Introduction

This chapter engages with one of the most controversial issues in contemporary youth justice: child deaths in custodial institutions. The chapter maps recent trends in child imprisonment in England and Wales and reviews what is known about the biographies of child prisoners, together with the treatment and conditions that they experience within the juvenile secure estate. It presents an overview of ‘safer custody’ reforms and their limitations alongside a critical assessment of the investigation and inquest processes that typically follow child deaths in penal custody. We argue that knowledge of child deaths in the juvenile secure estate is conventionally fragmented and limited in scope. More recent recognition of the issues involved, however, has led to demands for closer scrutiny and public inquiry. Building upon this, the chapter concludes by summarising the case for comprehensive independent inquiry into child deaths in the juvenile secure estate and related questions of contemporary youth justice policy.

Child imprisonment and child prisoners

England and Wales comprises one of the most punitive criminal justice jurisdictions in the modern world. In general, its level of imprisonment ‘places it above the mid-point in the World List; it is the highest amongst countries of the European Union’ (Walmsley, 2003, p 1). More specifically, greater numbers of children are imprisoned in England and Wales than in most other industrialised democratic countries in the world (YJB, 2004; Goldson and Muncie, 2006; Muncie and Goldson, 2006; Hazel, 2008; Muncie, 2008). Several commentators have detailed the dramatic expansion of child imprisonment over the last 15 years or so and there is little purpose in replicating such analytical accounts here (see, for example, Goldson, 2002a, 2006a, 2006b; Nacro, 2003, 2005). Perhaps most significantly, the pattern of penal expansion is seemingly unrelenting: ‘the average number of children and young people in custody during 2007/08 was 2,942 – 196 more than in 2004/05, when the average was 2,746’ (YJB, 2008, p 24). This all serves to impose serious pressure on the juvenile secure estate, which, according to Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons (2008, p 47), ‘is over-used, under-resourced and increasingly tired’.

The consolidating pattern of penal expansion and the operational strain that it exacts are particularly problematic given the complex and pressing needs of child prisoners. Indeed, child prisoners are routinely drawn from some of the most structurally disadvantaged families, neighbourhoods and communities.