Vulnerable children don’t belong in jail

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.’

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.