The Making of Kids Behind Bars

When you make the kind of films we do - The Dying Rooms, Slavery, Eyes of a Child - it’s vital to develop a degree of professional detachment. But even with that veneer of professionalism firmly in place, Kids Behind Bars, has been in many ways, the most depressing and arduous film we have made to date.

From the practical point of view it has also been the hardest.

Imagine trying to convince the prison authorities in over a dozen different countries to let you have unrestricted access to children in their prisons. The fact that the film is for the world renowned BBC helps, of course. But then they ask you what other films you have made. You have no choice but to list a series of human rights investigations which the governments of the countries involved rarely applaud (our list of possible holiday destinations shrinks every year!)

It is an accolade to the prison services of the various countries we approached that, with one notable exception, every country did in fact give us that unlimited access, letting the children talk freely to us, without a guard present.

The exception was the Prison Service of England and Wales. Already heavily criticised by the retiring Chief Inspector of Prisons, for appalling conditions in Feltham, Portland and several other Young Offenders Institutes, our own Prison Service uniquely felt unable to allow us to talk to the children in its care.

As the permissions started to filter in, we talked to experts in the field who knew the kind of conditions children were held in, and the effect this had on them. Andy Barclay, a former prison governor, and Baroness Vivien Stern, both of the International Centre for Prison Studies, explained the various regimes we might come across around the world.

But nothing could have prepared us for the sadness of the children we were to meet.

Children like Tsenguunjav, in Mongolia. Officially his age had been estimated at 12, but he looked no more than 8 or 9. When our cameraman, Jeremy, met him he was absolutely terrified. While he had been having a physical, the nurse had told him the code number of the offence he was being charged with. When he got back to the cell he asked his cellmates what this meant. With the characteristic cruelty of children, they told a petrified Tsenguunjav that it meant he would be sentenced to a minimum of three years and a maximum of eight.

In fact Tsenguunjav was being held for theft. A few nights before, he told us, he was with some friends, when one of them produced a stolen mobile phone. The friend then tried to sell the phone to the kiosk owner, who called the police unbeknownst to the boys. When the police arrived, all the children were picked up; but according to Tsenguunjav the boy who had stolen the phone accused him of committing the offence. The friend then topped this betrayal by managing to escape through the back window of a toilet, when allowed to go to the loo.

Now, the little boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time sat in a tiny cell with twelve other boys. He had no idea what was going to happen to him or when, if ever, he would see his family again. Several of the other boys had been in the cells for months because the Mongolian legal system insists on any child being accompanied by a parent when he or she appears in court. Because Mongolia is one of the last actively nomadic societies in the world, the police often find it very difficult to trace parents. As a result the children languish in police detention for months without coming to trial.

The building the boys were held in was recently refurbished by Save the Children, and though very crowded the cells were at least warm and dry. For the children the worst aspect of their incarceration was the boredom. Sitting in crowded cells, the hours turn into days, and the days turn into months.

For little Tsenguunjav at least there was a happy ending, of sorts. We had been given access to the Ulanbataar police detention centre through the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The RUC has an ongoing commitment to train the Mongolian police, and as part of this exchange RUC Chief Constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan was on a visit to Ulanbataar. We were filming on his coat-tails.

The evening after we filmed little Tsenguunjav, our cameraman, Jeremy, told Sir Ronnie how upset he had been by the gross injustice of this tiny child being held by the police. Sir Ronnie immediately spoke to his hosts and asked to include a visit to the jail - priding themselves on their hospitality they couldn’t refuse.

When Sir Ronnie met Tsenguunjav, this man who has piloted the RUC through many years of The Troubles, was reduced to tears. He demanded that Tsenguunjav be immediately released. Again hospitality demanded that this request be granted. He is now safe and sound in a Save the Children home until his parents can be found.

Small though Tsenguunjav was, he wasn’t the youngest child we found locked up on our travels. That prize went to Naveen, a six year old Indian boy who was found wandering around on the trains, looking in the bins. He was picked up and locked up. The Detention Centre he has been warehoused in is in Lucknow, south of Delhi.

Naveen says ‘ I don’t know why they brought me here, I haven’t stolen anything....’ He cries himself to sleep each night, hoping that he will not be locked up forever.

