If Clayfields House secure children’s home had a head boy, it would be Mark, 17, who has been locked up here for two years and 11 months. When government officials visit, Mark talks to them about his experiences and his hopes for the future. When I first visited Clayfields in January, he was deputed to describe how his life had been transformed by his stay there. He listed GCSEs he has picked up and bad behaviours he has shaken off. He spoke with optimism about his imminent release in April, his plans to become a mechanic and to find a new home away from his family whose problems with drugs and crime have not helped him in the past.  Clayfields is essentially a prison – although staff shy away from that word – for children aged between 10 and 17. It currently houses 18 children, mostly boys, who have been charged with a range of crimes, from murder and serious sex offences to burglary and assault. Staff were vague about the crime Mark had committed when he was 14, describing it as a “serious offence involving a bladed knife”. The details are, however, available on the internet – a judge ruled that the nature of his crime was so serious that his right to anonymity should be waived.  Hidden down a driveway behind a street of red-brick houses, Clayfields contains a tiny school, a vocational unit specialising in construction and mechanics, and bedrooms for residents (words such as “inmate” and “cell” are also avoided). This one-storey, 1980s residential block is unlike the large institutions where most young offenders in the UK are imprisoned, first because it is so small, with a high ratio of around one staff member for every two children; second because it focuses on nurturing and educating the children, and finally because of the cost. Keeping a child here costs about £195,000 a year – almost three times the cost of a year in a young offender institution.  Children can never have a conversation without a member of staff nearby, listening to make sure that the conversation is appropriate. Children are not allowed to huddle in the yard and chat, nor are they allowed to whisper. As a result bullying is very rare. Still, it would be hard to describe Clayfields as homely – the metal fences that surround it are too high, and the locking and unlocking of doors is relentless. Mark has grown up inside this building, rattling around between his bedroom and the dining area (separated by two doors that staff must unlock for him), and the classroom area, a few paces away (another four locked doors). In the warmer months he spends time in the yard. There are 10 locked doors between his room and the outside world.  When he came here he was small but wild and angry. He would regularly assault members of staff and fellow residents. Now he is taller, self-assured and polite, offering to pour me glasses of water, asking if I would like to wash my hands before eating. Slowly, over the course of three years, he has calmed down, and staff rely on him to help younger residents to think about their behaviour.  On the first evening I visited, he was giving an after-school session to three other boys, titled “Behind the Blade”, on the dangers of knife crime. He had changed out of his school clothes – a blue tracksuit with a Clayfields logo on the shirt – and into his own clothes: scarlet Nike trainers (pristine because they have never been worn outside), a gleaming, shiny red tracksuit, diamond earrings and a large black and gold New Era cap.  In the warmer months Mark spends time in the yard. There are 10 locked doors between his room and the outside world  His class consisted of a 13-year-old from eastern Europe, the child of migrants working several jobs each, with a knife crime conviction; a 15-year-old, who suffers from an array of learning disabilities, there for serious assault, and a monosyllabic 17-year-old with convictions for property damage and assault, whose parents were drug addicts and who, staff say, behaves more like an 11-year-old.  “What could you do to avoid carrying a knife?” Mark asked the boys.  “Bang them out?” the 15-year-old ventured, hesitantly.  “Without fighting,” Mark insisted. Since there were no suggestions, he moved on to tactics for how to refuse a request to carry a knife for a friend. “You can say no. It doesn’t mean you are being disloyal. It just means that you are thinking about the bigger picture.” He helped instruct them in what to do if they find someone who has been stabbed (do not pull the knife out, put pressure on the area around it); he questioned them on their understanding of the prison sentences for knife crime (up to four years in prison for carrying a knife) and the number of people admitted to hospital in England because of knife crime each year (4,491).  It is not clear how profound an impact the session had on the younger boys. There was a bit of yawning and the occasional interruption, with demands to leave the room to go to the toilet – but it was obvious that Mark commanded the respect of his peers, and was committed to the subject he was teaching.  