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‘Be easy, see wagwan’
Introduction
This book is about how young people experience long-term imprisonment and how they draw on their biographies to manage their imprisonment and to imagine and shape their futures. It is also about how the responsibilisation of individuals and communities combine to create the conditions in which the response to acts of violence by young people is long-terms of imprisonment. It is about the ways in which some harms are elided and others prioritised and how a criminal justice state can absorb all evidence that contradicts its efficacy and press on regardless.
Young people sentenced to long prison terms make up a small but significant part of the juvenile prison population. Their actions have caused harm to others and long sentences have an impact on them at a significant time in their development. Those on indeterminate sentences must prove they are no longer ‘dangerous’ before they can be released. The justice system has a statutory (and since 2008, legal)1 duty to provide resources to enable prisoners to demonstrate sufficient change to be released and the approach to young people serving long sentences speaks to wider issues in criminal and social justice, including the idealisation of (some) childhoods, the treatment of marginalised groups, the prison industrial complex, processes of nominalisation and racialisation, the philosophy of punishment and the sociology of the body.
A broad sociological approach to the understanding of prisons requires attention to the context in which prisons exist as well as the personhood of those who reside in them. Criminological theories have been criticised for their dependence on politically, rather than scientifically, defined objects and practices (Carrabine 2000; Rhodes 2001). This is especially pertinent in the case of prisons and prisoners where a focus on the specificities of prison life can obscure the fact that prisons do not exist in isolation, nor are they a corollary of crime. Decisions are made about how to manage those who break rules and that choice is, frequently and increasingly in England and Wales, prison – but it does not have to be. Nor is the current state of child imprisonment an inevitable one; it is based not in evidence but history. This book will explore, among other things, the role and impact of harm in the lives of young people serving long sentences. All young people in this study have been subjected to harm, all have caused harm to others and, I will argue, all are harmed by their imprisonment.
The fieldwork took place in 2010/11, during which time youth led protest movements and riots took place in England, Senegal, Mozambique, Egypt, Portugal, Tunisia and Chile. Though each of these protests took different forms and had differing motives and effects, at their heart all were disenfranchisement and futures restricted by poverty and exclusion (Honwana 2014), all of which featured heavily in the lives of participants. Honwana uses the term ‘waithood’ to describe young people on the precipice of adulthood but unable to reach it because of economic, social or political exclusion. In the UK, the riots were attributed to ‘gangs’ and youth violence, a move that enabled the ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’ by the allocation of £10m for gang intervention projects (Williams 2015). The characterisation of riots as gang-related decontextualised these actions from the systemic obstacles facing young people in early 21st century English cities. The focus on criminality locates responsibility with the ‘criminal’ individual rather than the circumstances in which s/he exists. Decades of failing to examine those circumstances has led to England and Wales as the nation with the highest rate of child incarceration in Western Europe, one of only three states that continues to sentence young people indeterminately (CRIN 2010), sentences to be spent in institutions that state inspectors repeatedly report as unsanitary and unsafe (HMIP and YJB 2017).
This small group of young prisoners merits sociological attention beyond the narrow road of crime and punishment and to understand their circumstances requires, as a minimum, attention to discourses of risk and governance and interrogation of the term ‘criminal.’ ‘Crime’ is not central to young prisoners’ experience; they talk about actions, about harm and about fears – not crimes. The chapters that follow will focus on the stories participants tell to and about themselves and others. That is not to say I ignore the parlous – and still yet declining – state of English prisons, nor the structural inequalities that determine who ends up there, but in privileging young people’s voices and the nuanced ways in which they choose to use them, I aim for a phenomenological approach to understanding young people’s experience of long-term imprisonment – one that is methodologically driven, rather than necessarily bound by particular disciplinary constraints.
Like their counterparts in West Africa, young prisoners in England develop their own spaces in which to ‘subvert authority, bypass the encumbrances created by the state, and fashion new ways of functioning on their own’ (Honwana 2013). Chapter 2 will set out the context for this research, including the value of a multi-disciplinary approach, the imposition of classed, racialised and criminalised identities and the urgent need for a phenomenological understanding of youth imprisonment. This means shifting focus from ‘the prison’ to the people who live there – in this case the young people. Their stories matter. Chapter 3 focuses on the methodological challenges to hearing and representing young people’s stories and the chapters that follow illuminate how young prisoners adapt to confinement, their pains of imprisonment, the uses and meanings of violence and social relations between prisoners and their loved ones, and prisoners and their peers. The final chapter draws together the themes raised in the previous chapters and returns to the three key contributions of the book.
The shape of the field
The criminal justice system is a mesh of law and policy and fraught with terminology and acronyms that render it opaque; terms that have colloquial meaning take on a different tone and are applied conditionally. The word person is used only rarely, and reliance on detached, arms-length terms is preferred. This study is concerned with how young people experience long-term imprisonment. The terms ‘young people’ and ‘long-term imprisonment’ have particular meanings, defined below and contextualised in the wider debates around long-term imprisonment and the failure of the English prison system.
What is a young person?
The Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility (MACR) in England and Wales and Northern Ireland is 10 – the lowest MACR in Europe, since Scotland voted to raise theirs (Scottish Government 2016), and has consistently drawn criticism from the Children’s Commissioner, the Law Commission and child development experts (McGuinness 2016; Church et al. 2013; Goldson 2013). A rebuttable presumption – the doli incapax principle – that children under 14 were incapable of serious harm – created a permeable barrier to protect children whose actions may be criminal but whose culpability was reduced by virtue of their age, although children under 14 could still be prosecuted for serious crimes. This was abolished in 1998. Calls to restore doli incapax as a means of partially assuaging these concerns (Gerry 2017) have gone unanswered.
