Little known and less discussed in the mainstream media is the state’s increasing reliance on imprisonment for an increasing number of the young and children - chiefly working class children.

Last year, the degrading and in many ways terrifying experience of prison caused 60 children, both boys and girls, to try to kill themselves. Sadly, at least five suicide attempts are ‘successful’ in a year. Five young lives snuffed out every year, prematurely and very needlessly, five out of a growing army of teenagers held in dire conditions and facing blighted lives, many unconvicted, not a few detained illegally.

Once inside it’s usual to spend 23 hours a day locked up and isolated in a cell, hundreds of miles from home. For a young person brimming with creative energy this must be a nightmare and it isn’t difficult to understand why so many make serious attempts to end it. The irony is that fully half of those jailed will finally be acquitted or given non-custodial sentences. So why the wall of silence about the creeping reimposition of the death penalty? Why is nothing said about the State's bloodletting and the way a brutal regime falls so heavily upon young people with no inkling of what they are about to face?

As adults, we have been extensively educated by all kinds of media into the reparation the state will exact when we break its laws. But how could kids ever contemplate such a devastating interruption to their childhood? Even the most hardened adults would find it hard to cope - and many can’t. Kids, they don’t have a chance, do they?

Yet the incarceration rates for this group are on the increase, actual numbers having doubled to well over 2000 a year since the introduction of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act. These figures confirm Britain’s dubious status as the most punitive state in the EU. The ‘credit’ for this league-topping position goes to politicians (what’s new!) like Straw and Widdecombe, forever competing to prove that the one can out-tough the other when it comes to crime even when, as the statistics show, many are acquitted and the re-offending rates remain stubbornly high.

Few rational people believe jail is the place for children or teenagers, yet the courts have fallen over themselves to implement the politician’s mantra: "Prison works". The judicial process takes no account of vulnerable children who have themselves been sexually or physically abused, or whose self-destructiveness comes from guilt at not living up to society’s demands. Criminals they may be, by the state’s laws, but how did they get there? Driven by school and society’s leaders to succeed, to make something of themselves, yet their minds and energies blunted by poverty and demoralised by lack of any real prospects, they seek any justification of their ‘failure’: rejection of society, violence, stealing whatever. Seduced by the siren call of instant gratification and the demand that they consume, is it any wonder they take what society denies them the means to get: power, money, status? Confused, trapped, caught, and condemned with the full rigour of the law, they self-harm in jail and care, desperate to draw attention to the problems they face, most often alone.

How does jail reassure these kids that someone, somewhere in the adult world, where ‘experts’ supposedly have all the answers actually cares for or about them? Instead of authority (‘leaders’ and ‘experts’ again) demonstrating a positive commitment to protecting children from further physical or psychological damage, they are busy throwing them into an environment so bad, so alien, so depressing that bewildered kids, in what should be the ‘best days of their lives’ reach the conclusion there is only one way out, just one final solution to their awful predicament.

The upholders of a society that is itself the author of practically every social ill that afflicts it like a cancer, need to pause for once in their disease-dispensing judgements, in their headlong rush to sweep out of sight everyone seen as a problem. They need to take a good look around, particularly inwards, and recognise it is they who are poisoning impressionable, developing minds before they have ever been given the chance to taste the love, compassion and solidarity that ought to be the essence of the human condition.