He knows the territory well. From the age of 10 he was regularly in and out of court for violent offences. His parents were not around much. His father was mainly in prison. By the time Mark was eight he had been taken away from his mother and put into care. “My mum was accused of neglect, that’s what the social services said. She was drinking – not heavy – taking drugs, taking crack. In the end it was for the best. She went to prison, and she’s changed her life around. She hasn’t touched anything since 2009,” he said. Over five years he stayed in eight different care homes and with one foster family. None of them could cope with him because he was so violent.  He went out stealing things from the age of seven or eight with two brothers, one a year older, the other a couple of years younger. “The family I was brought up in didn’t have money to splash out on us, so we thought we would go and make our own money – things to get by on, on a day-to-day basis. I wasn’t forced to do it. At first I didn’t want to do it, but then, I am not going to lie, I got into the habit. I thought that was the only thing I could do. I thought, ‘This is what I could do to further my life.’ Then I got destined for bigger things,” he said. “We robbed homes.” By the time he was 14 he was in court for violent assault. “I was given six years, do three.”  Every night Mark is locked in his room at 9.30; staff will turn off his electricity supply some time after that. How long he gets to watch television depends on his behaviour. “You can call it what you like: it’s a cell, a room, your pad, your home,” he said, standing at the door, accompanied by a care worker, who was wearing jeans. (Staff are not called guards, and don’t have a uniform, although each has a heavy bunch of keys attached to their waist.) There is a view of the yard, and a metal football goal, and another residential wing beyond.  “It’s not a good view,” he said.  “That’s the en-suite,” he added, pointing to the seatless toilet in the shower unit in the corner of the room; the door is fixed open and the water flow can be controlled by staff to prevent residents from flooding their rooms as a gesture of protest. The bed is fixed so it can’t be smashed. The mattress is a blue plastic gym mat, which can be removed if residents try to block the doorway with it. “We have to minimise risk,” the care worker said.  On display on Mark’s desk were half a dozen caps. He has a collection of around 20 – caps are one of the few things residents can order with their pocket money, since they pose no security risk. He also had on display photographs of his numerous siblings, all of whom are in care. By his bed were his Bart Simpson slippers and a picture of a pair of hands clasped together in prayer, accompanied by the motto: “Only God Will Judge Me.” There was one picture of him and two of his brothers, doing gangster poses with their hands, taken inside the centre a few months ago. It took seven months of negotiations between different social workers to arrange that visit.  Mark’s background is typical of most children at Clayfields. In her office Thirza Smith, who has been the manager for nine years, has a list of all 18 residents marked up on a whiteboard, alongside their release date, their offence and their keyworker. Over the past decade, the number of children in custody in England and Wales has fallen by 65% and there are currently around 1,000 children locked up. Because greater attempts are being made to avoid sending children to prison, those who are inside tend to have committed worse crimes.  She knew each child’s background in detail. Currently Clayfields is looking after a child who committed assault, who was also the victim of a serious sexual assault, and who recently witnessed his mother’s death. He is suffering from PTSD, Smith told me. They are also caring for a child who was so neglected by his drug-addicted parents that neighbours found him when he was nine, huddled in the folds of a blanket that was hanging out to dry. He was placed in care, but committed a serious assault and ended up at Clayfields. Some of the children are cognitively challenged and have serious special educational needs, one is autistic, more than 90% have some kind of mental health problem.  Being in here is like pressing pause on a television remote, Smith, said. “Often young people come in, thinking they are a gangster, sometimes they are heroin addicted, with no teeth, they look terrible,” Smith said. “They’ve been abused, neglected, they don’t want to think about education. They can’t tell the time, they haven’t been able to trust anyone in their lives.” She agrees that the service at Clayfields is expensive, but this is what it costs to provide small classes, psychiatric support, counselling, security, support in finding stable places to live once they have left. “It is a period of calm where young people can sort themselves out.”  