A personal history of the borstal in Britain: a century of incarcerated children.
The last time I saw my dad, we were looking through old photographs. In one sits a small, dark-haired boy staring gleefully at the camera. His smile is cheeky and wide, his little hands folded neatly over one another. Four years after this photo was captured, in 1973, my dad was taken from his parents and siblings and forced to live in a dark, stark building near the banks of the River Medway.
This is where his institutional career would begin: Rochester Borstal, the original children’s detention centre in Britain, where borstals themselves would later acquire their name. Opened in 1902 beside the Kentish village of Borstal, now swallowed up by the town of Rochester, it’s the sort of place you’d expect Miss Trunchbull to be nutting about in, terrorising the kids with maniacal joy. Heading the experimental scheme was the prison commissioner, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, who was seeking an alternative to the usual treatment of putting children directly into adult prisons.
Ruggles-Brise introduced borstal as a place of moral reform. He had travelled to America in 1897 to study their system, visiting the Elmira Reformatory School in upstate New York. ‘I was impressed by all that I saw… the elaborate system of moral, physical and industrial training of these prisoners… a human effort was being made for the rehabilitation of the youthful criminal.’ Ruggles-Brise was inspired. And upon his return, he got the go-ahead from the Home Secretary, Viscount Ridley, to create the first borstal. Ruggles needed inmates, so he carefully selected prisoners aged 16–21 from Rochester adult prison for the experiment. Ruggles-Brise himself had attended Eton, and his new prisons mirrored the Victorian boarding school system – early rises, physical drills and strict classroom education. Eton boys would go on to become bankers and prime ministers, whereas borstal boys, having been brutalised by a comparable system, would enter into a professional life of crime.
I have only one photo of me and my parents together. It was taken at the hospital moments after I was born. I look like a furious fat judge in a jet-black wig. You can see the zest for life in my dad’s deep brown eyes. My mum looks beautiful, though exhausted after giving birth to a giant baby. At first glance, it is the perfect family portrait.
Three months later, my dad would be arrested and then sentenced to 17 years for an armed robbery of a Post Office van. Armed robberies are considered to be among the most serious of criminal offences in the UK, which led to my dad receiving a ten-year sentence at Her Majesty’s pleasure. I have a hazy memory, aged three, of standing outside one of Her Majesty’s prisons. I remember the building, scary and intimidating, almost as if the jail itself was a character shouting ‘Hello, you feral little scumbag.’
During the First World War, borstal boys were conscripted in exchange for a reduced sentence. In 1916, Ruggles-Brise reported: ‘Since the outbreak of war, about 1,000 borstal lads are known to have joined the Forces.’ The majority of borstal boys fought in the war and many lost their lives, but they all seem to have been written out of the public narrative that otherwise celebrates wartime bravery on behalf of the nation. When the war ended, crime rates rose again. The authorities continued to see child criminals as immoral, and reasoned that if they could be broken down and built back up again, they could be turned into upstanding citizens. In The English Prison System, written by Ruggles-Brise in 1921, he refers to borstal boys as ‘the lads’ again. The whole thing feels like it was written by a chirpy old cove: ‘Many of these lads are total strangers to the most elementary refinements of civilised life; and so we inculcate the principle that by working hard and behaving well, a reward which brings comfort and pleasure upon the effort made. Here then we lay the first brick in building up character.’
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My grandad was born in 1939 to a working-class family in Bermondsey. He was sent to borstal for stealing, aged 14. In the real world, he was nicknamed ‘Snake Hips’ for being the best dancer in south London. Quick and smart, he was one of the funniest people I have ever met. During my teenage years I would regularly prank call my grandad with my friends. I think he always knew it was me, but he’d play along even when the calls took a dark turn. Once I put on a deep nasty voice and told him, ‘I’m in your garden and I’m off me nut and I’m COMIN’ TO GET YA’. I would know from his tone that he was smiling, and he’d respond as if he was in fear for his life – ‘Who is this? Jackie? Is this you, you bastard?’
My grandad always wore a suit and was never without a comb in his pocket. At family gatherings he would put his arm around me and whisper in my ear conspiratorially, ‘You’re my favourite, George.’
I loved staying with my grandad when I was a little girl. He was full of wacky stories, loved a gin and tonic and was never without a fag in his hand. We’d walk around St Mary’s Church in Rotherhithe together, and he’d tell me his version of historic events. ‘See that? That grave with the pigs on it? That’s that poor lady.’ Then he’d let out an exhausted breath, like he couldn’t bear to tell me what had happened. I’d performatively plead for the truth. He’d pause, take a drag of his cigarette and look me in the eye. ‘Poor sod gave birth to a pig. Can you imagine that? Poor bastard. Terrible really.’ My face, full of horror, would meet his, and we’d both burst into laughter.
