Well aside from the fact that post the [Education Act 1996]
and prior to the [Human Rights Act 1998] ‘Britain was
unique in Europe because it retained corporal punishment in
some schools’ and given that s.36 of the [Crime and Disorder
Act 1998] saw of the final element of capital punishment in
times of [peace], some might ask (perhaps with legitimacy)
whether it is appropriate to question how the state manages
delinquent or belligerent children. They won’t swing from
the gallows at least - even if an act of treason is committed.
children in such proportions and (ii) what if any are the
prominent or recurring themes. A trick question of sort
in that the former is so patently involved in the latter and
of-course there exist many variables - but as indicated by
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary it does merit
discussion.
Commenting on the vital necessity that members of the
Police differentiate between the need to protect and the need
to exercise powers of arrest the body said..
But what about today?
For a start according to the Ministry of Justice we are
arresting, sentencing and imprisoning less and less of our
children each year, very laudable. Latestdata states that
126,809 children in England and Wales were arrested
for[notifiable] offences in a given year, accounting for 10.5%
of [all] arrests within that year, 90,769 of which resulted in
either (i) conviction (ii) formal caution or (iii) other out of
court disposals.
Worrying?
Perhaps more so is that per head of population, the rate of
juvenile first time entrants remains higher than for adults.
This presents a number of questions, two of which are
obvious but contrasting, (i) why are the police arresting
‘The bricks and mortar of the custody suite
and the police cell do not, and cannot make
this distinction. As a result, some of the most
vulnerable in our society may be subject to the
same physical conditions and treatment as some
of the most harmful’.
The calamity of being imprisoned as a child is perhaps
reflected no more so than in the [recorded] instances of self
harm among incarcerated children. Even if current data is
analysed favorably from an MOJ perspective eg not following
the median percentage, it reveals that in the recorded year
‘There were 1,318 incidents of self harm’ - in mitigation this
is a reduction of eight percent since the last recorded year,
but it is a valid concern that The child custody population at
the end of July 2015 was 1,003 with an occupancy rate of
38 the barrister Hilary Term 2016
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