Naveen is tiny and looks awkward in his numbered uniform - always looking to the floor, always hoping his mother will come for him. The trouble is, she probably doesn’t even know he’s locked away- and the system is such that unless your parent comes for you and accompanies you to a court - then you simply don’t get heard - and you don’t get out.

The reality is that Naveen’s mother will probably never be found, the searches that are carried out for parents are limited because of the lack of money - and once they ‘can’t find her’ they stop trying. This leaves Naveen waiting for no-one to come - imprisoned for something he doesn’t understand. Another small child lost in the system.

To make a film like Kids Behind Bars requires, above all, time. When a schedule is agreed with the BBC, the theory is that everything will slot into place like clockwork: we will contact the prison authorities in a dozen countries; they will all respond within a week; we will then visit a dozen prisons over the following six weeks; shortlist eight of them and film over the following two months. Of course even as the "schedule" is being argued over, everyone knows that it won’t be quite as simple as that.

We gained access to each prison we visited through a different path, there was no magic formula that opened the doors to a prison as reliably as Open Sesame swung back the cavern door for Ali Baba.

In Romania, our key turned out to be Andy Barclay of the International Centre for Prison Studies. The Romanian prison authorities have great respect for Andy, and his introduction oiled the wheels of bureaucracy tremendously.

In Nicaragua the non-profit organisation Casa Alianza, with whom we have worked on previous films, managed to convince the authorities that they had a duty to let us in to their prisons.

In the USA we wanted to film in a Boot Camp.

After calling pretty much every Boot Camp in the country, our US Assistant Producer finally had a breakthrough in Florida, a Boot Camp there that had a particularly aggressive approach to the "shock induction" invited him down. They were happy for us to film, the county authorities were happy, the boys were happy and their parents were happy. We were all set to go when someone in Governor Jeb Bush’s office got wind of what we were up to. The order came from on high, no filming. Luckily, after a few weeks more phoning, we found a Boot Camp in Texas that was prepared to let us in, and didn’t feel they needed to check in with the Governor.

In Mongolia, we were allowed in on the coat-tails of RUC Chief Constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan, who was paying the Mongolian police a visit.

In England the Prison Service blocked us at every turn from filming in it’s Young Offenders Institutes. Group 4 were very keen for us to film in one of the Secure Training Centres they run, as were the Youth Justice Board. The boys were happy about it as well, however according to the contract Group 4 has with the government, any media exposure has to be personally approved by the Minister in charge. Paul Boateng, it seemed felt there was something to hide in the STCs and forbade us from even setting foot inside one. Thankfully, however the Local Authority Secure Units were much more open, and didn’t have to ask central government for permission, we were invited to several Secure Units, and ended up filming in one that the Youth Justice Board regards as one of the best in the country.

So what have we learned from this journey around the world’s child prisons? Well, for one thing the kids in these jails have a great deal in common. Mostly they are from poor families, often with an absent father. In many ways they are just slightly older versions of the children we worked with in our film Eyes of a Child about children growing up in some of the most socially deprived areas of England in 1999.

That film was greeted by a deluge of phone calls to the BBC. Several thousand people were moved by the film to go to the effort of looking up the BBC’s number and ringing, either to complain or to praise.

The balance, in fact, was about even. There were many who felt that such a film was a disgraceful waste of licence payers money, that we had "obviously" paid the children to act out specially for us, and that most, if not all of the scenes in the film were staged. Among the "outraged of Tunbridge Wells" callers there were also many who felt that the children we had filmed should be locked up, that the streets would be safer if these vermin were swept away.

Thankfully, there were just as many calls in support of the film. One reviewer called it "the Cathy Come Home" of our age because of the way it exposed just how grim life can be for those on the lower rungs of our society. Many social workers, teachers, district nurses and the like called up to say that it was a painfully true depiction of the lives they deal with every day in sink estates and inner city ghettoes.

In some ways the responses of two newspapers summed up the different extremes that were provoked by the film. The Daily Telegraph told it’s readers that if they were watching another channel they hadn’t missed anything important, there was nothing new in this film, just more predictable stories of neglected children. The Daily Mirror on the other hand devoted a double page spread to trumpeting the headline "These children shame us". The Mirror called not only on the government to do something to help these children, but also called on each one of us, as the individuals that make up the society which is rejecting these children, to look into our hearts and ask how we could respond in a different way.

