'I was locked up for 23 hours a day' - ex young offender

Officials say youth custody centres are so unsafe that a tragedy is "inevitable", but former inmates say they are already taking place.

Peter Clarke, chief inspector of prisons, made the statements in his annual report this week.

In it, he says no youth custody establishment in England or Wales is safe to hold young people.

"Every couple of weeks, someone would attempt to kill themselves," Luke, 26, from Winchester, tells Newsbeat.

Luke was put into a youth custody centre when he was 20, older than most inmates, but avoided adult jail as it was his first offence.

He was sentenced to 18 months for a bomb hoax and shared a cell with another inmate who had a history of suicide attempts.

"If you report it, like I did a few times, they'll say 'he's being stupid'," he says.

"Fair enough, if that's what he wants - the attention.

"Within the first month he did it. I was in there and I was watching him. I was scared stiff."

Luke says he alerted staff with a buzzer in the cell, but they arrived too late to help his cellmate.

"By the time they came up, he was gone," Luke says.

"I was just watching TV in my cell and he did it. I tried to help him, but he was gone."

He's angry at the jail for placing him in a cell with such a cellmate and also accuses the youth custody centre of placing first time inmates in the same wing as sex offenders.

"You don't stick a new person who's just coming into jail into a cell like that." he says.

Peter Clarke's report criticises youth centres for the amount of time inmates spend in their cells and Luke says he would spend most of his time in lockdown.

But this is nothing new, according to Dave, who was in a youth custody centre in Doncaster when he was 17 years old.

Dave is 36 now and says the issues raised in the report were there in 2001, during his time in a young person's facility.

"You were locked up for 23 hours a day," he tells Newsbeat.

"There were no televisions then so the only thing you could do was to talk."

His stories of suicide and inmate violence are similar to Luke's despite a decade between their time in a custody centre.

"There are so many suicide attempts, ones that never get recorded, because of bullying inside the jail system," says Dave.

"That's the worst thing, the mental torture you get from other inmates.

"There's a lot of violence in jails but what I saw most was people being bullied to where they thought they had no other choice but to commit suicide."

He spent three weeks on remand in Doncaster and nine months in a young offenders prison and like Luke, criticises mixing inmates serving time for offences of varying severity.

Dave says he was jailed for "petty crimes" but says he shared space with murderers and inmates who had committed gang-related violent offences.

And while he welcomes calls to improve safety in youth custody centres, Dave says more needs to be done before young people end up in trouble with the law.

"There's not enough public money to stop kids from becoming criminalised in gangs.

"We're taking away everything they have. We're taking away the youth centres and stuff like that.

"We're failing the youth before they even go to prison."

In response to the chief inspector of prisons' report, the Ministry of Justice said: "The safety and welfare of every young person in custody is our absolute priority and we are clear that more needs to be done to achieve this.

"But we also want custody to improve the life chances of children in our care and to deliver improvements to education and health services within youth custody."

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