The future of this model of dealing with young offenders is now in question. Justice secretary Chris Grayling has said that relying on small institutions such as Clayfields is “unrealistic and unaffordable”. The number of similar establishments has already halved over the past decade, dropping from 36 to 17. Ministers are finalising plans to build a large secure college not far from Clayfields that would house more than 300 young people – a project that, according to the justice department, will generate “substantial savings”. Although the details are still being debated, the £85m construction project could start this spring. A coalition of 29 children’s organisations came together to express their concerns about the proposal late last year, with signatories ranging from the NSPCC, to the Royal College of Psychiatrists warning that “warehousing children in massive prisons in the surest way to create more problems for the future.”  If the planned secure college goes ahead, staff believe that Clayfields will almost certainly close.  Any time after 7.45 in the morning, Mark can press a button in his room, which sets a red light flashing above the door, indicating that he would like to come out. Every morning he joins the five other boys who live on the Loxley unit for breakfast. (Children here are divided into three sleeping areas – Sherwood, Loxley and Scarlet, a nod to the centre’s Nottinghamshire location.)  By 8.45am, on the morning after Mark had given his knife‑crime class, care workers had woken everyone up, but no one had emerged from their rooms. A small boy, waiting to be tried for murder, was the first to appear. He sat at an octagonal table where Weetabix, Frosties and bran flakes were laid out, flicking through a Tesco magazine, carefully tearing out discount vouchers to give a care worker, so she could save money on washing up liquid. He told her he was expecting a visit from his solicitor that morning, but changed the subject quickly. “Do you like onions?” he asked, showing her a recipe in the magazine.  One of the care workers sat writing detailed notes in a logbook. The children are awarded marks – from zero to five – on three aspects of their morning behaviour: their readiness to get up, how they behave at breakfast and how polite they are to staff and peers. A score of five is excellent, and zero is unacceptable. Their total for the day influences whether their behaviour is ranked at bronze, silver or gold at the end of the week. “If they are swearing constantly at staff, they aren’t going to get fives,” a care worker said. Residents who behave well get treats, like the chance to order a takeaway from the town on Saturday night. They earn money for good behaviour; 16 merits is a voucher at Argos for £5. Student of the week wins an extra £2.50. Mark is saving up to buy a fridge for when he moves out in April.  Children can also spend money that their families send them, by asking staff to order them things from the local shop. As they came out of their rooms they consulted a handwritten sheet that showed how much money they had, and placed their orders. The youngest boy on the unit, Jason, 13, here on serious assault and burglary charges, asked staff to spend some of his remaining £7.46 on a packet of fizzy Haribo sweets and a Cherry Coke. The child here on murder charges is only occasionally visited by his family, and had just 2p in his account, but staff said this was because he had recently spent most of his money buying jewellery for his mother.  No one ate any breakfast, so a care worker took away the untouched cereal and bowls to a small, friendly kitchen accessed through another locked door, locking the food and the cutlery away. Cutlery and plates have to be counted and locked up after every meal. “Otherwise they get hold of ceramic cups, and use the shards to cut themselves,” he said.  The same precautions were in operation in the art class which began 10 minutes later. Two boys from another unit were working on their GCSE coursework. One child was painstakingly colouring a pop-art-themed picture, inspired by sweet wrappers. Each time he wanted a new colour, he asked the teacher for the precise shade; the teacher unlocked a drawer, searched for it and replaced the one he was using, locking that one away.  A lot of the art is inspired by crisps and sweets packaging; in the entrance hall there are outsized papier-mache models of Twix and sherbet Dip Dab lollipops. The art teacher explained: “There is no point them doing landscapes because they can’t do them, there aren’t any for them to look at. They can’t do ceramics because anything that is breakable can be used as a weapon. It has to be something they are able to collect and bring to a lesson.”  In the next classroom, two children were studying English – discussing an extract from a film of Romeo & Juliet – and writing answers to questions on the board. The teacher was determinedly upbeat and encouraging but the pupils were painfully reluctant to proffer opinions and hampered by shaky spelling. Next door two more boys were studying GCSE science. One of them was working on a computer built into the desk, its screen protected by a plastic protective screen. Keyboards and mice are easy to replace but screens less so, the science teacher explained.  