News

Community Care’s youth justice campaign calling for a dramatic reduction in the number of children sent to prison received overwhelming support from campaigners in the youth justice field last week.

Speaking at the launch of the Back on Track campaign, Prison Reform Trust director Juliet Lyon highlighted the "mad dichotomy" of society’s view of children as criminals once they had offended and no longer as children in need.

She warned that these children had paid the price of the government’s tough stance on street crime and antisocial behaviour, and were the group who had fallen through the gaps in health and other services.

The campaign wants to achieve a drastic reduction in suicides and self-harm among young people in custody by encouraging more involvement of social workers and removing vulnerable people from prisons (news, page 6, 8 July).

Community Care is also calling for the treatment of children in custody to conform to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and for the degrading practices of routine strip searches and inappropriate control and restraint to end.

Yvonne Scholes, whose son Joseph hanged himself nine days into his two-year prison sentence at Stoke Heath Young Offender Institution in Shropshire, told the launch how he was forced to wear an item of clothing "not unlike a horse blanket" under which he was naked.

"My child was subjected to degrading and inhuman treatment and others continue to be," she said.

The campaign also calls for the age of criminal responsibility to be raised from 10. Chris Stanley, head of youth crime at rehabilitation agency Nacro, said that in Scandinavia, where the age of criminal responsibility is 15, young children who offended were put into the welfare system for support.

"Our criminal justice system has a very poor record of reducing crime," he said.

Bobby Cummines, chief executive of the ex-offenders charity Unlock, added: "Custody should be a last resort, not a first resort. These are misguided kids. Instead of looking at where they have failed us, we need to look at where society has failed them."