The prison system is a complex, multi-layered topic. My knowledge and understanding about it is woefully inadequate to write anything of any substance. I shan’t let that stop me from having a go.
I often ride past this place. It evokes memories of my youth. The frontage is iconic for me. This grumpy looking gatehouse sits atop a ridge that glances over the River Medway. The date stone marks where Britain’s first forays into youth custody began. With a group of young offenders being moved from the adult convict prison next door. The solid Victorian brickwork. Symmetrical windows. An imposing entrance designed to convey authority bolstered by the intention to reform. To reshape character through architecture and routine. Whether it has ever worked is another question entirely.
Before this place, boys of sixteen shared cells with adult prisoners. The idea was simple: keep them separate, give them training, don’t abandon them at the gate. The Victorians spoke of “strict classification, purposeful training, and robust aftercare”. Doesn’t sound so out of place nowadays.
The irony is this ridge in Medway has remained central to youth custody ever since. HMP Rochester still operates on the original site with some wings given over to young offenders. A stone’s throw away, Cookham Wood YOI drew an Urgent Notification from inspectors in 2023 for serious concerns about safety and living conditions. Then there’s the infamous Medway Secure Training Centre, which became a national scandal after BBC Panorama exposed the abuse of children in 2016. The site has since been reborn as one of the new secure schools, though that too has faced challenges.
About one in three children released from custody will reoffend within a year. Not quite the transformation those Victorian idealists had in mind. But then again, they were working with the same realities we struggle with today: damaged young lives, limited resources, and the ongoing tension between punishment and rehabilitation.
During my teens the possibility of being “sent to Borstal” went some way to regulating my behaviour. I was not a bad lad but did from time to time skirt the edges of lawfulness. Often bending rules without being a serious troublemaker. Some of the boys whose paths I crossed saw juvenile custody as a rite of passage. It was mainly bravado and most of them never got sent down. Some of the lads that had friends who were not so lucky carried their acquaintance with a vicarious swagger. Seeing them perform like this reinforced the resolve I had not to go that way.
Cycling by the place now, I sometimes think about the young lives that have passed through these institutions. Some will have found their way to better futures while others likley did not. The experiment continues to this day in various forms across the youth estate. Wrestling with the the same questions about how society should respond when young people go astray.
The prison system in England is run down, overcrowded and under resourced. At best it works as a deterrent. Lessons that could have been learned seem to have been ignored or not properly invested in and implemented. Recidivism rates are high especially among the younger population. The principles guiding those early experiments in youth custody have perhaps been lost along the way.
I have no insights or solutions to offer. I just know that writing this had made me think. About second chances. About young people who’ve been mistreated and let down, about those failings being compounded by an inadequate and abusive penal system. Time after time inspection reports raise issues that show the questions raised here in 1902 remain just as relevant today. It seems we’ve learned little if anything from more than a century of trying to get this right.
The National Justice Museum’s blog series on borstals is a good read if you’re minded to learn something about the health, wellbeing, and everyday life for those unfortunate boys and girls who spent time inside the borstals.