SOCIALIST UNITY

“To weaken the provisions in local communities and then to claim that building the new secure training centres will help to prevent juvenile crime is a sham” - Tony Blair in 1994 criticising the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard’s proposals for STCs. The first STC was opened under NL in 1998.

The NSPCC launched a campaign today to demand an end to physical restraint. The degrading and violent assaults on children and young people in privately run detention centres or STCs (Secure Training Centres) is widespread. It is estimated that between April-December 2007,  physical restraint was used on almost 5,000 occasions in young offender institutions and secure training centres. This resulted in 154 injuries that included loss of consciousness and damage to internal organs.

Moreover, Anne Owers (HM Chief Inspector of Prisons) found physical force had been used at the G4S run Oakhill STC 757 times over the previous nine months, with 535 occasions involving the “highest level of restraint”. She stated that Oakhill has a , “staggeringly high level of use of force by staff”. And she has called for its temporary closure.

Whatever euphemisms NL uses these places are prisons for children and young people. The NSPCC correctly calls for an immediate ban on physical restraint. They have submitted a dossier to an independent review into restraint (the report is due next month) that catalogues abuse, broken bones, cuts and bruising. The review was originally set up in light of the deaths of Gareth Myatt and Adam Rickwood who both were physically restrained by staff before their deaths in 2004.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights have argued that physical techniques involving “deliberate physical pain should be banned without delay”..

The spin used by these private contractors, for example GSL,  includes that their policies are “derived from the principles of childcare best practice and reflect the every child matters agenda”. Well, did those principles include creating a macho enviroment where staff were given nicknames like “mauler”, “crusher” and “clubber”? 

Where children and young people who had been restrained the most times being described as “winners”? And Gareth Myatt who died in the care of Rainsbrook after losing consciousness while being restrained by 3 members of staff. Are these the policies that reflect “every child matters”? Did Gareth Myatt’s life matter?

Many of these children and young people come to these places damaged, distressed and in a highly vulnerable state (Adam Rickwood was suicidal but it was ignored). They are subjected to abuse and violence once in these places. What kind of person will come out of the other side..?

Physical restraint is used as a punishment against children and teenagers. The whole ethos of containment lacks compassion and understanding. These young people are sometimes miles away from any support structure, their human rights breached.

And another private company, Serco, runs Hassockfield where Adam Rickwood died. Serco has its greedy grasping fingers in many corporate pies (and doing very well with profits increasing) from decommissioning Sellafield to running Yarl’s Wood Immigration Remand Centre. Serco makes its money from misery, oppression and violence.

Rather like the numbers of adult deaths in state custody that go unheard, ignored and reduced to statistics, the number of children who have died in custody in the last 17 years is 29. Young, vulnerable and powerless people whose lives end in these hellholes.