ten downing street

More children aged between 10 and 14 are being locked up in England and Wales - increasingly for more minor offences - than in any western European country, the charity Barnardo's warns today.

A fivefold surge in child and youth custody sentences over the past decade has created an "expensive and ineffective" criminal justice strategy, it says.

The rise has come despite there being no significant increase in serious crime by children over the same period, and has resulted in youngsters "being written off" by the age of 12, Barnardo's says.

"We are almost alone in western society in routinely incarcerating large numbers of children aged 10 to 14 who commit crime," according to a report on child custody by the charity, published today.

"The last decade has seen an unwarranted rise in custody for children aged 10 to 14, most of whom have not committed serious offences and who have been failed by state agencies from an early age."

The annual cost of keeping a young person in a secure children's home is £185,000. "The same money could provide a child with an education at Eton for six years ," the report notes.

"If 10 to 14 year olds were sentenced to custody only for committing grave crimes or violent offences, the number placed in custody in 2006 would have been cut from 572 to 104."

The study, Locking up or giving up - is custody for children always the right answer?, is based on the latest available data covering the years 1996 to 2006.

Before 1994, children in England and Wales under 15 could be sentenced to custody only if they had committed serious or violent offences such as rape, assault or burglary. Successive legal changes have made it easier for children to receive custodial punishments for even summary offences and breach of community orders.

Within Europe, only Russia and Ukraine put more children in prison.

Martin Narey, the former director general of the prison service and now chief executive of Barnardo's, said: "We should drastically reduce the use of custody. Barnardo's is not naive: we recognise that children committing grave crimes need to be incarcerated. But the explosion in the use of custody for very young children when youth offending has not been growing is inexplicable, unjustifiable and unnecessary.

"It is often the most vulnerable young people in society who end up in the criminal justice system. Despite this, only 5% of the £445m spent by the Youth Justice Board was invested in preventative work. What sort of society are we which deems it appropriate, last year alone, to imprison 572 children aged 14 or under, none of whom had committed a serious crime?"

Barnardo's maintains that custodial sentences are ineffective because 78 per cent of 10 to 14 year olds reoffend within 12 months of release. The charity is calling for sentencing thresholds to be changed.-link