Violence, illegal force, abuse: who will remove G4S from children’s prisons?
Eric Allison and Simon Hattenstone: After another report damning the security giant, at Oakhill secure training centre, Dominic Raab must revoke its contract
Children locked in their rooms for up to 23 hours a day, young teenagers exposed to violence and excessive force, safeguarding systems in disarray: for those of us familiar with G4S’s record of running prisons, these appalling practices found at Oakhill secure training centre, a children’s prison in Milton Keynes, come as no surprise.
A door being closed by a prison guard
Children locked in rooms at youth prison up to 23 hours a day – report
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The security giant G4S has a long and undistinguished history of running children’s prisons – something that the new justice secretary, Dominic Raab, who has been in post for less than two months, is evidently still naive about. The findings from Oakhill last month by the joint inspectorates Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission and HM Inspectorate of Prisons were so damning that they issued an urgent notification to Raab to respond with proposals to remedy the situation within 28 days. The situation at Oakhill was “unacceptable”, he tweeted; the details of the report “truly shocking”.But these results are not shocking at all, in fact they are horribly familiar – a repetition of failings and abuses that have occurred ever since the security giant opened the very first secure training centre (STC), Medway, in Kent, in April 1998. By January 1999 there had been a riot there, and a report from the social services inspectorate concluded that children were subject to “excessive use of force”, including neck and wrist restraints.
In 2004, 15-year-old Gareth Myatt died three days into his sentence after being restrained by three G4S officers at Rainsbrook STC near Rugby in Warwickshire. The restraint followed his refusal to clean a sandwich toaster. Myatt was under 5ft tall and weighed six and a half stone; one of the restraining officers was 6ft tall and weighed 16 stone. During the restraint Myatt said he could not breathe. He was told: “If you can talk, you can breathe.” He died from positional asphyxia, choking on his own vomit.
In 2016, Panorama secretly filmed staff physically abusing children at Medway, while the Guardian revealed similar abuses had been reported to G4S and all the relevant monitoring bodies as far back as 2003, but nothing had been done about it. The Guardian also interviewed two women who had been detained in Medway as children in 2010. Roni Moss was left locked in her room by herself while having a miscarriage at the age of 15, while Lela Xhemajli, also 15 when she was imprisoned, alleged that her face was repeatedly smashed on icy ground by a G4S officer.
These investigations led to G4S being stripped of its contract to run Medway STC, and the company announcing it was pulling out of the youth prisons sector in 2016. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) announced that STCs would be replaced by secure schools, and that the first one would open on the Medway site in 2020. Five years on, it is yet to open – and G4S is still running Oakhill.
G4S is clearly recidivist. The inspectorates made a preliminary visit to Oakhill, which currently holds 46 boys between the ages of 12-17, in September after a whistleblower had alleged abuses to the children’s rights charity Article 39. They found conditions that “barely met minimum standards of human decency”. When they returned in October for a full inspection, the list of failings was extensive. Unjustifiable – and in some cases unlawful – levels of force were being used by staff on children as young as 15; children experienced frequent incidents of violence; allegations made about staff abuses were not passed to the local authority by G4S, contrary to statutory guidance; children had access to inappropriate adult content via televisions in their rooms.
To be fair, G4S is not the only private security company that has failed the children in its care. In June this year, the inspectorates ruled that serious and widespread failings at Rainsbrook, run by the US-based contractor MTC, had put children and staff at risk of harm. After children told inspectors they feared that someone was going to die or be seriously harmed, the inspectorates triggered an urgent notification for the second time in six months. The MoJ then removed the children from the centre; some were transferred to Oakhill.
In August 2004, 14-year-old Adam Rickwood hanged himself after being restrained at Hassockfield STC in County Durham by four Serco officers using a technique known as “nose distraction” – a painful chop to the nose. The inquest jury concluded that the restraint was unlawful and contributed to the decision to take his own life
The government has shown itself equally incapable of looking after our incarcerated children. In 2019, the inspectorates reported that staff at Medway, by now run by the MoJ, were still restraining young people unlawfully.
Britain’s
secure training centres are simply not fit for purpose. It is a change
of culture that is needed, not a change of management or name. These
institutions must focus on education and rehabilitation as the Spanish do so successfully,
rather than the punishment and pain they have subjected children to.
They should be run by qualified carers with ambitions for the children
rather than unqualified custody officers, many of whom see their job as
metaphorically (and sometimes literally) squashing them.
But in the short term, the justice secretary has to deal with Oakhill and G4S. And surely Raab can only reach one conclusion when he responds to the urgent notification about Oakhill within the coming week. G4S has shown time and again that it cannot be trusted to care for vulnerable children. It must be relieved of its contract and banned from running our children’s prisons. This will be the first step in fixing a broken system.
Eric Allison is the Guardian’s prisons correspondent; Simon Hattenstone is a Guardian writer
