Young Offender Institution, England (Andrew Aitchison andy@prisonimage.org )
England and Wales lock up more children than any other country in Western Europe. Yet the impact of imprisonment can be extremely damaging to children and can compound problematic behaviour rather than prevent it. The Commission on Sex in Prison, Britain’s first independent review of sex behind bars, has found that locking children in large prisons where violence is a daily occurrence is harmful to healthy sexual development and may increase the risk of violent and sexual offending in adulthood, leading to more, not fewer victims of crime.
There are around 1,000 children in custody in England and Wales. Three quarters of the children locked up are held in prisons, large institutions with low staff-to-child ratios and high levels of violence. More than 2,600 children were received into prison custody during 2013.
