Secure Accommodation in Child Care

'Between Hospital and Prison or Thereabouts?'

Robert Harris, Professor Noel W Timms, Noel Timms

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134924318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médecine
• Subtopic: Théorie, pratique et référence de la médecine

For some children secure accommodation seems to be the only way to control their disparate number of "problems". But why is this so, and from what criteria do social work professionals decide that a child should be put into secure accommodation? In Secure Accommodation in Child Care the authors use an empirical study of secure accommodation as a basis for an analysis of the relations between the state, the family and the "difficult" child. By looking at court procedures, social workers and the children themselves they explain how professionals and children make sense of their worlds, and how they translate that "sense" into personal or professional action.
Secure Accommodation in Child Care is essential reading for social service managers, social policy makers, social workers and health care professionals as well as for students and lecturers of social policy and social work.

Part I

Theoretical background

History, literature and social theory

1 Secure accommodation outlined

In the war waged by the State against irregular families … the child is no more than a pretext and a hostage. Parental authority is an instrument distributed by the State, which the State consequently has the power to retract. The absolute weapon of those who inspect how families run their lives is to take away, or threaten to take away, the children. All children who are ‘guilty’ or ‘unhappy’ or ‘irregular’ or ‘neglected’, to use the expressions most current in the mouths of philanthropists, come from a poorly kept family.

(Meyer 1983: 11–12)

What we’ve never done is give the opportunity for children to stay in secure accommodation without a secure order, which is an interesting way to use it.

(Interviewee)

SECURE ACCOMMODATION: AMBIGUITY IN ACTION

Secure accommodation is available to, and normally provided by, local authorities for use in respect of three main categories of youngster: children¹ committed to care,² those remanded awaiting trial or sentence³ and those serving sentences of detention under the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 (section 53). We shall have more to say about these youngsters later.

Since 1983, in order to hold a youngster in secure accommodation for more than 72 hours in any 28-day period a local authority has had to obtain an authorisation from a juvenile court (see Appendix A). Prior to this there existed few restrictions on local authorities’ use of such accommodation, and our research was commissioned to study the impact of the new legislation on the practices of local authorities. At the time of the study an authorisation could be granted on one of two main grounds: briefly, that the child, having a history of absconding, was likely to abscond again and, if he did so, was likely to put his physical, mental or moral welfare at risk;⁴ or that the child, if not kept in secure accommodation, was likely to harm himself or others. The length of time a child may be held in secure accommodation is specified by regulation; then as now it was 3 months at a first hearing and 6 months on renewal.

In spite of occasional appearances to the contrary, an authorisation is not a sentence; indeed the local authority is not empowered to hold a youngster in secure accommodation once the circumstances which led to the making of the authorisation have ceased to exist: the 3- and 6-month periods are maxima, and early release is formally encouraged. As we shall see later, however, things are not so simple in practice.

Secure accommodation is a fundamentally ambiguous facility, and to view it in isolation from the much larger child-care and delinquency systems of which it is a part is to miss both the nature and significance of this ambiguity. Secure accommodation is both incarceration and an alternative to incarceration, a form of control imposed in order that care can be provided. This has certain ramifications, all of which suggest the likelihood of continuing pressure to expand the system. Politically, as a humane form of custody with therapeutic aspirations it has an attractiveness to both the liberal rehabilitative and the conservative law and order lobbies; professionally, by embracing both youngsters who would otherwise be in less pleasant institutions and those who would otherwise be in open conditions it has created pressure for more ‘experts’, better trained and with enhanced influence and status. In secure accommodation the penal and the therapeutic, the controlling and the caring converge, and the resulting ambiguity is central to the system’s logic. Secure accommodation is the point at which the protection of children and the protection of others against those same children merge into a single carceral disposal.⁵

