In January justice secretary Chris Grayling announced plans to build Europe’s biggest child prison. Euphemistically called a ‘secure college’ or ‘Pathfinder’ the proposed facility is, in reality, an enormous new prison built to save costs by warehousing children and contracting out its running to private sector companies such as Serco and G4S.
The state intends to create a small network of “secure colleges” to hold the current 1,117 children in England and Wales. Construction of a 320-bed, £85m “pathfinder” secure college, which will hold girls and boys between 12 and 17, is due to begin next year, on land next to Glen Parva prison, Leicestershire.
The bill’s proposals would allow staff in secure colleges to use potentially fatal restraint on children to enforce ‘good order and discipline.’ In 2008 the courts ruled that using force for these purposes breaches children’s human rights because it can cause serious harm and was not shown to be necessary (the court referred to evidence that in secure children’s Homes restraint is not used to enforce good behaviour by children convicted of an offence). Restraining children for reasons of “good order and discipline” is no more necessary now and it is just as dangerous today as it was in 2008.
This is about life and death for children. The 2008 case was triggered by the deaths of children in custody who had been restrained for failing to comply with orders. Fifteen-year-old Gareth Myatt protested when prison officers in a G4S-run secure training centre tried to remove a piece of paper from his room, which had his mother’s mobile phone number on it. He was restrained by three officers who ignored his desperate pleas that he couldn’t breathe. Adam Rickwood was 14 when he took his own life after being restrained by four members of staff in a secure training centre run by Serco.
This is blatantly a return to the old system of ‘borstal’ in which so called ‘deliquent youth’ were intended to be reformed, a system where training, education and moral influence were apllied to fit offenders back into society and prevent them from reoffending again. The conditions in such borstals was a regimen designed to be “educational rather than punitive”, but it was highly regulated, with a focus on routine, discipline and authority. Borstal institutions were designed to offer education, regular work and discipline, though one commentator has claimed that “more often than not they were breeding grounds for bullies and psychopaths.” Evidence exists of brutality, both by staff towards the inmates and between inmates creating an atmosphere mirroring prisons, but for children instead.
The Criminal Justice Act 1982 abolished the borstal system in the UK, introducing youth custody centres instead.
There should be no illusion that imprisonment of youth and their so called reforming is an act of violence by the state to make those who rebel against their authority into upstanding citizens to fit back into the system. Of course imprisonment of youth has continued since the ‘borstal’ era, but what is apparent by this move is to incoporate into the general privitisation of the prison system, youth offenders, into a already ever increasingly securitised apparatus that aims to violently restrict freedom to those who do not fit in, to enslave them inside and once outside.
Fire to the new ‘borstals’!
Lets break out of the prison society that surrounds us!
ATTACK THE PRISON APPARATUS AT EVERY CHANCE!
