Archive for the ‘Children and young people’ Category

Less crime, safer communities, fewer people in prison

We have launched our new campaign, which you can find by visiting our website.  Please take two minutes to take action for the Howard League and help us put penal reform at the top of the political agenda during the general election and beyond.

March 5, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Campaigns, Children and young people, Government policy, Howard League, Overcrowding, Prisons, Public Services, Rehabilitation, Sentencing, Victims  No Comments

Children’s prison to close

Castington prison for children is to close – fantastic news. One down, quite a lot more to go. Castington, in Northumberland, is hundreds of miles away from the homes of many of the young people incarcerated within its bleak walls. I visited a few years ago and found lads from inner city London, bemused and [...]

February 23, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Children and young people  One Comment

Youth sentencing

The Prison Reform Trust has published statistics showing variation in the use of prison custody between youth courts across the country. Courts such as Bridgend, Rotherham (maybe it is to do with the food? remember that was Jamie Oliver’s shock horror television programme), Derby and Wolverhampton. The custody rates are not related to crime rates, [...]

February 16, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Children and young people, Sentencing, Uncategorized  One Comment

Too many initiatives and not enough resources for young people.

I spent Friday night with the Stay Safe programme in Salford. The local authority, police and youth offending service have staff who tour the streets of Salford every Friday night from 6pm until midnight in a marked police car and an unmarked car to find children and teenagers on the streets. I arranged my participation [...]

February 1, 2010   Posted in: Children and young people, Government policy  No Comments

Myleene Klass and Richard Bradshaw, via Boots the chemist.

I have a lot of sympathy for Myleene Klass, and I must admit that if I was home alone and saw young men in my back garden I would react intemperately. She should have called the police. It is possible that they were intending to burgle her house and the police should be involved in [...]

January 13, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Children and young people, Police  4 Comments

Ofsted and secure training centres

Happy New Year to all our supporters and readers of this blog.  Just before the break I wrote to Ofsted about the poor quality of their latest inspection of Medway secure training centre.
You can read the letter here.

January 7, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Children and young people, Inside prisons  No Comments

Youth Rehabilitation Order

The Youth Rehabilitation Order (YRO) has come into force as part of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.
When the idea of a shopping list of sanctions from which the sentencer could choose was first proposed, we were very concerned that a child would be given unduly onerous interventions on the spurious grounds of dealing [...]

December 1, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Children and young people, Government policy, Sentencing  No Comments

I’m a person, not just a number

Recently staff from the Howard League for Penal Reform held focus groups in a young offender institution (YOI) with boys aged between 16 and 20. As a society, we discuss them, judge them, sentence them, abandon them. We wanted to hear what they had to say.
From the conditions of food in prison to the chances [...]

November 24, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Children and young people  No Comments

We have not learnt how to deal with our troubled children

Shipping poor children off to the colonies, both Australia and Canada, was common practice in the nineteenth century. It was seen as a way of dealing with troublesome children from the slums.
The 1887 annual report of the Howard Association deals with the problem of juvenile pauperism and crime. William Tallack, the founding Secretary of the [...]

November 16, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Children and young people  No Comments

Fig leaves for a failing system

Tomorrow a fanfare will sound from Hounslow as Jack Straw and Boris Johnson descend onto Feltham Prison for the official opening of a 30 bed unit for children.
The unit is part of Project Daedalus, a major element of the mayor’s Time for Action programme. It promises to deliver two ‘innovations’: an enhanced resettlement regime, designed [...]

November 4, 2009   Posted in: Children and young people, Government policy, Prisons, Rehabilitation, Uncategorized  One Comment