The reaction to Kids Behind Bars will probably be fairly similar.

If you are reading this article you are probably in that part of the population which will agree with our closing commentary, that "by locking them up we confirm all their worst beliefs about themselves and society, and make it more likely that they will offend again and again." But there will also be many viewers who will look at the draconian physical and psychological conditions in the detention homes we filmed in the USA, and ask why our prisons here in the UK are not as "disciplined".

One thing has become very clear to us, not only through talking to children in prisons around the world, but also through looking at the statistics for re-offending; quite simply, prison doesn’t work. It may work as a punishment, and it may work in that it keeps society safe from the potential misdeeds of the young offender while he or she is serving her sentence, but at what price?

In the UK 84% of children released from YOIs are reconvicted of an offence within 2 years. That’s 17 out of 20. Would we tolerate such a spectacular failure rate in any other public service? If our phones failed to connect on 17 out of 20 calls, if our tax bills were completely wrong 17 out of 20 years, if the police failed to catch 17 out of 20 murderers, if our dustbins were not emptied 17 out of 20 weeks?

These may be unfair comparisons, but they underline the point that we, the public, complacently accept a system that is patently failing, and indeed punish any politician daring enough to suggest another way.

So is there another way?

In Turkey we found a prison that was unlike any other we found anywhere in the world. One of the most extraordinary things about it was its success rate, only 3% of those released from the Ankara Reformatory had been reconvicted of an offence within 4 years. If we have to send children away from their families for "correction" (and we don’t, as other articles in this magazine explain) than perhaps the Ankara Reformatary could serve as a model of how to do it in a better, more effective and more humane way.

To quote the governor of the Reformatory, "This place is more like a school than a prison, because we believe this project will be the first one that will help the children who have committed crimes return to the community as normal citizens."

What is immediately most striking about the Ankara child prison is that there is no imposing main gate, no high walls topped with razor-wire, no bunches of keys hanging from the waist of every member of staff.

If a child really wants to escape, there is very little to stop him. More than half of the children leave the prison campus every day anyway, either to go to local schools, or to go to jobs in local businesses, so if they wanted to do a runner, they need simply not to come back at the end of the day. Even for those who are supposed to stay within the bounds of the prison, without guards or even a perimeter fence, escape would be easy.

Yet very few run away (when we were there, the last escape had been four months previously). Part of the reason is that the children know the alternative, all of them have spent time in a closed prison before their cases were heard. If they run away, then once they are recaptured they will go directly to a closed prison, probably for the rest of their sentence.

That’s the stick, but the carrot is far more impressive. The conditions in the reformatory mean they want to stay there. One boy told us that, apart from missing his family, the reformatory was much nicer than living at home. Another said he never wanted to go home, he would like to stay in the Reformatory for the rest of his life.

Physically the conditions were simple but very pleasant; tiled floors, clean bedsheets and duvets, and very good food (we have become gourmets of prison cuisine, with Turkey being near the top, and Kirovgrad in Russia undoubtedly being at the bottom).

If a boy is only up to primary level in his education then he joins classes inside the Reformatory. If he’s up to secondary standard in his education then he goes to one of the local schools, simply walking out of the Reformatory, unaccompanied, in the morning, and back in the afternoon.

For boys over 15 (the official school leaving age) the Governor will try to find them a job in a local factory, depending on their skills. (The Reformatory can use a Turkish Law - passed in 1971 - that requires any business with more than 50 employees to ensure that at least 3% of the workforce are ex-offenders.) If they have no skills, then they will be trained in the Reformatory and given a craft. Anything they make in their classes (such as clocks, like the one the boys presented us with as a souvenir, ceramics and stained glass) is sold to the public at regular craft fairs, with the profits coming straight back to the boy who made the artefact.

But school and jobs are not the only occasions on which the boys leave the campus. There are regular trips to football matches, the theatre, TV studios, the cinema, and to museums.

The boys who are serving time in the Reformatory are mostly there for quite serious crimes, with more than half of them convicted of murder or serious sex offences, and serving sentences of more than five years. Yet despite this, the local community not only doesn’t object to the presence of the Reformatory (imagine the cries of outraged NIMBYs if such an Institution were to be proposed in the UK) but actively support it, with local volunteers coming in to offer extra teaching, sports and craft skills.

