UK- Children behind bars: The young murderers, arsonists and rapists at Britain's forgotten jails

4-28-2009 England:

They are Britain's forgotten jails, housing some of the country's most serious criminals.

The difference between these institutions and normal prisons, however, is that the criminals housed in these jails are still just children. For more than 40 years, there have been secure units in Britain to contain the tiny minority of children who commit the very worst crimes.

In 1968, Mary Bell, then aged 11, was sent to Red Bank in St Helens for the manslaughter of two small boys.

Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the children who murdered James Bulger, served their eight-year terms in secure units. And the 10 and 11-year-old brothers recently accused of attempted murder in Doncaster have also been remanded in secure care.

The units are usually hidden from view, their work with some of Britain's most troubled and troublesome youngsters conducted in strictest privacy.

But I was allowed into one - Vinney Green in Bristol - to make two documentaries for BBC Radio 4, interviewing children and staff.

'One here has just got life for murder'

Vinney Green is tucked away down a track behind a private housing estate on the outskirts of the city.

Purpose-built for 24 boys and girls, aged from 10 to 17, it looks like a cross between a school and a sheltered housing block, arranged on one level around a central courtyard, with lots of pale wood and plate glass.

Entrance is through an office where we had to hand over our bags and mobile phones. Inside, it is light, clean and welcoming, except that every single door is locked and has a buzzer on the inside to call for attention.

In a staff room, the names of all the youngsters are displayed and alongside them coloured dots indicate their crimes. Assistant psychologist Amy Ostrowski ran through the current intake: 'One here has just got life for murder. We have four sex offenders and one is a rapist. The majority, though, are in for burglary, robbery and actual bodily harm.'

The boy accused of rape is 14 and was arrested for an attack on a young child at a family party. He has severe learning difficulties and has been judged unfit to plead. I met him, a big, shy, gangly youth.

He was at a computer screen, sitting alongside a teacher, who was explaining that a verb is a 'doing word'. He seemed to be trying to comprehend. According to staff, he has the reading age of a six-year-old and no grasp of the gravity of what he has done.

'If he wasn't here,' asked Tina Morgan, the resettlement officer, 'then where would he be?'

But while this boy will spend years in secure care, the average stay for the 290 children currently locked up in units in England and Wales is just four months. Most are aged about 14. Ten years ago, only two out of ten were girls. Now it is four out of ten.

All the children I interviewed in Bristol looked like any other group of 10 to 17-year-olds. Some were small and slight; others were big for their years, towering over the staff.

There are two routes in - from the courts as punishment or as a social services welfare placement, when a child is considered a danger to others or themselves.

But, in practice, there is not much distinction between the two groups - the welfare children have criminal records and the criminals have deeply unhappy pasts. Physical and sexual abuse and neglect are common experiences among them, according to psychologist Amy.

'You are shocked that people can do that to their children and also a lot of them have been in care and claim to have been abused,' she says.

'They can be real Jekyll and Hyde characters, you can read their file and they can have a history of violent, aggressive behaviour and then you meet them and they seem like the most polite, pleasant young people. Obviously, you have to be aware of the potential risks.'

Chaotic family backgrounds have left some of the youngsters unfamiliar with even the most basic tasks. An area at Vinney Green is set aside to demonstrate to youngsters how to vacuum and make the bed.

Toddler-type temper tantrums

'Some children can't look after themselves at all,' Tina Morgan says. 'We had one teenager here who couldn't even make a cup of tea. Some tell us they love it here because they get regular meals.'

I was introduced to one 12-year old boy whose ten-day disappearance from a care home led to a nationwide alert. Before he came to Vinney Green he had been brought before the youth courts 65 times.

When the time came for him to go, he did not want to leave. He confided that he had quickly committed another offence, just to get back.

While these children can be easy enough to engage in quiet conversation, away from their peers, it is what happens when they are crossed or disappointed that sets them aside from the law-abiding majority.

Rage and an inability to control it is the common personality trait. One teacher estimates that 98 per cent of youngsters who end up at Vinney Green have been expelled from mainstream school, many of them at the primary stage.

It is as if a vital behavioural development, which usually occurs when children emerge from the toddler stage and start school, is completely missing.

So what you have at Vinney Green are big, adultsized teenagers who throw toddler-type temper tantrums - with catastrophic results.

'I bounced his head off the f***ing wall'These are the children still pushing at the boundaries long after they should have learned when to give up on a destructive course of action.

An uncontrollable temper makes it impossible for them to make friends, except with others like themselves, and it leads to exclusion from school and to aimless hanging out on the streets where cannabis and cheap alcohol offer an easy diversion.

The parents of Jimmy Mizen, the 16-year-old schoolboy murdered in a bakers' shop in Lee, London, have spoken of rage as the curse of our age. Their son's throat was slashed when another teenager hurled a glass tray at him for failing to stand aside in the queue.

