IT WAS a spring evening, soon after nine o’clock. Powerful hands gripped the boy. He was struggling, hysterical, violent; but he was only 15, under 5ft foot and less than 7st, and there were two men and a woman on him. It didn’t take him long to die.

The adults never meant to go that far; they were doing only what was normal in their world, and knew what was allowed for such children as this. Children, from the age of 12, can be controlled with sharp pain, routinely stripped naked, have their genitals forcibly examined and be shut in bare cells without natural light, furniture or lavatory. Such force happens a dozen times every week, across the country.

Which country? Can’t be Britain, surely. Not Britain, where MPs are so tender towards children that they spend hours of parliamentary time trying to criminalise the mildest domestic slap, and where the Government lavishes even more in making baroque arrangements to put CCTV cameras in hedges in case people set dogs on foxes. It can’t be Britain, where a teacher of impeccable reputation may be suspended for a year on a suspicion that he may have patted a child’s bottom; not Britain, where primary school teachers are told not to put sun cream or plasters on children lest their intentions be misconstrued and land them in the dock. No: the stripping, the isolation cells, the twisting and gripping restraints which injure 100 children a year cannot be happening in official institutions here. Obviously not. A modern government would never stand for it.

But they do. And we, as a nation, tolerate it. Gareth Myatt’s death under restraint in a “secure training centre” last April produced a brief stir; suicides such as that of the 14-year-old Adam Rickwood, last month, bring only rueful headshaking. He was the youngest person to die in state custody in any Western democracy in modern times, but there you go. These children, after all, are in jail. They’re trouble. Even at 12 or 13, they’re seen as dangers, so once they are swept off the streets we prefer them kept out of sight.

They are in the powerful and — we vaguely assume — benign care of the State. Unless they are very lucky and go to a local authority secure unit (where so far nobody has died) they will be in prison, or in a secure training centre (STC). The Conservative Government (Kenneth Clarke, actually, in his brief tenure as Home Secretary) bestowed this reassuring name on the new child prisons, cannily insisting that even some troubled little girl of 12 should never be referred to as a child but as a “trainee”.

We know that STCs are run privately for profit, but presumably we accept this as part of the modern, efficient economy. We assume — what with the UN convention on the rights of the child, and the Human Rights Act, and all that — that such children get adequate education, exercise, and socialisation. We assume that they will come out having learnt, by example and precept, about civilised behaviour.

We are wrong. Nearly a third of inmates who leave these “training” centres reoffend within a month. And not only have two children died in STCs — and 25 more in mainstream prisons since 1990 — but things are actually getting worse, or potentially worse. The Home Office — after the Howard League for Penal Reform got a successful judicial review over the ministry’s ignoring of the Children Act — has rewritten the Order to Governors on the subject. It comes into force this month, though there has been no consultation. The new order, incredibly, is actually vaguer: despite statements of principle it gives no clear orders on how many hours children must spend out of a cell and in purposeful activity; there are no minimum hours of education laid down. Nor is there a distinction between treatment of girls and boys in matters of stripping and hygiene. All these things, it says, are defined in a “service level agreement” between the Prison Service and the Home Office.

The snag is that nobody is allowed to see this service agreement: Frances Crook, of the Howard League, was told it is “commercially confidential”. What? Between the Home Office and the Prison Service? The only reason for commercial sensitivity, not an edifying one, would be if the Government firmly planned to privatise all child custody. Thus governors who wish to know what they have to do for 12 to 17-year-olds in their care must now refer to two long documents, one of which is kept secret from parents, press, public and prison watchdogs. Hmmmm.

As for the matter of physical cruelties, the Howard League was astonished to learn that with only 190 children in these STCs, many of them girls, there were 11,500 instances of forcible restraint in five years, and 200 injuries (some hospitalised) in the past two. One girl, according to the Chief Inspector of Prisons, was subjected to such treatment 46 times.

The system of “pain compliant restraint” involves twisting an arm behind the back and bending the subject over; it is effective in adult prisons, and enables us to have warders without guns and truncheons. However, teenagers’ arms and shoulders break more easily. The Artful Dodger’s joints are not fixed as firmly as those of Bill Sykes the burglar. They get hurt, sometimes seriously. Given that the Government is terribly keen on sending “messages ” about violence — note the smacking law again — it might mildly be observed that the message being given to young offenders here is not a useful one.

Look, there are 2,800 children in custody. They may have behaved like little swine, they may be lippy and lairy and half off their heads, but they are in our care. Many of them have only ever experienced chaotic lives and casual violence: custody should be an introduction to civilised values and human respect. And it rarely is. And we ought to care, not just out of human kindness, but because if we do not care, and do not make it a live political issue which governments cannot ignore, we are storing up hideous trouble for the future

The Howard League for Penal Reform is setting up a major investigation, under Lord Carlile, into the treatment of children in penal institutions. It will be independent, and open. They need £50,000 to fund it. I hope we manage to give it to them — www.howardleague.org — but it would be better if it had not become so woefully necessary.

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