The criminal justice system recognises three age groups: young people, (occasionally referred to as juveniles), young adults and adults.
Ten- to- seventeen-year-olds are defined as young people. Differences in court procedures, sentencing and custodial accommodation apply to this group, although they are often found less than satisfactory by advocates for children and young people (Willow 2015; Gibbs 2012). Children under 12 can only be sentenced to custody if sentenced to a long-term sentence – for young people, over two years. In essence, this means a child under 12 can only be imprisoned for a serious offence although there is a strange irony to the fact that children should be protected from custody unless they need a long term. There are three types of secure accommodation for young people: Secure Children’s Homes (SCHs), Secure Training Centres (STCs) and Young Offender Institutions (YOIs). The differences between the three are detailed in Chapter 3, but here it is sufficient to note that SCHs accommodate young people from 10 onwards, up to age 18 if the young person is considered vulnerable, and on welfare as well as criminal justice grounds. There are just 48 beds reserved for justice placements in England, 94 available to either justice or welfare placements (Warner et al. 2018). STCs are privately operated and accommodate young people aged between 12 and 18. In 2016/17, 49% of children in STCs were from a black or other minority ethnic background. Twelve percent were Muslim and 10% were from a Gypsy, Romany or Traveller background (HMIP and YJB 2017). There were 243 beds in STCs in 2016 (Warner et al. 2018).
YOIs accommodate 15- to 18-year-olds and most closely resemble prisons in architecture, layout, regime and disciplinary controls. The majority of spaces for young people are in YOIs – 906 in 2016 (ibid.) Young people serving long sentences are most likely to be accommodated in a YOI, if they are old enough. In 2016/17, 48% of boys in YOIs are identified as being from a black or minority ethnic background. Twenty-two percent were Muslim and 42% had experienced local authority care. Nineteen percent reported having a disability (HMIP and YJB 2017). This study took place with young people aged 15–17 on a wing reserved for long sentenced prisoners in a juvenile young offenders’ institution (YOI). For anonymity the YOI is named Wearside and the wing, Cypress.2 Young adults are those aged between 18 and 21 – subject to the same sentence types and lengths as an adult but their sentence expressed legally as detention in a young offenders institution (a ‘DYOI sentence’). There are three designated establishments for young men aged 18–21, and an additional 49 prisons that hold 18-year-olds alongside older men (Justice Committee 2017). There are no YOIs for women aged 18–21, and these young women are held in adult women’s prisons, alongside adult women.
Definitions of childhood and youth vary in different settings, even in legislation that applies to public life. For example, the Children and Families Act 2014 defines a child as someone under compulsory school age and a young person as someone over school graduation age but under 25. The legal frameworks governing children and young people in conflict with the law are rooted in numerous Acts over the last two centuries (see Bateman and Hazel 2014). Neither the age groupings nor the different types of establishment are underpinned by knowledge or best practice in neuroscience, social or psychological development or evidence on effective practice. A comprehensive review of evidence on health and wellbeing concluded that adolescence spanned the period from age 10 to 24 (Sawyer et al. 2018). Young people in conflict with the law have disproportionately experienced trauma and there is growing evidence that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) affect cognitive, physiological and emotional development (Lyons et al. undated; De Bellis and Zisk 2014). Trauma is held in the body (Van der Kolk 2014). Growing evidence shows the brain is malleable and continues to develop into the mid-20s (Hughes and Strong 2016; Royal Society 2011), and there is consensus amongst psychiatrists and psychologists that the effects of trauma can be repaired with treatment (Van der Kolk 2014).
In 2017 the Government rejected the Justice Select Committee’s (2016) recommendation for the development of a specific strategy for young adults in custody (MoJ 2017). This is important in the case of young people serving long sentences as almost all of them will remain in prison past their 18th birthdays, and most past their 21st birthdays. Most have experienced ACEs and the effect of trauma on their behaviour is poorly understood by those tasked with their care and control; the secondary traumatisation of imprisonment is increasingly recognised, both among young people and those who work with them (Baldry et al. 2017; Lyons et al. undated; Sage et al. 2017). In a High Court judgement in 2002, Mr. Justice Munby said: ‘the State appears to be failing, and in some instances failing very badly, in its duties to vulnerable and damaged children in YOIs.’ (EWHC 2497 [Admin]: para 185). In October 2017 he repeated these concerns, citing the Chief Inspector of Prisons’ earlier conclusion that ‘not a single establishment inspected [in 2017] was safe to hold young people’ (Munby 2017).
What is a long-term sentence?
The Prison Service describes sentences of over four years as long-term (Prison Service Order 6650). Long sentences can be either determinate or indeterminate. Determinate sentences have an expiry date and a conditional release date, usually midway through the sentence, with the remainder spent under supervision in the community. An indeterminate sentence has no expiry date and no automatic release date. The sentencing court will set the minimum period – the tariff – that must be served before a person can apply for release by the Parole Board. Anyone released from an indeterminate sentence will remain on licence and under supervision in the community for the rest of their life. A person on licence can be recalled to prison, without the intervention of a court, for breaching the terms of their licence, a suspected breach of licence or a perceived increase in risk. Once recalled, a person has no automatic right to release and must reapply to the Parole Board. A person convicted of murder in England and Wales is subject to a mandatory life sentence. This applies to all age categor...
