Girls in detention
CRIME & PUNISHMENT GILES PLAYFAIR
In its White Paper on the treatment of juvenile offenders (August 1965) the Govern- ment committed itself to a policy of no change regarding detention centres: a decision that must have delighted the courts, which have been making an increasingly abandoned use of them. Earlier this year, however, the Home Office was forced to investigate conditions at Buckley Hall (Rochester) following charges of maltreatment of the inmates published in the Guardian; and, consequentially or not, the Home Secretary announced on 28 July that the operation of detention centres, and 'the cate- gories of young offenders for which they are most suitable,' are to be reviewed by his Ad- visory Council on the Penal System. This move may possibly foreshadow a modification of the Government's policy. But it falls short of honouring the hopes expressed in Crime—A Challenge To Us Al!: the report of the Labour party's study group, issued only a few months before the Government came to power.
The chairman of this group was Lord Long- ford, and its members included Lord Gardiner, Sir Elwyn Jones, Mr Anthony Greenwood and Miss Alice Bacon. By strong implication, they rejected the whole concept of a punitive kind of treatment for juvenile offenders. They were especially doubtful of the value or propriety of applying anything resembling the short, sharp shock treatment to girls. They referred specifically to what was then, and for the moment remains, the one and only girls' detention centre—at Oakamoor, Staffordshire. They recommended that this 'geographically isolated centre' should be replaced by 'a series of quite small homes . . . at the main centres of population, easily accessible to parents and relatives.'
The Labour government's response to this recommendation has thus far been to promise more institutions of a similar kind for girls. There is also a plan to enlarge the present one, which is roughly the equivalent of a combined senior and junior boys' detention centre. It 'receives' girls from all over the country, aged between sixteen and twenty-one: coevally, a differential that makes the potential danger of mutual contamination, inherent in any and every form of institutional treatment, especiaUy marked. If some of these girls can fairly be considered prima facie suitable candidates for a taste of strict discipline and regimentation. others are clearly misfits. The inmate popula- tion has included prostitutes convicted of soliciting, young mothers, and girls suffering from more or less severe mental dis. orders. When I visited the place some months ago, one graduate was described to me by k, staff member as having been 'violent without knowing it.'
Like other detention centres, the building is caged in by a high wired fence. The inmate, are not subjected to quite such a tough regimt as they would be if they were boys. At tht. same time, they are all of them, children and adolescents alike, under the constant super vision of officers in uniform. While they are evidently well fed, and, so far as it is possible to tell during a prearranged visit, kindly looked after, the conditions of their confinement art in other respects considerably more painful, cu .0,t -any rate less privileged, than those which borstal girls or women prisoners undergo.
Smoking is forbidden them; so is make-up There is no television for them to watch, and «about the gayest thing that happens during theif evening 'association' period is when one of the officers in attendance plays pop records on a gramophone, although even then they are not allowed to dance or forget where they are They sleep in dormitories, light, airy and formidably spotless, but starkly barren of decorations or personal touches; no rugs on the floors, no pin-ups on the walls—not even family photographs. Their waking hours art- minutely regimented. A working day begins fot them at 6.30 a.m., when they are told to gel up, and ends with prayers at 9.15 p.m. Though the prayers are supposed not to be compulsory. one is seriously assured that these (presump- tively) extraordinarily anti-social girls invari- „Ably show themselves willing and eager to say them.
Everything else in their ordered life is com- pulsory, though. The institution places con siderable emphasis on bodily fitness and per sonal cleanliness. A bath must be taken daily and times are set aside for washing and changing. There is a half-hour period reserved in the mornings for physical drill, and another period in the afternoon for organised games. Otherwise, the 'training' employed tt fit the girls for freedom differs little fror prison training, which is to say it is mostly a matter of putting them to more or less un skilled labour, such as reconditioning used bottle-tops and gardening. This is admixe. with a token amount of education. Classes are held every evening from five to seven in a variety of subjects, among them social studie, art, English and hygiene; but since not on of these subjects is taught more than once week, it is hard to see how, during only three months, which is usually the maximum sentenct served, the students can get much of a ground ing in any of them.
Clearly, then, the institution does not an. cannot serve any such constructive purposes as, in the opinion of the Labour party's study group, would alone justify the existence of a girls' detention centre. But it can be seriously faulted on a quite different ground. When de- tention centres were introduced under the 1948 Criminal Justice Act, there appeared to be some doubt in administrative circles about how precisely this new method of dealing with juvenile delinquency was actually to be de- veloped. Granted that the primary objective was deterrence, the difficulty remained of recon- ciling the treatment with the ideals of a sup- posedly enlightened and progressive penal system. On one point at least, Sir Lionel Fox, the then chairman of the Prison Commission, enter- tained no doubt. The 'short, sharp shock' of the detention centre would have to be made something wholly distinct from the 'short, sharp lesson' (how slight are the changes in penologi- cal jargon!) of a taste of imprisonment. 'A centre,' he wrote (1951), 'must be separated entirely, not only from the premises of a prison, but from the idea and ambience of a prison. There must be no names or practices in it connecting it with the prison system in any way.' (Italics mine.) If one were to stretch a few points—over- look such features as secure perimeters, cen- sorship of letters, officers in uniform, punish- ment cells and so on—one might argue that Sir Lionel's pledge has been honoured in the case of all eighteen detention centres for boys that have since come into being. But it has been manifestly violated in the case of the girls' detention centre.
For the institution is situated within the grounds of an open prison for women; and by contrast with the prison itself, which is a pleasant-looking country house, whose exterior is unmarked by any tell-tale signs of its con- version for custodial use, the centre has rather the appearance, from the outside, of a private zoo on an eccentric landowner's estate. Its surrounding fence means that the two buildings are effectively isolated from one another. But they are no more than a few hundred yards apart, and they are both called by the same name—Moor Court. As if to make this identification complete, they also have the same governor.
Nevertheless, the children and adolescents who find themselves locked up at Moor Court are expected to believe that what they are suffering is not imprisonment. Maybe they do believe it. But if so, they can hardly fail to conclude, with evidence under their very eyes of the comparatively lenient treatment their adult neighbours are receiving, that imprison- ment is much to be preferred, and that the worst that can ever be done to them is being done. This surely undermines even the theoretic point of the short, sharp shock tech- nique in their case. For instead of teaching them an unforgettable deterrent lesson, it would seem as likely, in the long term, to act as a kind of insulation against their fear of future consequences should they continue to commit crimes.
Yet despite all this, the Labour party in office has underwritten the Moor Court deten- tion centre, and one can think of no reasonable explanation of this particular example of prag- matic government, unless pragmatic government is to be equated with do-nothing government. It is certainly a mournful reflection that Miss Alice Bacon, one of the authors of Crime—A Challenge To Us All, was until the last re- shuffle Minister of State at the Home Office; and that there was once no more ardent advocate of radical penal reform than her suc- cessor, Lord Stonham, who, in his previous position as Under-Secretary of State, has had 'special responsibility' for the Prison Depart- ment.
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