‘Go to your room!’: Dangerous Ideas that Combine Children, Detention & Solitary Confinement in Scotland

Inspiring Children’s Futures reflects on Dr Kasey McCall-Smith’s recent presentation at the Edinburgh Fringe on conditions of solitary confinement in youth offender institutions in Scotland.

On the 22nd of August 2022, Dr McCall-Smith took to the Edinburgh Fringe’s Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas to revisit the fine, and not-so-fine, lines between isolation, torture, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment when we send a child to ‘their’ room.

A commonplace method of discipline, children around the world are regularly sent to their room as a form of punishment. However, would we consider holding a child in their room for 22-23 hours a form of reasonable punishment?

For children in prison custody, single occupancy cells are their room. Despite international standards, medical professionals and those closest to children advocating for their wellbeing and pointing to the potential irreparable harm of isolating children for prolonged periods of time, HMYOI Polmont staff held children in their rooms for 22 hours a day during COVID-19. When probed on why children were subjected to prolonged periods of isolation which amounted to solitary confinement, the Scottish Government cited staff shortages and refuted claims that the conditions amounted to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Conditions of detention in Scotland’s YOI during COVID-19 reached the threshold of solitary confinement, and amount to the torture of children. Negligent detention practices, masked by staff shortages, do not absolve the Scottish Government and/or relevant public bodies from their local, national and international obligations to protect children’s human rights and well-being. No child should experience solitary confinement in prison custody.

In December 2021, Inspiring Children’s Futures presented the expert legal opinion of Dr Kasey McCall-Smith, on conditions of solitary confinement and prohibited treatment of children in Youth Offender Institutes (YOIs) in Scotland in the wake of the results of a Pre-Inspection Survey, conducted in the context of the Year of Childhood.

Dr McCall-Smith presented the troubling conditions of detention for children in prison custody in Scotland, where YOIs were found to be holding children for prolonged periods of isolation which amounted to solitary confinement, citing evidence as follows:

• As of December 2020, over 70% of children referred to the Courts in Scotland were held on remand in a youth offender institute (YOI). This raised severe concerns over Scotland’s alignment with its own law, European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments and the breadth of international law (including UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Article 37) on the detention of children prior to conviction.

• The Pre-Inspection Survey revealed prohibited conditions of detention for children in prison custody in Scotland, where Scottish YOIs were found to be holding children in single occupancy cells for more than 22 hour per day during COVID-19. Citing the Istanbul Statement on Solitary Confinement and the UN Mandela Rules, Scottish children in YOIs were being held for prolonged periods of isolation which amounted to solitary confinement. Given children’s evolving capacity and need for ‘special care and assistance,’ the solitary confinement of children in prison custody may have amounted to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

As we rapidly approach the incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into Scots law, there has never been a more important time to be watching carefully and calling out the emerging gaps where children’s human rights in Scotland are not being respected, protected or fulfilled.

Those of us who advocate for Scotland’s children have a critical role to play in calling out the conditions of solitary confinement in prison custody, where children are being subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The YoC Survey findings strengthen calls that to realise all children’s human rights, no child should be detained in a prison setting.