Children remand rates in spotlight

Hundreds of children are being held on remand every year despite ultimately not receiving jail sentences campaigners have said, as even ministers concede that the criminal justice system is in crisis.
Two thirds of the more than 1,000 youths remanded to custody over the past year were convicted but not sentenced to jail. In a further 126 cases, proceedings were dropped or the defendants were acquitted.
Researchers say that nine out of ten of the children remanded to youth detention during that time were aged between 15 and 17 — important exam years. Some 109 exams were sat across the youth custody estate last year.
As well as potentially jeopardising exam results, remanding young people to custody also harms their future prospects, campaigners argue.
“They come out of prison 12 months later in a much worse situation,” says Paul Carberry, the chief executive of the charity Action for Children, who was speaking at a summer session of The Times’s crime and justice commission.
Carberry is not speaking from a purely academic position. In 1979, when he was 16, he was sentenced to five and a half years in a young offender institution for fatally stabbing a man, and has since worked with charities that support young people involved in crime.
“There are lots of good examples of alternatives to remand, where we can work with young people in the community,” he says.
There are some positive signs: the youth custodial population overall fell by 65 per cent over the past decade. However, 44 per cent of children in custody last year were on remand, making last year’s remand level one of the highest on record.
About 200 children are remanded to custody every month, with three quarters held in young offender institutions. The others go to secure children’s homes or training centres.
Dame Sally Coates, the author of a government-commissioned review into prison education, told the commission about the damage that imprisonment can have on young people. Her review recommended placing education at the heart of the prison system for both youth and adult offenders.
“Children in prison are not accessing education — in fact they are not even being put in a room and being allowed to take their exams,” she says, adding that many are left to sleep through the school day.
“If you go to a young offender institution at about 11 o’clock, half the jail are still in bed,” Coates says, noting that because there is a lack of prison officers, it is easier “to keep kids in bed”.
Coates says that in some cases students held on remand have been given the wrong GCSE papers. She points to one case where a boy was “born with a really good brain and he could have done anything with his life had he been born into a different family”. Coates notes that the boy was later acquitted of his first crime, but in just two years was “back in prison for attempted murder”.
Campaigners say that on average young offenders are forced to wait on remand for more than six months before sentencing. They argue that children who fall into the criminal justice system are much more likely to have been in care, have special educational needs, or have been excluded from school. More than 60 per cent are from non-white backgrounds, a figure that is gradually increasing.
There are also said to be problems around the quality of the limited education that is offered to children who are remanded to custody. Coates claims that many teachers working in youth offender institutions “probably wouldn’t be good enough” to hold jobs in mainstream education.
She argues that gang culture has caused those managing institutions to adopt a “who can’t be mixing with whom” approach to lessons, which damages educational attainment while also perpetuating “what’s going on on the outside”.
Coates acknowledges that there is “some good practice” in the system, but she says that it is “nowhere near widespread enough”. Solutions such as better educational technology could mean that even “if children can’t get out of their cells, they can learn independently”. Vocational training, Coates says, could be the “last chance” to save these children, but “even that isn’t there”.
Problems for children who are remanded to custody do not end on release. Ironically, the difficulties are greater in cases where proceedings are dropped or the defendants are acquitted because they do not receive the same level of support with resettlement as young offenders who are released after serving custodial sentences.
Lynn Perry, the chief executive of Barnardo’s, told the commission that these children do not receive a youth offending officer or a probation officer. She said that instead they simply “lose that period of their lives and they don’t get any support”.
A Ministry of Justice spokesman says that officials “are categorical that custody should be the last resort for children, reserved for those charged with the most serious offences”.
And he notes that “while young people in custody had a 92 per cent GCSE pass rate last year, the government is committed to steering more children away from crime in the first place”.