As I was preparing for a short presentation I am making to a Plaid Cymru conference tomorrow, I came across this truly shocking report by the Howard League for Penal Reform. The report looks at the state of youth justice in Wales – it calls for greater devolution – but what is so shameful are the circumstances of children in custody.
29% of boys and 44% of girls in prison had been in care. They had experienced high levels of violence and sexual abuse at home, are much more likely to have special educational needs than other children yet around 80% had been excluded from school, and 90% had used illegal drugs.
Any idea that prison might be a place for reform is dashed – 30 children have died in custody since 1990, and in 2007 alone there were 1,007 incidents of self harm. Strip searching and physical restraint is common. About half of those in prison had been in prison before.
The Howard League concludes: imprisoning children exposes the most vulnerable in our society to conditions of oppression that do not prevent them committing crime in the future.
It is time to stop.
MH @ Syniadau 2:01 am on 20 November, 2009 Permalink
Thanks for the link, Victoria. I agree entirely with what you’ve said.
Of course it should stop in England too, but it does seem that Wales would be a good place to pilot it on a manageable scale.
The Tory think tank, Centre for Social Justice, made what to me was a surprising, but sincere call for NOMS to be broken up, and for prisons and rehabilitation be devolved to the Assembly, in March this year. Story and links in the second half of this post:
http://syniadau–buildinganindependentwales.blogspot.com/2009/10/locked-in-to-wrong-sort-of-prison.html
So it does seem that greater devolution in this area is “on the agenda”.
Is there any chance of you being able to post a summary of your presentation? If it has powerpoint slides, there’s a neat way of embedding it in the blog using docstop.com It’s free and this is an example of how it works for me:
http://syniadau–buildinganindependentwales.blogspot.com/2009/10/yougov-full-results.html