Since he arrived at Clayfields, Mark has picked up a C in GCSE applied science, a B in art, an A in design and technology, and other qualifications that he thinks he would not have gained had he not been incarcerated there. In recent years, the home has begun to offer more vocational training, and in a new complex beyond the gym, a few older children were working on cars and learning bricklaying. “Before, I didn’t see the point of going to school,” said Mark. “I was out with friends, committing crime on a daily basis, in a little gang. Education didn’t come into it.” He has been diagnosed with severe dyslexia while at Clayfields. In his room he laid out the range of tools – from electronic reading pens (that scan and read words out loud) to audio equipment – he has been given to help him deal with it.  Before being transferred to Clayfields, Mark spent three months in a young offender institution in Warrington. His memories of it are not positive. “When I woke up in the morning, I was out on the landing, and I knew half the people there … It was like a huge big adventure playground,” he said. “There were two guards to 50 people. There was no structure, no real routine. It was fun, in a way. But young people were being assaulted when staff weren’t there, in the showers. Staff couldn’t cope. The education was ridiculous. Everyone was having a laugh. I don’t remember doing one piece of work.” Even though he knew people, he was still on edge. “Every day was a fight for survival, making sure I wasn’t being bullied, that I was OK,” he said.  Since 1990, 33 people under 18 in England and Wales have died in custody, 31 of whom killed themselves. None of these deaths were in secure children’s homes. “If you put people into 300 bed places, they are just going to get used to that environment,” Mark said, “people banging on the doors, shouting. Those kind of places make you into a worse criminal than you already were.”  Not everyone at Clayfields makes immediate progress. Along the corridor from Mark, in bedroom one, is 13-year-old Jason, who is spending the custodial part of a six-month detention training order (DTO), for burglary and assault there. (A DTO is a sentence that combines time in custody with a period of supervised release given to young people who have committed a number of offences.) Jason is babyfaced, with puppy fat around his chin and stomach. His mother abandoned him some years ago and moved abroad. He was very unhappy in care and was shifted between 22 different placements in the space of two years. Staff described his family life as “horrific”. When I met him later that morning, Jason was putting on a convincing display of cheerfulness as he bounced around the unit. “I know I’m getting out soon. I know eventually I will get out,” he said, adding abruptly: “It’s also my own fault that I am in here. It’s no one else’s.”  Inside his room he showed me his felt-tip pens, which were laid out meticulously on his desk, the woolly hat his mother had knitted and sent to him for Christmas, and a pile of soft toys including a soppy-eyed dalmatian and a teddy bear from Clacton-on-Sea. He had carefully laid out his school clothes for the next morning and neatly folded his towels into triangles. Someone had laminated a short letter from his mother and stuck it to the wall: “I am writing you these few lines to say how much I love you. I want you to know I will never, never give up on you.” Occasionally he receives calls from his mother through a peculiar handset-free telephone – a metal panel, screwed to the wall.  He pulled out a box of Lego from beside his bed – police cars and trucks. “I don’t play with it … I don’t play with the people,” he said, as if that would be a demeaning, ridiculously childish thing to do. “I like building with it.” He seemed happy and calm playing with his toys, but staff were concerned about his difficult behaviour. That afternoon a call came through for him from his mother, abroad. He disappeared for a while and returned, subdued and morose, so his care worker Jenna took him for a one-to-one counselling session.  “You have been a bit rude and demanding,” Jenna told Jason gently.  “Why should I care? I’m gone in three weeks.”  “You know how to behave. The fact that you are leaving shouldn’t mean that you can get into trouble. You are not acting appropriately.”  He admitted that his mood had been affected by the phone call. “I don’t like talking to family and stuff in here. It makes me sad.”  Before the session was over he pointed to the vent on the ceiling, and said: “If those machines were turned off, we would all suffocate and die.” Jenna explained that the air-conditioning vents heat the unit or cool it in the summer, and even if they broke down, no one would die. But it was clear that her description of how air comes in through the doors when people come in and out did not convince him. “In here no one is walking in or out. The windows don’t open or close.”  