Youth custody will never be a 'holiday camp'

Have you ever heard a tough young person from the wrong side of the tracks concede that custody was quite unbearable? Have you ever heard them say that it was "hard"? Of course not; such concessions would be too damaging to street cred and peer status. Instead, they will tell you it was "easy peasy" and that "you can do it standing on your head". Or, according to reports of the MPA survey, that young offender institutions were "youth clubs" or "holiday camps". Quite why the media, and most of those who commented on the survey, did not place these remarks in any real context escapes me, if you'll excuse the pun.

The context is that all secure regimes for young offenders in England and Wales - of which young offender institutions are by far the toughest - are closed settings governed by locked doors, with very limited freedoms and regulated by people with keys jangling on their belts. The context is that all young offenders have to find ways of coping with their sentence: if they do not laugh about it, they will cry. For sure, the very early days of the first experience of custody are desperately lonely and depressing but after that the vast majority acclimatise and get on with it: what other choice do they have? We know, of course, that just below the surface there are depths of depression that produce considerable self-harm and sometimes suicide, but those are things that have to remain hidden in the brutal and brutalising environments from which most young people in custody come and to which they will return.

Young people rarely expect to go into custody. They remain optimistic that they will be given one last chance or that, in some other way, they will "get off". Those who have been inside before deal with the next sentence stoically; those who have not have usually absorbed the "holiday camp" mythology. They don't expect it to be too bad. It is nearly always worse than they anticipate. Privately every day is still hard, but you don't admit it. And you certainly don't on release: your role is to perpetuate the myth.

That this myth should be reinforced by the MPA, adding fuel to the fire of the tabloids, which just love such stories, is deplorable. Instead, we should dispel it and debate the lasting damage produced by custody and think how it can be avoided and more sensible alternatives put in its place.

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan, and a member of the Youth Justice Board. Email howard.williamson@haymarket.com.