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Deaths of Children in Custody: Action taken, lessons learnt, Youth Justice Board for England and Wales, 2014, pp. 50

01 February 2014

Since 2000, when the Youth Justice Board (YJB) took responsibility for commissioning places in secure custodial institutions for children and young people in England and Wales, and for placing children in secure units after they had been sentenced by the courts, 16 children have died in custody. This report is an account by the YJB on how it has discharged its role and the wider lessons for the youth custody system relating to the deaths of children in custody.

The report claims to be about “action and about change”, but has been criticised by INQUEST whose own work on deaths in custody found that “the same issues of concern repeat themselves with depressing regularity”, demonstrating that “the current mechanisms, including the YJB, are not preventing deaths of children.”

INQUEST has pointed out that this short report cannot do justice to the situation and has called for “a full, holistic, independent review of child deaths in custody”, a demand that has been endorsed, in a letter to the Guardian newspaper (14 February 2014), by the parents of six child victims.

These parents welcomed the government’s decision (in February 2014) to hold a review into the deaths of 18-24 year old prisoners, but made clear their “disgust at the decision to snub our own and Inquest’s calls for a full independent public review into the deaths of children while in the care and custody of the state.” The family members said: “It is inconceivable that within any other childcare setting 33 child deaths [since 1990], an untold number of abuse allegations, including sexual abuse, emotional abuse, broken bones and illegal restraint, would not have triggered an immediate exhaustive review.”

The YJB report is available here (pdf).