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Chris Grayling backs a return to borstals for youth offenders

A TORY project to take Britain back to borstals horrified human rights campaigners and MPs alike yesterday over its use of violence to “discipline” children.

Justice Minister Chris Grayling touted detailed plans for an £85 million “secure college” in Leicestershire as part of his sweeping changes to the justice system.

The prison is expected to hold up to 320 offenders between the ages of 12 and 17, with Mr Grayling insisting it represented a shift away from the “traditional environment of bars on windows.”

But legislation authorising the college’s creation gives prison staff free rein to wield “reasonable force where necessary to ensure good order and discipline.”

Westminster’s joint committee on human rights said yesterday the Bill’s wording represented a clear breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. 

Instead the Bill should allow “minimum force” only as a last resort to prevent harm to the child or others.

The Howard League for Penal Reform’s Frances Crook said she welcomed the MPs’ stand.

She said: “MPs have recognised that allowing prison officers to restrain children violently, simply if they don’t follow orders, is illegal and will put lives at risk.

“It is symptomatic of the kind of institution that ministers are proposing — not a college with education at its heart, but a giant prison where human rights are infringed and physical violence becomes part of the rules.

“Ministers must abandon the idea of a Victorian child jail that will waste money and young lives.”

An inquiry by the House of Commons justice committee last year found more than 8,000 incidents of physical restraint in young offender institutions in 2011-12, with 254 cases leading to the child’s injury.

In 2012 the prisons inspectorate found 44 per cent of young male black and Asian detainees had been physically restrained, compared with 32 per cent of young white men.

The “secure college” announcement also comes a decade after the deaths of Adam Rickwood, 14, and Gareth Myatt, 15, following two separate restraint incidents in privately-run “secure training” centres in 2004.

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