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 wants all children removed 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.

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 follows our lobbying during the passage of the Police and Justice Act 2006. In the House of Commons, the Home Office Minister Fiona Mactaggert MP praised the ‘excellent intentions’ behind our proposal. A range of children's, youth and prison reform organisations supported us. Unfortunately, we were not successful.

In 2005 and 2007, CRAE wrote to the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture to inform it of the use of deliberately painful restraint in child custody. The Committee visited the UK in December 2007, and Ministers subsequently suspended the “nose distraction”. The Government has recently (July 2008) confirmed the “nose distraction” is prohibited permanently. We continue to collect information, lobby Government and we are exploring ways of legally challenging abusive treatment in custody. We submitted evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Committee's inquiry on the use of restraint in secure training centres, and to the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman's (PPO) inquiry into the care and treatment of a young woman in prison. We note the resignation of the PPO in June, following his claim that the Prison Service was interfering with the inquiry.

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.