Ambiguity presents problems and opportunities for both policy makers and front-line professional workers, and the rules of engagement derive ultimately from the fact that secure accommodation seeks to address three contested issues, all of them intrinsically complex as well as controversial – those of needs, rights and interests. The necessity of maintaining an equilibrium among these concepts, affording sovereignty to none, means that the conventional attempt to eliminate ambiguity by rule making can only take us so far. For not only are rules regularly ignored or manipulated by those subject to them, but they are by nature general, while each ‘case’ is unique, with its own combination of characteristics seldom amenable to simple or routine interventions: applying general rules to specific cases necessitates discretion, for there is seldom only one possible answer. This point is accentuated when a single disposition is required, as this one is, to engage with concepts which, if unyoked from each other, would take us in quite different directions. Accordingly as we progress we shall see that attempts to use secure accommodation solely within a framework of rights or needs or interests is by no means to simplify but to be simplistic.

Obviously ambiguity is by no means unique to secure accommodation. Because it facilitates strategic and flexible policy implementation it is indispensable to many penal disposals (Harris and Webb 1987: 163), other social policies (Harris 1990) and indeed the interpretation of statute generally (Zander 1980: ch. 2). In criminal justice it reflects the belief that there is seldom a ‘right’ sentence in a given case, and allows for changes in circumstance during the course of the disposal. Both community service orders and the range of prisons, from ‘open’⁶ establishments on the South coast to dungeon-like institutions in remote corners of northern England, provide just this form of manoeuvrability: the finer a system’s calibrations the greater its utility (Cohen 1985; Harris and Webb 1987).⁷ The calibrations both build in a legitimate and necessary role for experts (who inevitably determine these fraught allocations) and create a logical system of rewards and punishments as individuals are, on the basis of their conduct and response to treatment, moved along the continuum of harshness and care. This in turn transforms the sentence from an event into a process, a site for a succession of determinations influenced less by the original crime than by the subsequent behaviour of the criminal.

Secure accommodation, in embracing not only different categories of offender but also non-offenders, seeks simultaneously to meet the needs of disturbed or unfortunate youngsters and to inject discipline and structure into the lives of the deviant young. For secure accommodation is precisely the locus in which the question of whether a child has committed an offence or is in some other way problematic ceases to matter. And the decisiveness of this expression of the state’s interest in the realm of family and childhood deviance teaches us much both about the state and about its management of families and children. This is why, if we are to understand secure accommodation, we cannot examine secure accommodation alone. This first chapter, therefore, provides both basic information about the system and some of the analytic equipment necessary to enable us to complete our journey in reasonable shape.

At the most abstract level, extracted from their historical, social, political, administrative and cultural contexts, the words ‘secure’ and ‘accommodation’ are of course meaningless. Even if we concede a general area of shared understanding – that ‘secure accommodation’ is an amalgam of the name given to certain categories of buildings of containment and the laws which permit that containment – the ‘meaning’ of such buildings and such laws derives both from the social purpose of holding children in this way and from the manner in which the holding relates to other options available.

The taken-for-granted assumption that there must be secure accommodation arises from certain historical trends in child-care policy. In a long historical perspective these have involved the gradual distancing of provisions for juvenile offenders and adult criminals, and the complementary merging of facilities for delinquents and needy children (Heywood 1978; Packman 1981; Harris and Webb 1987). These shifts have not always been smooth; they too have about them an ambiguity acknowledging the awkward coexistence of deprivation and malevolence, for the misbehaviour of the young is conventionally regarded as a blend of personal or social misery and deliberate crime, and the social response to delinquency must accordingly involve the coexistence of the notions that crime is the product of external social forces and that it is deliberately chosen. The fates may not have dealt a good hand to many of the children who concern us in this book, but in contemporary political discourse the children are none the less blameworthy for succumbing to temptation.

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY: THEMES AND ISSUES

Until the early nineteenth century there was no readily available concept of juvenile delinquency. This is not to deny that youngsters committed crimes, that the period we would now term ‘adolescence’ was perceived to be ‘difficult’, that there existed humane judges, or that day-to-day accommodations were made to what was, then as now, perceived as the immaturity of youth. It is rather to argue that since ‘juvenile delinquency’ was not of a distinctive form no specific strategies had been created to deal with it.

