Rehabilitation inside

The village of Borstal, near the historic Medway town of Rochester, has been synonymous with youth offending for 110 years. It is here that the UK’s first child-only prison was established in 1902, by the then prison commissioner Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise. The practice of separating young people from adult prisoners spread quickly nationwide and was eventually enacted in 1908, with “borstal training” becoming a byword for the detention of boys and young men for much of the 20th Century.

Today, 130 boys aged 15 to 18 are detained at the modern-day Cookham Wood Young Offender Institution (YOI), on the site of the old children’s prison in Borstal. Although intended to accommodate juveniles when it was built in the early 1970s, the prison was used for women offenders up until 2007, when it was converted back to a YOI. Two-thirds of the inmates come from outside Kent and the average stay is just 80 days. For many institutions, this lack of time would make it practically impossible to change a young person’s life. But over the past 18 months, the management, led by governor Emily Thomas, has created a culture at Cookham Wood that aims to make every day spent there count.

At the heart of this new approach is the introduction of a youth work programme. Stephen Smith was an inmate for a year before being released in early 2012. He is now a trainee youth worker for Kinetic – the social enterprise running youth work services at Cookham Wood. This is the first time since his release that he has been back, and as he gives us a tour around the institution you can see that he finds the experience surreal.