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 by the Youth Justice Board and the National Offender Management Service with the additional funding coming from the YJB; and resettlement brokers who will provide enhanced support to young people in custody and on release, funded by the economic arm of the Mayor’s office.

However, behind the fanfare and spin of language this pilot is merely covering the cracks of a crumbling youth justice system that does not work. The ‘enhanced’ regime does not include anything additional to what should be delivered under the current service level agreement between the YJB and NOMS. The additional funding being pumped in is an acknowledgement that children’s prisons are failing to the point where they cannot even deliver the meagre regime they are meant to. What does this mean for the other 2,237 children locked up in prisons across England and Wales? Their conditions and experiences in prisons are even more damaging than we thought and those that run the youth justice system know it.

The resettlement brokers are simply replicating the duties of local authorities, and covering their failings – it’s taking over £2 million worth to cover these. To add insult to injury, this money has actually come from the European Social Fund. Europe has to pay because our government does not think these children are worth the money.

So, as Boris and Jack grasp at the spoils of scissors and a red ribbon tomorrow, both trying to claim that they have found the magic bullet to solve youth crime, children around the country are suffering in a system that does not work and does not even provide what it’s meant to.

It is particularly strange that the secretary of state for justice is celebrating this latest fig leaf for a failing system, when he was responsible for designing the very sentence that these children are serving. The detention and training order was the brainchild of the Labour government in the 1990s. A short prison sentence would be followed by an equal period of intense supervision in the community. But we all know that short periods in custody, particularly for children, are dangerous and damaging. It has proved to be a recipe for increasing crime and inflicted violence, inertia and more crime on children and their communities. Some 100,000 children have gone through this system in the last eleven years. Some have taken their own lives, many have been brutalised, few have succeeded.

Like Daedalus who constructed the wings for Icarus to escape the labyrinth, the government is doing little but running a prison system that when held up to the heat of inspection melts away and fails its purpose. At least the name isn’t spin….

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

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