The Boys on B Wing
How is it that every year 1,500 teenage boys - all 16 years old or younger - can be locked up in British prisons, two to a cell, 20 hours a day, on remand sometimes for offences as trivial as absconding and car theft?
Reporter David Lomax and a Panorama crew have been allowed to visit B Wing in Hull prison, where, in cells without windows or toilets,
15- and 16-year-old boys have often been waiting months for their cases to be heard.
Fourteen years ago, a Parliamentary Committee recommended that the holding on remand of children in adult prisons should cease forthwith.
Why hasn't it happened?
Would an increase in 'secure units' like Aycliffe in Co Durham or Eastmoor in Leeds be a more humane response to our juvenile criminals and make them less likely to re-offend? Or do the boys on B Wing deserve everything they get?
Producer FRANCESCA KIRBY GREEN Editor TIM GARDAM
(Postponed from 20 November)