Therapy sessions, aiming to offer practical strategies for cooling down tempers, are held weekly at Vinney Green. Suggestions include taking deep breaths, standing back and thinking problems through before wading in, or removing yourself mentally by picturing a favourite place.

I watched Amy Ostrowski in action with one boy, who is aged 12 but looks much older. He has been in care since he was eight and was sent to Vinney Green by social services for his own protection because he had joined a drug-dealing gang.

Sprawled on a sofa he recounted, with obvious enjoyment, a situation where he had separated two boys fighting and then been bitten on the arm for his trouble.

Compliant'I bounced his head off the f***ing wall,' he boasted. In a later interview when I suggested his swearing was disrespectful, he demonstrated how quickly his mood can turn. 'Who the f*** do you think you are?' he shouted before standing up, ripping off his microphone and kicking the walls. Nothing I said afterwards could rescue the situation.

And although we regard children as more malleable than adults, that is not always the case. Amy joined Vinney Green after leaving her job at an open prison where offenders were preparing for release. 'The guys that I worked with before were a lot more compliant,' she reflected.

'Here, they present me with a lot more difficult behaviour. People who are young often don't have an awareness of their situation. A lot of them are caught up in gang culture and the people they hang around with have a massive influence on them.
'They use violence as a way of gaining acceptance in peer groups and they find it exciting. It can be very hard to work with that.'

There are breakthroughs, though. Jess, a small, slight, very pretty girl with huge brown eyes and a mane of straight black hair is 14 and has been at Vinney Green since January. She has made such good progress that she will soon move on. Her criminal record dates back to when she was 12 and attacked a shopkeeper who accused her of theft.

'The shopkeeper grabbed me by my shoulders and threw me out. I started booting the door, the shopkeeper locked it, but I was shouting "I'm gonna get in". And it ended with me sticking my leg through the window. I cut up all my leg, but I was still going mad.'

Gang cultureJess went on to commit arson and assault, and earned a reputation for attacking adults trying to help her - including a foster mother, who she punched in the face.

She described how at Vinney Green she learned to recognise the triggers to her anger and discovered how to back off. 'In here,' she added proudly, 'the staff care about you and they are really good. They haven't had to restrain me once.'

For staff such as resettlement officer Tina Morgan, the biggest anxiety is what happens to children when they leave. 'We have one boy here who can be very difficult, but he has come on leaps and bounds. He has two brothers in prison and his dad has been serving a long stretch,' she says.

'How do you stop that cycle? It's all he knows. When he gets out in October, that is what he is going back to. You just have to keep going and do what you can.'

The other limitation is money. New plans drawn up by Tina are often rejected by social services teams in areas where funding is tight. Secure units, with their high staff ratios of four per child, are an expensive option compared to young offenders institutions which typically house hundreds at a time.

So is the investment in secure units worthwhile for any but the most dangerous children? One thing is certain: these units are disappearing - and fast.

A period of rapid growth in the early Nineties - designed to deliver a new get-tough policy towards very young prolific offenders, the children police describe as 'mobile, mini crimewaves' - has been followed by an equally swift contraction.

'I used to get stoned...and come in and smash the house up'

There are 19 secure units remaining in England and Wales, compared with 28 four years ago and more closures are planned.

A recent report for the Government looked at why the units are closing and put it down to two factors: cost and ideology.

Places are expensive, typically £500 a night. And some social workers now regard locking up children as a failure and a breach of children's human rights. The authors warned that if the closures are allowed to continue, the danger is that some children will be denied secure care - when that is just what they need.

We traced one boy whose experience suggests that it is worth keeping the units open. He is 16 and has a criminal record for assault, attacking a police officer, carrying a knife, criminal damage and breach of an Antisocial Behaviour Order.

'We used to get bored and drink and stuff, and then we would go out and some people would rob cars, some people would smash things up. We just didn't care,' he said. 'I used to get stoned on cannabis and come in and smash the house up. My mates were like my family, and I loved it.'

He was sentenced to a year's youth custody for a serious wounding and transferred to Vinney Green from a Young Offenders Institution after he tried to take his own life. Six months later, he emerged skilled in bricklaying and plastering and has since begun a college course.

'It was the first time in my life that I was good at something, that I could see a future for myself that didn't involve always being in trouble,' he says.

Of course, this is not firm evidence that secure units are worth saving, but it is vital that we do not allow them to be abandoned without proper evaluation.
If we do, we may all end up paying the price.

• WINIFRED ROBINSON'S Inside The Child Prisons: Episode Two is on BBC Radio 4 on Monday, April 20 at 8pm. Episode one is available on the BBC iPlayer. ..News Source.. by Winifred Robinson