What were you doing when you were 14? I was smoking fags, falling in love with boys and doing experimental dance routines to Pink’s Just Like a Pill. My grandad was running away from borstal. He managed to travel from Rochester to Bermondsey on foot, some 30 miles. All he wanted was a cuddle from his mum but when he arrived home the police were already there to take him back. He would go on to become a career criminal, spending large parts of his life in jail. When he died it was with his loved ones by his side, and all of his possessions in one small bag.
The Criminal Justice Act of 1948 abolished penal servitude, flogging and hard labour. This was intended to render the treatment of child prisoners more humane, but the state’s solution to youth crime remained to lock them up. In 1961 a prison commissioner, Mr Fairn, reported ‘the numbers in local prisons and borstals has reached a new record. If we include those in detention centres, in addition to those in prisons and borstals, the total is now 29,600, as compared with 11,000 before the Second World War.’ The post-war overcrowding led to rioting in a handful of borstals. Reading Borstal– renowned as Britain’s toughest – also closed down in the late 1960s, due to an inquiry regarding the brutalising of inmates by guards.
‘As soon as I got there I’m leaving, do you know what I mean?’ My dad couldn’t be contained by an open borstal. This makes him a critical thinker. If you put someone in a cage with an open door and they don’t run, there’s a serious problem. After his escape, they moved him to a closed borstal in Dover. He remembers being taken by one of the screws to a hospital in London to visit his mum. They call this ‘compassionate leave’. My dad wasn’t aware that his mum had cancer and was dying. After a short visit, they took him back to the borstal. When he got released a few weeks later, his mum had already died. ‘It was an evil time, man. Medieval. You slept on the floor. They made you march everywhere.’ I asked him if he wore a uniform. ‘You had to wear some sort of shit.’
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My dad was released from prison when I was ten. I had never spent any one-on-one time with him, so when he said he was going to take me to Spain I was buzzing with excitement. I’d have him all to myself. I had visions of what the holiday would look like. But he had spent most of his life behind bars and wanted to live – really live. And living meant partying and drinking and meeting women, not being stuck with his daughter. When we landed in Spain, I suddenly felt like I had made a big mistake. But I’d be dead before I called my mum. I put on a brave face. If he was loud, I would be louder. If he made a joke, I’d do some physical comedy. He’d laugh and say, ‘Oh here we go. The mad half hour.’ I’d play up to it, being as nutty as I could. I thought if I was rebellious, he would think I was cool. Sometimes I’d go a step too far, and would see despair in his eyes.
One night we went to a café on the strip. It had omelettes and chips on the board outside. Beside us sat a meek girl and a woman with a large mouth out of which words never stopped coming. They were mother and daughter. I was hostile to them which aggravated my dad. He called me rude and made us sit with them. They ordered beer after beer after beer after beer. We went back to the apartment after dinner, and my dad said he was popping out quickly. I didn’t see him again until the next evening. I just sat and watched Only Fools and Horses on VHS for 24 hours waiting for his return. It was hell, but I’m now fluent in the episode where Del Boy falls through the bar, I’ve memorised it word for word.
Two years after this holiday, my dad was arrested again. I gave evidence for him during his trial. I remember walking into the courtroom at Maidstone Crown Court and seeing my dad behind a glass box. He looked like the exotic taxidermy at the Horniman Museum. I think I saw the whole thing as a sort of performance. My Nancy in Oliver! moment, my Sally Bowles turn. Michael Billington would have given me five stars. ‘The vulnerability moved me to my core,’ he would have said. I had watched plenty of films and I think I was most excited to swear on the Bible. I did. The prosecution was an old posh man who looked like Mr Blobby with a gastric band. He was scarier than I expected him to be. But I was a brazen, cocky child who had visited jails since the age of one. Some bloke in a wig couldn’t intimidate me. I acted sad but confident. The perfect schoolgirl who had a perfect relationship with her perfect dad who had done nothing wrong. My dad got a ‘not guilty’ verdict but was arrested again when I was 16, receiving an indeterminate life sentence for armed robbery.
Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 promising to deliver young offenders a ‘short sharp shock’. A quick and severe punishment for juveniles. Borstal also gained prominence in popular culture at this time with films like Scum, which was originally banned due to its authentically violent portrayal of the system. At the end of the film there is a scene where one of the younger, more vulnerable boys is gang raped by the other prisoners in a greenhouse. A screw nonchalantly walks past, witnesses the rape, walks up to the window and watches the horror with a wry smile. It is clear that enabling violence of this kind is standard practice within the institution. There has rarely been a more fitting image for the banality of evil.
In 1982, Thatcher renamed borstals Youth Offenders Institutions (YOI). Still reformatory, still brutal, and still with a heartbreakingly high rate of youth deaths. There are no available youth death statistics for the year 1982, but from 1987–1996 there were 73 self-inflicted deaths in men under the age of 21 in youth custody.
In 1997, Tony Blair won over the curtain twitchers, in part by promising to be ‘tough on crime’, and a new period in the history of the borstal began. New Labour reforms put private corporations, like the security company G4S, in charge of the Victorian institutions, punishing children for profit rather than moral reform. Companies making profit from the imprisonment of children: it’s insane when you say it out loud.
