source: The Guardian

published: 22 August 2023

Image Credit: RobD at www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Staff working in children’s prisons are to be banned from using techniques that deliberately cause pain, except in emergency scenarios to save life or to prevent life-changing injury.

The new Ministry of Justice policy for England and Wales, which follows a review completed by the now chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, in 2020, will be effective from February 2024. It states that it is “never acceptable to deliberately cause pain when a non-painful alternative can safely achieve the same objective”.

In his review Taylor criticised the restraint regime (known as MMPR – minimising and managing physical restraint), saying: “I believe that this places the use of pain-inducing techniques on a spectrum that makes it an acceptable and normal response rather than what [it] should be, the absolute exception.” Taylor said MMPR “has contributed to the overuse of these techniques that I so frequently witnessed during this review”.

Three official methods of pain-inducing restraint are still in use in children’s prisons, involving the infliction of severe pain to the area below a child’s ear (“mandibular angle technique”), thumb (“thumb flexion”) and wrist (“wrist flexion”). But the MoJ has conceded that a fourth technique (“inverted wrist hold”) causes “considerable pain and discomfort” and agreed to recategorise it after Taylor’s review concluded that it had “become a pain-inducing technique in all but name”.

Staff will only be allowed to use techniques that deliberately cause pain when they are responding to a situation where someone’s life is threatened “or there is risk that they will suffer a significant or life changing injury”. The policy document states that any time an “emergency intervention technique” is used it must be reported to the Youth Custody Service and that staff “will be expected to be fully accountable for the action taken”.

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