Don’t lock up young offenders – send them to top boarding schools instead
Not long ago, driving through a Warwickshire town looking for a residential school, of a kind, I drove past a group of pupils walking in a crocodile. The uniforms caught my attention – the girls’ skirts looked unusually long, flapping around the ankles, an eccentricity denoting privilege. The boys were dressed in suits, and they were accompanied by a master in long robes.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by these pupils from Rugby School – one of Britain’s famous, establishment boarding schools, home of the eponymous sport – I was in the town of Rugby after all. But the place I was looking for was a very different one. I’d come to Rugby in search of Rainsbrook, a “secure training centre” (STC) just a few minutes away, home to around 75 children – not so much boarders but young offenders sent there by the criminal courts.
The physical proximity of Rugby and Rainsbrook makes comparisons unavoidable. The first, founded in 1567 by Queen Elizabeth I’s purveyor of spices, is where the children of the wealthy go to be educated; the other, run on public funds by private security companies, is where the children of the poor go to be punished.
The only thing the two remotely have in common is their unusually high cost. At over £30,000 a year, Rugby School is unaffordable for most families. I wonder if they realise they are footing the bill for Rainsbrook, which costs a cool five times more, at £163,000 a year. With such a huge difference in price, there is naturally a difference in quality. Pupils leave Rugby School boasting A-level grades three times better than the national average, and go on to the best universities, including the dozen or so who get into Oxbridge.
Graduates from Rainsbrook, on the other hand, can most realistically expect to end up back in the criminal justice system. Two-thirds of them leave the STC and go on to reoffend . Their education and care, according to the most recent inspection, “requires improvement”. The chief inspector of prisons said recently that conditions across all secure training centres and young offender institutions (YOIs) were so bad, there was not a single one in the entire country where it was safe for young people to be detained.
If you were to put the humanitarian questions about incarcerating young people in these conditions aside, as a taxpayer, this does not strike me as a good deal. Put those questions back into the equation, and it’s a scandal. What if we took a long, hard look at who these young people are? 18% of them have a statement of special educational needs, compared with 3% of the general population. Over 60% have difficulties with speech, language and communication. Over a third have been subject to a child protection measure, and have experienced abuse or neglect. Half have been in care. In other words, these children are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable in our society.
Custody has also, increasingly, become a way of dealing with black children from particularly underprivileged backgrounds. The extent of this was laid bare earlier this month by Tottenham MP David Lammy’s report on racial justice – or the lack thereof – in the criminal justice system. He found that the overrepresentation of ethnic minority children had almost doubled over the last decade, with young black people now nine times more likely to be imprisoned than their white peers – deeply troubling statistics to which the system itself remains stunningly indifferent.
Our treatment of young people in custody in the UK has become a matter of international, as well as domestic concern. Historically, we have had one of the highest rates of criminalising young people of any country in Europe.
Last year the UN committee on the rights of the child drew global attention to this dubious track record, and pointed to practices such as segregation and solitary confinement, as well as the fact that custody is not always treated as a last resort for young people, as further evidence of a lack of humanity in our system.
Imagine that we abolished the secure youth estate. We got rid of secure children’s homes (average annual cost for a child £204,000), YOIs (£75,000 per child per year) and STCs. Rather than waiting until these young people had offended, we ploughed the millions of pounds we spend on punishing them into nurturing them instead.
The merit in this idea first struck me seriously around a decade ago, when I was working as a criminal defence barrister. I represented a young man – let’s call him Remi. Remi was a traumatised child. His mother had struggled with his bedwetting and emotional and behavioural difficulties ever since her husband left, when Remi was very young. He was uncommunicative and practically mute. He ate little, and was physically underdeveloped for his age.
She had asked her GP for help, but no identifiable medical condition had been diagnosed. She had been referred to her local child and adolescent mental health services (Camhs), but his problems were not deemed serious enough for help. She had asked for assistance from the school, but none was given. Remi was bullied, and often excluded. Aged 13, he had joined a local gang that afforded him the protection of older boys against the violence in the part of inner-city London where he lived.
I was defending Remi because he had stabbed another child in the playground. The cost of his legal team, courtroom time, youth offending team, specialist pre-sentencing interviews and reporting amounted to tens of thousands of pounds. His offence was so serious that he was now facing a custodial sentence. After years of being denied far cheaper services, he was about to be worth more than £100,000 a year.
As was the case for Remi, the causes of youth offending are complex. Studies have found they include growing up in areas characterised by high unemployment, poor housing and crime; are linked to conditions such as ADHD, cognitive impairment, poor reasoning skills and low birth weight; and the experience of harsh and violent parenting and poor quality schooling and education. For each of these problems, there is a solution.
I’m not talking about the dystopian Asbo or “pre-criminal space”type stuff that our current political leaders have dreamed up, solidifying criminal identities before a young person has ever even offended. I’m talking about genuinely childcentred nurturing, state-of-the-art schooling, therapeutic interventions and investment long before that’s even a possibility.
We should be doing that anyway, because it’s what our children need. Instead, we currently organise our children as follows. Those from privileged backgrounds, who are more likely to enjoy space and safety at home, support with their schoolwork from graduate parents, and access to expensive and absorbing extracurricular activities, go to schools that augment those opportunities. Those from poorer backgrounds – including the vastmajority in youth custody – are more likely to have cramped homes, parents working long hours in low-paid jobs (or to be in care with no access to parents at all), and an environment that threatens violence and insecurity. They also go to schools, and use strained public services, that lack the resources to fill the gap.
The impact of a Rugby-quality environment – with all its emphasis on holistic care and nurturing – on these kids would be truly transformative. It would cost money, of course. The good news, however, is that if we were to abolish the youth offender institutions that cost so much public money but deliver so little public benefit, we could easily afford it.
• Afua Hirsch is a writer and broadcaster
Asbos solidify criminal identities before a young person has ever even offended