I beg to move,
That this House has considered youth inmates in solitary confinement.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I am pleased to lead this extremely important debate. Much of the focus in our criminal justice system is rightly on our failing probation system following privatisation and the rising violence in our prisons, but worryingly little attention is paid to what is going on in our youth estate—particularly to the children and young people detained there—and to the concerning use of solitary confinement.
It may come as a surprise to some people listening to our debate who know me well that I became interested in this issue, but it links closely to work we have been doing in the Education Committee on exclusions, children with special needs and disabilities, and the link between children who have undiagnosed special needs, disabilities and emotional problems being excluded and then ending up in our prison system.
What is happening to those children and young people is extremely worrying. Just before the debate started, I was saying to a colleague who sits on the Government Benches that the issue forms part of a wider picture. Although it is one for the Justice team, I hope the Minister talks closely to the Education team, as well as to social services and local government teams, about how money can be invested in our vulnerable children as early as possible to give them the best possible chance in life so that they do not end up in the criminal justice system.
No one wants to see a child sent to prison. That is a failure on the part of our societal infrastructure. Everyone would agree that, for any young child to go to prison, there must have been a failure somewhere in the support given to that child—at school or on the part of society or social services. We have failed a young person who ends up in our criminal justice system.
Young offenders institutions must balance punishing a child for committing a crime—there should of course be consequences for criminal behaviour—with the need for rehabilitation and the need to assist the child to go on to become a productive member of society who will not offend again. Having been a teacher for 11 years, I know that we should never give up on children, even when our patience has been tested to the absolute limit. I am sure that parents agree—we do not give up. If we have a child who has reached the point of being involved in criminal activity and is being rightly punished for it, youth offenders institutions should be the opportunity to turn that around and to start again.
Getting the correct balance between those goals should be the guiding principle of youth justice. Falling too far towards punishment and not addressing the problems that caused a child to offend in the first place—perhaps undiagnosed special needs or disabilities, or social and emotional problems—means that the child will reoffend immediately on release. All that we would have created is an older criminal. Falling too far towards rehabilitation means that the victims of the crime will feel let down by the system. The use of segregation in young offenders institutions does not create the right balance between those goals—between giving young people a consequence for their actions and an opportunity to set themselves on the right path for the future.
Let me be clear about what I mean by segregation. I do not mean time out as an immediate response to violent or disruptive behaviour, or situations in which children must be physically isolated for their own protection or the protection of others. Solitary confinement—segregation, isolation or whatever else we might call it—is the deliberate removal of an individual from association with others. It was defined by the prison and probation ombudsman in a 2015 “Learning lessons bulletin” as
“an extreme and isolating form of custody”.
Whatever the Minister might say in his remarks about solitary confinement and segregation—that children are not subject to solitary confinement—the Children’s Commissioner has been clear, as have the current and the previous chief inspector of prisons, that the conditions to which children are exposed fit the definition of solitary confinement.