Young People in Custody - Joining the dots...
An inquest into the death of Adam Rickwood was told yesterday that magistrates who sent the 14-year-old into custody were told in a pre-sentencing report that he constituted "no risk of self-harm".
The decision to send him to Hassockfield secure training centre near Consett, Co Durham, also drew on the results of a form completed by Lancashire County Council's youth offending team which indicated that Adam had had no contact with mental services, had received no kind of mental diagnosis and had never harmed himself.
In fact, the boy had been in hospital seven times after repeatedly overdosing on alcohol/drug mixes and cutting his wrists twice. Lancashire County Council's director of children's integrated services, Gill Rigg, said Adam's mental health record was the "key, relevant factor" in determining whether he should have been in custody at all. "I accept that was a very critical and essential piece of information that should have been on [the] form," she told the inquest at Chester-le-Street magistrates' court, Co Durham.
How can this possibly be the solution...?!
Up to 80 youngsters aged 18 to 20 are to be held on remand in Brixton, Wandsworth and Wormwood Scrubs prisons while they await trial or sentence alongside some of the most hardened career criminals for the first time from today as the jail system struggles with overcrowding.
Serco private escort officers staffing the vans which move prisoners between courts and prisons in London will decide whether a young adult on remand is too much of a suicide risk to be held at an adult prison and should be sent instead to Feltham young offender institution.
Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said she was horrified that the private escorts were being entrusted with deciding who might not make it through the night in an adult jail when even experienced mental health professionals struggled to assess the risks.
It's "Time to stop locking up so many children and young people."
Utter cruelty, corporate
Utter cruelty, corporate manslaughter in waiting. This is treating people as trash, fucking disgraceful.
I think Rick has made a very
I think Rick has made a very succinct comment regarding this matter, it is indeed fucking disgraceful. In many reports including that of the last link supplied I find the comment that the young people within our society are being marginalised more and more. There are of course many reasons for this but if one wanted an accurate picture of where things are going wrong and the underlying sentiment then we only need pick up a copy of the Daily Mail on occasion and glance at the poisonous invective in there about young people. Many occasions have shown themselves where perhaps the ranting of such columnists as Mel Phillips show how scared the adult population have become of the youth of today. I am of a mind that one of the reasons that such poisonous drivel gains any sort of audience at all is an underlying knowledge that all the problems that are here and are coming are solely the fault of all adults in society today. We are truly to blame for all the things that are wrong that are of significance, the fact that Blair remained in power after such an abysmal failure of Iraq, the fact that the young people trying to make it in the world for the first time are crippled with debt before they even start, the fact that we are unwilling to deal with the issue of housing prices rising beyond the scope of any job outside of an exploitative corporate structure that can deliver the only type of money needed to live, the failure to stop alienating drug users with policies that have failed to work in over 121 years, the failure to provide a decent education with the questions for first year maths university students being marginally less difficult that those I was presented with when I was in my first year of secondary school all in the name of making the government look statistically good, the failure to step out of carbon or even plan for a future without carbon emissions, the continued burying of everything we waste to the point of sending our shit half way round the world to be buried leaving nothing but a legacy of poison for the young people today to pay for for the rest of their lives, the failure of any industry to behave responsibly leaving the young with no choice but to connect and grow to these systems, the failure to engage successfully with other nations in development to help them develop responsibly leaving our youth with a lifetime of issues and deaths that they never caused. Yes there is a lot of poisonous invective out there about a bunch of kids wearing hoods, how could there not be, how could we be anything but scared of watching our failure grow up to a position where it will ask and act upon the question "why did you do this to us?". We treat the young so badly because we are so scared of what they will do when they can do something.