Medway with 1, 419 and Hassockfield with 843.

And the logic and spin used by by these private contractors, for example GSL, (they run Medway and Rainsbrook) state that their policies are “derived from the principles of childcare best practice and reflect the every child matters agenda” yet how come they come second in this league table of shame?

Many of these children and young people come to these places damaged, distressed and in a highly vulnerable state. They are subjected to abuse and violence once in these places that leads to systematic brutalisation. What kind of person will come out of the other side..?  Young people like Adam Rickwood committed suicide as a result of physical restraint (at Hassockfield where, incidentally, is it run by Serco!) and Gareth Myatt who died in the “care” of Rainsbrook after losing consciousness while being restrained by 3 members of staff.

Physical restraint is used as a punishment against children and teenagers. The whole ethos of containment lacks compassion and understanding. These young people are sometimes miles away from any support structure, their human rights breached. Physical restraint is nothing more than torture.

Rather like the numbers of adult deaths in state custody that go unheard, ignored and reduced to statistics, the number of children who have died in custody in the last 17 years is 29. Young, vulnerable and powerless people whose lives end in these hellholes.

As Frances Crook (Director of the Howard League) says: “Later this week the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child gives its verdict on the UK government’s treatment of our children. The issue of children in custody being physically restrained in English and Welsh jails will be of major concern. Our legal team are being told by children in custody that they are being provoked by staff into bad behaviour so that restraint can be used, since a Court of Appeal judgment in July limited the ways in which restraint can be legally deployed”.