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In 2004, my half-brother got sentenced to a YOI after receiving a guilty verdict for armed robbery. My brother was sensitive and kind. He had an infectious smile and emanated warmth, which made others feel safe. One night sticks in my memory. I was 18. Me and my best friend were stranded at the train station, after a wild night of grinding and doing shots. I called my brother and within minutes he came zooming around the corner, jungle music blasting out of his car. I felt such pride that I had this cool older brother. I’m really sad I never got to know him better. I know that he was a good person though. Full of anarchic spirit. And he was the opposite of my dad in every way, but was forever clawing for the love that we all wanted from the man we held so high in our mind. I visited my brother when I was 13. You could smell the sadness in the room. All the boys were hiding behind machismo for fear of breaking down in front of their families. When he was released he went straight into a life of crime, and prison became a regular occurrence. My brother was killed in a car crash in 2017. He died young, but his death could have perhaps been avoided if we didn’t live in one of the most punitive countries in the world.
My dad finally came out of prison when I was 28. I remember I arrived at the jail to pick him up with my then-boyfriend. The prison, for the first time ever, seemed like a place of hope. Actually, what am I talking about? Prison is incapable of hope. But on that particular day the sky was cartoon blue. The prison warden standing at the gate looked like a jolly, rotund, donut-eating guard straight out of central casting. I saw the other families walking to the visiting room and breathed a sigh of relief that those days were over, that today was the day my dad would be free… again. I thought of all of the things I’d be able to do with him: watch TV with him, walk with him, make him a spaghetti bolognaise, embrace him without some screw with raisins for eyes and a radish for a nose watching our every move. I didn’t think about how the world had changed or what my dad would do with the rest of his life. I just thought that now I could love him, really love him. Get to know him again. I remember seeing my dad leave the jail carrying a single bag. A lifetime of belongings. My brain was fizzing and I suddenly had no idea what I would say to him. I went mute and settled on a hug. My dad broke the silence when he got into my car. ‘Fucking hell George, state of this, you could have cleaned it.’ I suddenly felt a pang of shame. My car is as messy as my mind.
We drove to a restaurant I had booked. We drank and laughed and neither of us mentioned the last 17 years. It was almost like it hadn’t happened, like it had already been forgotten about, like there were two timelines we had both lived in: jail and the outside world. That day will always be special to me. No time constraints were put upon us. We were still high from his release, still high from the possibility of what might and could happen, just like how my dad had felt before he got taken away to borstal. His life was up for grabs again.
I’m not sure what we both expected after that first day together. I had an unrealistic fantasy of us, me on his toes as he danced us around at some sort of groovy ball. Maybe he imagined us feeding some ducks. But I wasn’t a child anymore. The relationship had changed. When I was a permanently rabid teenager I would berate my mum for being so different to me. I felt like me and my dad were the same person, connected in a way that nobody else understood. But really, I didn’t know him at all. We’d only ever had an hour or so per visit, a few times a year. The following years quickly passed us by, and our relationship began to suffer. We had both put each other on a pedestal. Each month that passed in the real world, the pedestal became smaller and smaller until we were both flawed humans. The pedestal became a pebble. Zeus had turned into Stuart Little, and I was less Matilda and more Veruca Salt. And we both hated it. I don’t really have a relationship with my dad now. We both tried, but you can’t make up for lost time. Soon the few memories we did have had vanished. No more memories were being made because nothing was holding us together.
Governments may change the borstal name, use a different logo, a different slogan, but nothing really changes. The psychological damage is irreparable. Today there are five child prisons in England and Wales. Evidence shows that children are spending sometimes 22 hours a day or more alone in their cells. From 2023 to 2024, six boys suffered serious injuries as a result of the use of force by the screws. 51 children suffered minor injuries in this way and there were 153 incidents where a child showed a ‘warning sign’ such as loss of consciousness. And these reports are out there for everyone to read. Can you imagine what they aren’t reporting, or what goes unreported long after they leave? Even now as I write this, I am thinking about an article I read in the Times about a new YOI called the Oasis Restore Secure Unit. The guards use key fobs instead of key chains. And – the children can put posters on their walls! I looked on their website. ‘Oasis Restore is a secure school enabling young people to live their best lives, through education, wellbeing and hope. We care for children aged 12–18.’
I had a missed call the other day from a number I didn’t recognise. Unknown numbers always give me the horrors, but in this instance I reluctantly called back. I stayed silent just in case it was my dentist, a debt collector or some freak I’d given my number to somewhere along the way. ‘George? Hello?’ A soft, gruff voice. Sounded like how I’d imagine an XL bully would speak if he’d just dropped a valium: aggressive and loving in equal measure. I didn’t speak immediately. ‘George? Hello? Can you hear me love? How are ya?’ I took a deep breath. ‘Hi dad.’