Such strategies began in mid-century, stemming, depending on our approach to history, from the efforts of individual ‘great men (or in this case women) of history’ who by passion, commitment and eloquence swayed nations to their point of view; from a collective humane concern about the social costs of industrialisation; or from the class interests of the mercantile bourgeoisie in stemming the threat of revolution which had materialised in many countries in continental Europe between 1789 and 1848, and in creating a compliant labour force for the mills and factories. As our own story unfolds, however, it will become apparent that to us none of these encapsulated ideas adequately embraces the inchoate nature of the social understanding of, and response to, the amalgam of youthful experience and behaviour which we term ‘delinquency’. For this book does not posit policy development as linear and progressive, with the state moving inexorably towards greater rationality, efficiency or humanity. Our image, on the contrary, is of the various arms of an anything but monolithic state grappling as best they can, first with the often unanswerable problems posed by deviant and distressed children and secondly with the unintended consequences of their own earlier and unsuccessful endeavours.

Before the ‘creation’ of juvenile delinquency there existed conceptually distinct categories of childhood need and adult crime. The crucial contribution of the concept juvenile delinquency to understanding each was that it bridged the two. Juvenile delinquency, though in contemporary discourse it is used synonymously with ‘juvenile crime’, refers, literally, to ‘neglect of duty’, and involves simultaneously addressing on the one hand immaturity and deprivation, and on the other criminality, all of these being inextricably intertwined in the small person of the child. And it is essential to understand that the carceral structures created as a response to juvenile delinquency are not mere responses to it but central aspects of the social construction of the concept itself (Foucault 1977). To have been a ‘provie [approved school] boy’ or a ‘Borstal boy’ is to carry a signification not only of the institution in which one happens to have been contained but of one’s own characteristics, experiences and conduct. Hence:

The delinquent is not the author of a criminal act pure and simple, rather the delinquent is a life, a collection of biographical details and psychological characteristics. The delinquent is also ‘an object’ in a field of knowledge, a field patrolled by experts – jurists, but also psychologists, social workers, in short a whole series of professional biographers, whose task has been to change the reference point of criminality from the act to the life.

(Boyne 1990: 116)

This intertwining has complicated the notions of both childhood and crime (see, for example, Bailey 1987), creating policy problems to which secure accommodation constitutes one attempted solution. So our image of ‘childhood’ carries traces of self-seeking voluntarism and helplessness or immaturity; the child cries out both to be socialised and to be loved. And though lower-class children in particular may experience disadvantage and pain they have opportunities too, which they must be encouraged to grasp. It is in part in furtherance of this that the state’s functions turn both on meeting needs and interests and on protecting rights. When, however, the helping hand of the benign state is spurned and the crimes continue, persuasion and control become necessary. While this does not make the benignity of the state a fraud, it endows it with a certain conditionality, rendering it, perhaps, a clause in an individually renegotiated social contract: the state gives more to the child, but in return expects more back.

The child delinquent, therefore, is to be punished yet helped, and in varying proportions depending on the nature of the ‘case’ as determined by law and professional opinion. Nor, however, can the family which, both responsible and not responsible, culpable and not culpable, plays a complex role, be left outside of this process: while it is over the child that the court stands in judgment, the judgment is of a particular and qualified kind which by no means excludes the possibility of advising or rebuking the parents. While allowances are made because, had the child had better parents he or she would not be in trouble, the existence of bad parents is of itself insufficient justification for delinquency. How else, therefore, is the state to respond but by an amalgam of care and control directed not solely at the child but at the family too? However complex in practice sustaining such a duality may be, analytically it is difficult to see how else to proceed.