At the beginning of March, Mark was making preparations for his release from Clayfields. The previous week, he had been on three excursions – once to the bank, once to the housing office to try to organise somewhere to live when he leaves, and once to the shops to buy things he will need in his new home, wherever it turns out to be. There was a heap of new belongings in the manager’s office: frying pan, duvet, cups, cutlery. He had handled money for the first time in nearly three years and was preparing for an interview for a work-experience placement at a mechanics workshop. He was also making plans for the day of his release and said he was hoping to meet up with some girls he knew before being imprisoned. “They want to go for a drink.” He hasn’t drunk alcohol since he was arrested, but doesn’t much lament missing out on that side of teenage life. “I did a lot of stuff in my teenage years, the ones that I had.”  Stretched out on a sofa in the television room, he reflected on his three-year incarceration. “It’s not an unhappy place because you make of it what you can but everyone would rather be outside. It took a good year before I even considered making a change. I was a child. I was destructive, abusive, not listening, fighting. Then I had a conversation with my brain. I was in my room and I told myself: ‘I don’t want to be sitting around in a council flat, doing nothing for the rest of my life.’ I knew I had to change.”  As he spoke, weak sunlight came through the window, where he was waiting for lunch, the narrow shaft of warm light falling on his legs. “It is much worse here in the summer. Every time you look out, it is a nice sunny day, you want to be outside, you know the girls will be out. It gets roasting in here. You can’t breathe properly. The worst times are Christmas, summer, your birthday.”  Leaving will be difficult, he said. Before his recent outings, he had been outside only twice in almost three years – to visit the dentist, each time accompanied by two members of staff, who linked arms with him when they got out of the car, and shuffled him along the pavement to his appointment. Since he came to Clayfields he has not had a conversation without a member of staff listening to what he is saying, he has not opened a door himself, switched on a light or walked up a flight of stairs. He has not seen his father and has only seen his mother three times.  When I spoke to prison researcher and academic Di Hart, she argued that prison experiences such as that of Mark do not prepare children for life outside. Although Hart acknowledged that secure children’s homes were “better than the rest”, she wondered whether the system needs to be reinvented entirely. “Children on long sentences, are being brought up in locked institutions, so that any chance of normal development is really severely impaired,” she said. “A child only allowed out twice in two years? How can we prepare them for the future and make them well-rounded individuals, if they are having such an abnormal experience? Their ability to form a relationship with their peers and adults is really impaired.”  Since he came to Clayfields, Mark has not opened a door himself, switched on a light or walked up a flight of stairs  Clayfields’ manager Thirza Smith would actually like to have a longer period of time to work with residents; she feels sentences of less than six months are not enough to offer real help. “They are not all success stories. If a sentence is short it doesn’t help them or us,” Smith said. Official figures show that 71% of young offenders released from custody reoffend within 12 months, and this is one reason the government argues that the system of dealing with young offenders is in need of reform. Analysis of reoffending rates at Clayfields indicates a much lower rate of 18%. “They are battered and bruised when they come here: emotionally, physically, mentally,” Smith said. “But if you get them when they are 12 to 16, then you have a chance to stop them from going on to prison as adults. We catch them, we show them that they can be nurtured.”  The strength of Mark’s transformation will only really be tested in the months after he is released. He is hoping to be rehoused in a new city, away from his family and his old friends, but bureaucratic hitches (local authority budgets, a dispute over who should pay) may mean that this is impossible.  “The worry is where is he going to live. We are having a real struggle with that,” Smith said. “I’m acutely aware of the challenges he will face. It’s not foolproof. It would be naive to say otherwise. They go back out and they go back where they came from, they go back to the problems that sent them here, and then it goes wrong. It is our job to make sure they don’t go back to where they were before. Invariably because of how life works, we do fail sometimes, but we are as good as it can possibly get.”  Related: Ministers sanctioned over benefit claims | Letters  Mark is confident that things will go well for him when he leaves. “I come from a background where there are a lot of people coming in and out of prison, and I don’t see them coming out and saying, ‘That has really changed me.’ But most of the people here do – being here has changed me.”  • Names and some details have been changed to avoid identifying the children  Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread
The long read: The young people who live in Clayfields House have been convicted of serious crimes, from burglary to murder. Under close supervision, many have turned their lives around – but now it’s under threat