The overall effect is that these boys are not isolated from society, instead they are probably far more integrated into society than they were when they were living at home.

In some ways the Reformatory looks and feels a bit like a traditional boarding school, but even that comparison is insufficient. Boarding schools tend to institutionalise their occupants, creating a isolated microcosm of society, but definitely separated from society itself. It is the very integration of the Reformatory into a well ordered and law-abiding stratum of society that is the key to its success.

If Ankara was so good (and so effective) then how do we explain the success of the next most effective prison we visited, Harlingen County Boot Camp in South Texas?

On the face of it these two prisons are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of their approach to the children in their care, yet the Boot Camp Captain claims that in the two years the camp has been running, more than 70% of those who have passed through its squad rooms have stayed out of trouble.

But there are some similarities deep down.

The Drill Sergeants who appear to terrorise the "recruits" are also all trained counsellors, and as we witnessed (but were sadly not permitted to film) when the shouting doesn’t work, they will sit down quietly with a boy, take of their caps, and talk to them as mentors rather than drill sergeants.

Also the central characteristic of life in the Boot Camp is structure, there is a time, a place and name for everything, and the boys never have to think about what they are going to do next, it’s all organised. That is also the case to a large extent in Ankara, there is a lot of structure imposed on the kids.

However the main similarity comes through one of the comments of Captain Coan, the man in charge of the Boot Camp. We asked him what he thought was the key to their success:-

"After care. When we send these kids home if we don’t have effective after care he is going to go back to the same environment. On our after care program the staff over here will call and check on the boys regularly; see if he’s making curfew. If he’s not making curfew we’ll get him back here and we can keep him here for a while for just to wake him up and say you can be confined again. We also call and check on his educational level and see if he’s complying with school. We’ll help him out in getting his high school diploma if he didn’t get it here. And we talk to the parents all the time. Also we have an open door policy for any former cadet to come back here and seek help, so that’s the support we give them. And they really need that after care; if you don’t have effective after care system no boot camp in the world is going to work."

If this is the key to the success of the Boot Camp then in a way it is also the key to the success of the Ankara Reformatory, only at the Reformatory, the aftercare (in terms of the integration and support of the child back into society) happens from the first day they arrive.

One study has suggested that what happens to prisoners on release is a far more important factor in determining their future offending behaviour than what happens to them while they’re locked up. That study was done on adults, but our experience suggests that the same goes for kids.

The Boot Camp in Texas serves only the local county, it only takes about 2 dozen kids at any one time (for a minimum sentence of six months) and when they are released they live within 20 miles of the camp, so keeping in touch is relatively easy.

Compare this with the situation in England. Paul, a 12 year old sentenced (ridiculously) to and 8 months for taking some golf clubs from a garage and shoplifting a pack of Pokemon cards, built up a very good relationship with his key worker, Callum, during his stay in the Secure Unit where we were filming in the South of England. On his release Paul is "on licence" (sort of "on probation") for another four months. But during that time Callum - who has become probably the most important adult influence in Paul’s life, other than his parents - will have hardly any professional contact with him, beyond the odd phonecall and maybe one or two visits. Paul goes back to his home, over a hundred miles away from the Secure Unit, and his case is handed over to a Youth Offending Team worker who may not even know him.

If the Secure Unit has done Paul any good at all, it is almost entirely down the relationship Callum has built with him. Yet the system prevents Callum from being able to continue that relationship in a meaningful way, and so dissipates any benefit that may have accrued.

So, our conclusions:

There will always be a small minority of very violent child offenders who have to be locked away from society, for their own good and for the good of society, but we feel that the majority of the three and half thousand children in prison in Britain today, simply shouldn’t be there.

If our politicians continue to be scared of looking soft on crime by considering some of the more effective alternatives to incarceration explored elsewhere in this magazine, then they should at least try to learn the lessons of the most effective prisons we visited around the world - the Ankara Reformatory and the South Texas Boot Camp.

Aftercare is all important: it’s what these children go back to after their incarceration that matters more than what happens to them during it. And the more that aftercare can be integrated into the experience of prison itself (in Ankara the sentence and the aftercare are almost indistinguishable) the more humane and effective the prison can be.

Julio, a 15 year old in prison in Sao Paolo, Brazil told us, "This place is a high school for crime, the big prisons are universities of crime. All I learned here was new ways, better ways of breaking the law."