These seemingly contradictory responses to the delinquent child have different historical traces. We are carriers of successive ‘dominant’ views of history, cumulatively not substitutively, and these views coalesce to ‘create’ today’s images of childhood. These images are not simple, and we must avoid the trap of believing that we have an agreed ‘image of childhood’ which guides our actions and beliefs. First, except in the case of very young children we seldom regard the child as qualitatively different from the adult; secondly, we do not regard children of all ages as homogeneous in the way that we may conceive, say, of a ‘responsible’ adult; thirdly, we cannot decide how to determine whether and to what extent children can exercise the responsibilities and discharge the obligations of citizenship (Harris, J. 1982); and fourthly, we tend to regard ‘childhood’ as a voyage, a form of progress towards the threshold of maturity. Hence it is ‘obvious’ that the 15-year-old should be more mature than the 10-year-old in a way that it is not ‘obvious’ that a 35-year-old should be more mature than a 30-year-old. The mutability of childhood, which contrasts so strikingly with the relative stasis of adulthood (at least until the onset of old age), offers a bewildering and contradictory array of images on which to draw in a particular ‘case’. So complex is this activity indeed that it can only be undertaken by experts, whose selection and application of explanatory theories are prerequisites for authoritative judgements (Harris and Webb 1987: ch. 2).

This is, of course, very much a twentieth-century perspective from which to view the nineteenth century’s nascent attempts to create structures to address this phenomenon of delinquency. In spite of piecemeal attempts to distinguish the treatment of young from that of adult offenders in the early years of the last century (Harris and Webb 1987: 10–11), it was reformatory and industrial schools, instituted in the 1850s, which were the most significant developments, signifying as they did the more systematic segregation of young and adult offenders. Reformatory schools, for Mary Carpenter’s designated ‘dangerous classes’, received legislative sanction in the Youthful Offenders Act 1854, quickly becoming the standard disposal for a second offence (though always following a period of hard labour, in order both that punishment was inflicted and that the child arrived suitably chastened). Industrial schools were initially for those ‘at risk’ non-offenders designated the ‘perishing classes’ (Carpenter 1851; see also Manton 1976).

We see in this realignment of adult criminals, juvenile criminals and needy children only an interim stage in the reconceptualisation of delinquency which has since occurred. The creation of reforming institutions for youthful offenders and, separately from that, of corrective institutions for the wayward pre-delinquent constitutes an acknowledgement of the ‘separateness’ of adult and young offenders but not yet of the relative interchangeability of the dangerous and perishing classes. The inadequacies of this division, however, quickly became manifest. The perishing classes contained many vagrants, a group which, because they would not stay ‘placed’, had traditionally worried the ruling classes. One contemporary account noted that two-thirds of London criminals had ‘migratory habits’ (Day 1858: 76; see also Tobias 1972: ch. 5; and Priestley 1985: 57), and the removal of street children who seemed at once miserable and threatening was attractive both to the self-interested bourgeoisie and to the reforming conscience. The Industrial Schools Act was passed in 1857 and steadily extended, notably in 1866 and 1908, by which time was permitted the commitment of children aged 7 to 14 who were vagrant, begging, destitute because their parents were serving penal servitude, under the care of a drunken or criminal guardian, frequenting the company of reputed thieves or prostitutes or residing in premises used for prostitution.

Though provisions of this kind were not new, and it may indeed be that the idea of industrial schools is ‘as old as the poor law’ (Rose 1967: 4), the second half of the nineteenth century, in which industrial schools were holding some 15,000 children at any one time, remains the apotheosis of the attempt at the institutional socialisation of the young. A trade-off began to occur between unpleasantness and length of sentence, and so great was political confidence in the reformatory school system that by the end of the century even the short periods of pre-reformatory hard labour were abolished (Reformatory School...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Theoretical background: history, literature and social theory
• Part II Secure accommodation: some themes and issues from an empirical study
• Appendix A: Child Care Act 1980, section 21A
• Appendix B: Children Act 1989, section 25
• Appendix C: Extract from the Criminal Justice Act 1991, section 60
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index