Adultifying Youth Custody - the long term view with John Drew CBE
In this blog, John Drew CBE, a former CEO of the Youth Justice Board (YJB), shares his thoughts on the government’s decision to change the age young people transition from the youth to adult custodial estates due to a capacity crisis in adult prisons. The blog accompanies our latest briefing, Adultifying Youth Custody: Learning lessons on transition to adulthood from the use of youth custody for young adults, part of our project exploring transitions.
I became Chief Executive of the Youth Justice Board (YJB) on the 1st January 2009. At that stage there were 2700 children in custody and a further 180 18-year-olds also living in children’s prisons, the proportions therefore being 1 18-year-old to every 15 children. Keep that proportion firmly in your mind, 1 in 15.
Its significance is that starting in late 2022 the last government deliberately engineered a rise to 1 young adult to every 4 children (1 in 4), rising to 1 in 3 when only considering Young Offender Institutions - apparently casually altering the nature of children’s imprisonment with barely a backward glance.
In 2009 the rationale for there being any young adults in prison alongside children was that it allowed children very near the end of their sentences to complete these.
It also allowed the Prison Service to handle the transition of those children on longer sentences to adult prisons in their rather ponderous way. Essentially this was a pragmatic and humane way round those two tricky issues.
This arrangement was never, however, without its problems. Dating back nearly two centuries Britain has made repeated efforts to separate children in prison from adults, not always it must be said for humane reasons. Since 1989 the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child had made it clear that children in prison should be held ‘separated from adults’. The YJB had been working hard for many years to turn this into reality and I was very happy to finally be able to order the closure of girls’ units in adult women’s prisons during my period as Chief Executive. It was always the case that we kept a careful eye on the number of 18-year-olds in children’s prisons and were aware that this was an imperfect situation.
“Dating back nearly two centuries Britain has made repeated efforts to separate children in prison from adults, not always it must be said for humane reasons. Since 1989 the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child had made it clear that children in prison should be held ‘separated from adults’.”
Why was this imperfect? Restricting the number of 18 year olds in children’s prisons was never driven by a desire to send 18-year-olds to less well-equipped prisons with more impoverished regimes. In my view the maturity case for imprisoning young adults in prisons with enhanced regimes was always strong, even if it was outside of my specific remit. But there was then and remains to this date, no doubt in my mind that the red line of a child’s eighteenth birthday is an important one to patrol diligently. Children in prisons have entitlements that are not available to eighteen-year-old and older prisoners, entitlements around regime, access to education, disciplinary systems, staffing ratios and qualifications, and the like. The real danger has always been that the more children’s prisons come to resemble establishments for adults the more these entitlements will be under threat. So back in 2009 the ratio of children to 18-year-olds was a monthly statistic I kept firmly in mind.
“Restricting the number of 18 year olds in children’s prisons was never driven by a desire to send 18-year-olds to less well-equipped prisons with more impoverished regimes. In my view the maturity case for imprisoning young adults in prisons with enhanced regimes was always strong.”
The rapid reduction of the total number of children in prison from 2009 created its own challenges in this regard. The ratio of young adult to child did deteriorate a bit, not as a result of the number of 18-year-olds remaining in children’s prisons rising, in fact this number fell too as it would (by 35% in my time), but because the number of children in custody fell faster than this (by more than 50% at the same time). But the rise in the ratio was not concerning enough to call foul, and the humane case for some 18-year-olds remaining in their original prisons remained sound.
Statistics show this status quo held good until late 2022 with the introduction of the then Government’s “Operation Safeguard”. This was intended to ease pressure in adult prisons, but in actuality led to the deliberate decision to change the normal transfer date from a children’s prison to an adult institution from the person’s eighteenth to their nineteenth birthday. The same government who made this decision had been in power by then for nine years but had sleepwalked into the crisis of overcrowding due to its addiction to imprisonment. Successive Ministers had ignored all the matrixes that should have told them that the Prison Service was “running on empty” for years. This was an entirely Minister-made crisis.
“Children in prisons have entitlements that are not available to eighteen-year-old and older prisoners. The danger has always been the more children’s prisons come to resemble establishments for adults the more these entitlements will be under threat. ”
There was an additional problem with the change in policy. Almost all children’s prisons had been for several years by then firmly in crisis, as was shown starkly by successive inspection reports. It didn’t require any great wit to realise that filling these prisons with a growing number of young adults was a recipe for disaster as they simply couldn’t cope with the extra numbers. According to the inspectors Wetherby YOI had “lost ground” since 2019, and the Keppel Unit there revealed “a disappointing fall in standards” when inspected in 2021. Feltham A had briefly improved between 2019 and 2022 but had then been plagued by violence, which in the diplomatic language of the Chief Inspector “had got particularly bad” in the summer of 2023. At the same time HMP Werrington “had become an establishment in difficulty” and performance in all areas apart from resettlement had fallen since 2020. Meanwhile HMP Cookham Wood was placed in special measures (“Urgent Notification to the Secretary of State from the Chief Inspector) in April 2023. The Chief Inspector’s notification reveals a stark decline in six successive inspections from 2016 which eventually culminated in the closure of the prisons in April 2024.
“Almost all children’s prisons had been in crisis. It didn’t require any great wit to realise that filling these prisons with a growing number of young adults was a recipe for disaster.”
As the Alliance for Youth Justice’s briefing - “Adultifying youth custody: Learning lessons on transition to adulthood from the use of youth custody for young adults” - highlights, this “Urgent Notification” was on top of the four that the Chief Inspector had issued to the children’s secure estate between 2019 and 2021. Thus, the direction of the government’s policy was to triple the number of 18-year-olds in a failing estate already in crisis. It is unclear why the government would think this would work, and, of course, it didn’t. The current government’s reversal of this policy from October 2024 is to be welcomed.
The Alliance for Youth Justice has produced a withering yet positive briefing on this short-lived policy debacle, which makes ten coherent recommendations for the future of custody for children, as well as calling on the government to develop a comprehensive plan for young adults in custody. This briefing should be in the in-tray of Ministers, Senior Civil Servants and all concerned with the treatment of children and young adults in custody. Only action now can safeguard our society against further crises in this most important area of public policy.
“The Alliance for Youth Justice has produced a withering yet positive briefing on this short-lived policy debacle, which makes ten coherent recommendations for the future of custody for children, as well as calling on the government to develop a comprehensive plan for young adults in custody”