SUICIDE FEAR FOR TEEN VICTIMS OF BLUNKETT'S GET-TOUGH RULES

Children Behind Bars: As 12-Year-Old 'Bail Bandits' Are Sent Into Custody,
Martin Bright Launches The Observer's Campaign With The Children's Society

The teenager made it clear what would happen to Robert Bentley if the two
boys were forced to share a cell. 'If you don't give me my own cell, I'm
going to beat him up,' he spat at police.

Bentley had been on remand at the notorious Feltham Young Offenders
Institution and was due to appear on a burglary charge for stealing 1,000
cigarettes. The 17-year-old was taken to the police cells before a court
hearing in Slough four months ago. He never made it. Instead he was taken
to hospital with blood streaming from his broken jaw after his cellmate
carried out his threat. The blow's force was so great his bottom jaw was
knocked out of alignment and doctors later fitted a steel plate to hold his
face together. For the three days Bentley spent in hospital, he was chained
to a prison officer.

Bentley was on trial for a first offence that he'd committed to fund his
drug habit. He shoplifted a bottle of whisky while on bail and, under
strict adherence to new guidance from the Home Office, the courts adopted a
two-strikes-and-you're-out policy. Home Secretary David Blunkett wants to
get tough on 'bail bandits' like Bentley and he was sent to one of the
country's harshest youth prison regimes.

On his first night in prison, the time when experts believe children are
most at risk of suicide or self-harm, Bentley was given no treatment for
his drug addiction and had no assessment of his mental state. Later he told
drugs counsellors that he thought about suicide all the time.

'I was a first offender. To put someone inside so unexpectedly, knowing I'd
been stealing because of the habit, was cruel really. I could easily have
killed myself that night. I had my trainers with the laces in them.'

Sheila Quinn, a mental health worker in Manchester, saw her 17-year-old
son, Paul, slip into mental illness after a period on remand in Stoke Heath
Young Offenders Institution in the West Midlands. 'He told me that if he
was still inside on his eighteenth birthday, he would kill himself. He had
never experienced anything like this, and he is now an extremely paranoid
young man,' she said.

Paul had been accused of threatening a friend with a knife during a fight.
When he was released on bail, he began having religious visions and jumped
out of a window. As a result he was sent back to prison, for his own safety
and for mental assessment. Like Bentley, he was a drug user, but he had no
record of violence. All charges against him were later dropped, but Paul
still suffers mental illness brought about, his mother believes, by a
combination of drug abuse and his time spent inside. Sheila Quinn said: 'I
feel passionately that children who should not be in prison in the first
place are being left to rot.'

This weekend a prominent children's charity has described the Government's
policy on youth crime as an abuse of children's human rights. A book to be
published by the Children's Society this week includes interviews with more
than 100 staff and inmates in young offenders' institutions. It describes a
bleak picture of a system struggling to cope with the increasing number of
children being incarcerated.

Vulnerable Inside, by Barry Goldson, shows that Bentley and Paul's
experiences are not unique. In one example, a child with learning
disabilities was remanded in custody for the theft of toffees from a jar of
sweets and criminal damage to the lid of the jar. One prison officer said:
'I think that when the door closes and there is no one else around, the
bravado goes and they realise that they are just children. The thought of
me being locked up alone when I was 15 - it would have scared the hell out
of me.'

But the most shocking testimony of bullying, intimidation, neglect and
self-harm comes from the children themselves. One 16-year-old tells of a
child who committed suicide after bullying: 'This morning, when we came out
for breakfast, the screws said that he had tried to kill himself and he was
in hospital on a life-support machine. At dinner they said he was dead. He
was 16, the same age as me. Everyone was quiet.'

The latest figures show a rise of 21 per cent in the number of 15-year-olds
remanded into prison in the 12 months to April 2001. A quarter of all
15-to-16-year-olds remanded in prison are accused of property offences.

Children's charities are voicing serious concerns about Blunkett's April
announcement that suspects as young as 12 will now be remanded in custody
for persistent petty crimes. The Home Secretary has already ordered 600
places to be made available in secure local authority accommodation in 10
pilot areas and the scheme will go national in September.

The policy is having a knock-on effect in the prison population, with
15-year-olds being moved from secure units into prison to make way for the
younger arrivals. These, in turn, have displaced young offenders into
already overcrowded adult prisons.

Author Barry Goldson, a specialist in youth crime policy at Liverpool
University, said: 'This is morally reprehensible and cuts across any
civilised notion of justice. Children will be imprisoned not because they
have committed serious crimes, but for being a nuisance.'