Editorial: Don't let this latest death in custody be in vain
Ravi Chandiramani
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Just after seven o'clock last Thursday morning (29 November), a 15-year-old boy was found hanging in his cell at Lancaster Farms Young Offender Institution (YOI).
Liam McManus became the 30th child to die in custody in England and Wales and the first for more than two years. His suicide has passed with relatively little fuss. It shouldn't. McManus's tragedy must focus minds on two massively important issues for the youth justice system.
First, we lock up far too many children - more than any other country in Europe with the exception of Turkey. McManus was a persistent but minor offender with a deeply-troubled background. His mother was in prison and his father was dead so he was brought up by his uncle and aunt. He had been in custody twice before and was this time around half way through a six-week sentence for breaching a supervision order. Repeatedly sentencing him to custody hardly addressed the root causes of his offending behaviour. It was a Victorian punitive measure doomed to fail, and as it turned out, tragically. It was decided he was not sufficiently vulnerable to be placed in a secure children's home but he clearly didn't have the resilience to remain in a YOI. Prison was no place for this boy.
The second issue is the training and support of prison officers in YOIs, which needs to be reviewed. These people work with the most difficult children in the country and need to feel confident identifying and dealing with vulnerability. Here, the government's current consideration to extend the use of batons on children as young as 15 is terribly misguided. Young offenders stand little chance of rehabilitation unless they learn to form relationships with and have respect for adults who are charged with enforcing boundaries.
The situation at Lancaster Farms has been especially volatile of late, with four outbreaks of violence this year. Relationships there between prison officers and management have been fractious. The timing of McManus's death is particularly tough for Lancaster Farms staff, who are dealing with the ongoing inquest into the 2005 death of 16-year-old Gareth Price.
Let's hope this latest death channels the resolve of the government to put its money where its mouth is and allocate ringfenced funding for prevention work, which has been subject to confusion for many months. For McManus to become just another statistic would be a tragedy too far.