In 2002, a young woman recorded a CD of her experiences in Holloway Prison the previous year, when she was just 16 years.

Listen to the CD (requires Windows Media Player).

CRAE strongly welcomes the Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke's intention to cut prison numbers and focus on rehabiliation. For many years we have campaigned for the removal of children from penal custody. Prison is no place for a child. The small number of children that must be locked up in order to protect the public should be held in local child-centred facilities with highly skilled staff that can meet their needs and enable rehabilitation.

The UK locks up more children than most other industrialised countries.

There have been 30 child deaths in custody since 1990, but not one public inquiry.

The State has approved painful restraint methods which injure, hurt and frighten children.

How we seek to protect the rights of children in custody

• We are challenging the Youth Justice Board's refusal to disclose the full Physical Control in Care manual which governs the use of force in the country's four privately-run child prisons. In July 2010, our case will be heard before an Information Tribunal.
• We lobbied during the passage of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 for a children's custody safeguard to make sure that children are only ever locked up as a very last resort. This followed our lobbying during the passage of the Police and Justice Act 2006. In October 2008, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights made recommendations to the UK Government on ensuring our country's juvenile justice is compliant with human rights. Thomas Hammarberg said: '...a legal safeguard must be introduced to ensure that custody is only ever used as a last resort for children. This would give statutory expression as to the circumstances in which it is appropriate to order the detention of children (i.e. as to what ‘last resort’ means)'. Read the full memorandum here (opens in new website).
• We supported the legal challenge to the use of restraint for good order and discipline in privately run child prisons, which the Court of Appeal declared to be unlawful in July 2008.
• In 2005 and 2007, CRAE wrote to the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture about the use of deliberately painful restraint in child custody. The Committee visited the UK in December 2007, and Ministers subsequently suspended the “nose distraction”. In July 2008, the Government confirmed the “nose distraction” was prohibited permanently. In December 2009, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture urged the Government to 'discontinue the use in juvenile establishments of manual restraint based upon pain compliant methods'. CRAE is pushing for this recommendation to be acted on.
• Through Freedom of Information requests, and working with Parliamentarians, we have gathered evidence of rights violations in child custody and passed this information to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the UN Human Rights Council, as well as to the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights. 
• We contributed in a small way to the Howard League's legal challenge in 2002 on the application of the Children Act 1989 to prisons. Our report 'Rethinking child imprisonment' was used as evidence in the groundbreaking case.
• CRAE's national co-ordinator, Carolyne Willow, was a member of the advisory panel for the Carlile Inquiry, established by the Howard League for Penal Reform to investigate the use of restraint, strip-searching and segregation in child custody. The inquiry reported in February 2006. In March 2006, the Guardian newspaper published a comment piece by Carolyne Willow bringing into the public domain the experiences of children she interviewed in secure training centres as part of the inquiry. In June 2007, another piece was published in the Guardian following remarks by the then interim Chair of the YJB Graham Robb criticising the 'hysterical' nature of the debate on the treatment of children in custody and accusing CRAE and others of not engaging in an adult debate.