Britain’s prisons brim with vulnerable people but perhaps the most vulnerable are children. At 30 September 2023, there were 301 children in prison in England and Wales alone. Wetherby Young Offender Institution in Yorkshire is home to 165 of them and a new report from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons makes for troubling reading about the conditions inside. There are the usual observations, familiar to regular readers of these write-ups, about broken heating systems and smashed windows, faulty electrics and insufficient time out of cells. But then there is this:

‘We had considerable concerns about the use of all-male teams to cut the clothes of vulnerable girls under restraint and place them in anti-ligature clothing.’

Two-thirds of children reported having been restrained

This appears to have been done to prevent self-harm but the Inspectorate says it is ‘simply not acceptable’ to have groups of male prison officers stripping female children. Inspectors identified two occasions on which this happened. They also found 24 occasions on which children had been strip-searched in the previous year, half of them while the child was under restraint. Inspectors considered this frequency to be ‘high’. The report notes that while management had kept records of the strip-searches, none had recorded the authority to conduct them under restraint.

A review of prison records showed that force had been used against the children on 1,126 occasions, with 155 of these cases involving girls. That might seem a pretty small proportion but at time of inspection, from November to December 2023, there were exactly three girls being held at Wetherby. Two-thirds of children reported having been restrained. One in three use-of-force events cited the need to prevent self-harm, a significant problem in the institution, with 892 self-harm incidents and 205 reports of children being at-risk of self-harm or suicide.

One third (98) of the prison’s safeguarding referrals last year involved allegations of a child being harmed during restraint. ‘Pain-inducing techniques’ had been deployed nine times in the previous 12 months and in every case their deployment was found to be ‘inappropriate’ by the Independent Review of Restraint Panel. Prison management ‘did not routinely attend incidents to provide support to staff nor did they attend planned intervention briefings which resulted in poor management of incidents’. The prison leadership is criticised for failing to review body-worn camera footage. When inspectors studied the videos, they uncovered ‘the restraint of a child which resulted in an injury that had not been referred to senior leaders’.

The Inspectorate’s report for Wetherby paints a picture of a prison which, while getting some things right (mostly on care and purposeful activity), is struggling to manage behaviour. One in four of the children fail their drug tests. There were 443 assaults reported in 2023, with 67 involving a blade, blunt implement or harmful liquid. While not the worst example of the English prison estate, HMYOI Wetherby does not come across as a safe place for detaining vulnerable children. The stripping of girls by male prison officers in particular is beyond alarming.

Some of the issues identified could be remedied by tightening of rules and regulations. Prohibiting anyone other than female staff from removing girls’ clothing would be one such measure. Limiting the use of restraint to the preservation of human life or prevention of serious harm to other children would be another. Yet none of these measures would address the more basic question of whether we need or ought to be holding 300 children in prison. There will be some for whom incarceration in a place such as Wetherby is unavoidable on public safety grounds, but there is scope to consider alternative arrangements for children who pose a lesser risk but still require restriction and supervision.

Unfortunately, there’s no votes in this and in an election year everyone’s attention will be focused elsewhere. Children who end up behind bars are just wrong’uns and toerags and getting what they deserve. Except, we know that the kind of people who enter the carceral system are disproportionately likely to come from broken homes, to have witnessed or experienced alcohol and drug dependency or violence and abuse. They are typically children who have been failed from the earliest years of their lives and written off not long thereafter. They don’t need our cynicism, they need our empathy and compassion and support.

There are no votes in this issue but there damn well ought to be. The treatment vulnerable children receive at the hands of the state is far less than adequate. It is sometimes scandalous. That should be everyone’s concern. We cannot lock up our conscience along with these children and throw away the key.