Spain’s youth prisons provide a model for Britain

Holly Bancroft, The Independent

Labour's radical plans to modernise youth prisons will take inspiration from Spain, where inmates are given schooling, train horses, make mosaics and play sport. Minister for youth justice Jake Richards last week visited three facilities run by Fundación Diagrama, a non-profit organisation that manages youth custody on behalf of Spanish regional authorities, to consider what could work in the UK. The custodial centres have educators instead of prison guards, who give daily direction and discipline to inmates in centres that offer a range of activities, including sports and gardening. They are split between secure centres, which offenders cannot leave, and semi-open sites where young people can go into the community and meet up with their families.

They are a stark contrast to England's violent youth offender institutions, which are routinely failing to deliver the legal minimum of at least 15 hours of education per week for school-age children. Children in Werrington prison, in Staffordshire, were outside their cells for less than three hours on an average Saturday or Sunday last year, figures from charity the Howard League show. The moves are part of Labour's pledge for "the most significant reforms to youth justice in a generation" — focusing on early intervention and making sure custody is a last resort for children - with further plans to be outlined in Spring.

Richards visited two secure centres on his trip, La Villa in Alicante and La Sangonera in Murcia, as well as an open-regime education centre, Los Pinos in Murcia. La Villa boasts occupational workshops for youth offenders, including drawing, screen printing and sewing, and some receive training to help with future employment, such as lessons on food handling, forklift operation, and customer service skills. Some of its other centres provide activities such as bee-keeping, looking after goats, and classroom lessons that involve maths and languages.

Figures provided by Fundación Diagrama last year showed that 16 per cent of the children who serve their sentences there go on to reoffend. Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures for 2024 show that around 61.7 per cent of children in England and Wales released from custody that year reoffended. Richards, who met with Spain's justice secretary Manuel Olmedo Palacios during his trip, told The Independent: "What I saw in Spain was not just a different system, but a fundamentally different way of thinking about youth justice — and it works.

"Rehabilitation isn't an afterthought; it is the whole point. The evidence is compelling. Smaller, education-led environments reduce reoffending and change lives. That's not being soft on crime — it is being smart on crime." He added: "We can't afford to ignore what works. I returned from Spain with a clear conviction: if we are serious about breaking the cycle of youth offending and preventing future victims, we must be bold about reform. That is exactly why I am committed to building a youth justice system fit for the future and will set out how we do that very soon."

Lord John Bird, founder of the Big Issue, who has spent time at the Diagrama centres, said: "I'm pleased to see the justice minister visiting the exemplary Diagrama detention centres in Spain. I've long encouraged the government to replace our own faulty youth detention framework with their blueprint for real change. "I know first-hand how a good rehabilitation programme can set up young offenders to make meaningful contributions to their communities and wider society. But shamefully, that approach has long been abandoned here in the UK."

Figures for the year ending March 2025 show that an average of 420 children were in custody in England and Wales at any one time, the lowest number on record. Around 44 per cent of children in custody are being held on remand awaiting trial. The majority of children in custody are held in young offender institutions — 63 per cent — with 22 per cent in secure children's homes and 15 per cent in secure training centres.

Youth custody in England has been marked in recent years by high levels of violence and self-harm, and the use of synthetic pepper spray against young people was approved for the first time in 2025 under the then-justice secretary Shabana Mahmood. Since taking office, Labour has ended the practice of housing girls in young offender institutions, instead putting them in secure schools or children's homes. The MoJ also announced in February that every child caught with a knife in England and Wales will be given "targeted support" to stop them reoffending, with local teams spanning health, education and community services tasked with breaking the cycle. Announcing plans to modernise the system last month, justice secretary David Lammy said there had been a dramatic fall in the number of children offending in the past 20 years, with the number of children in custody falling by over 85 per cent since 20067. The children that remain in the justice system now are often the "hardest to reach" and those who commit serious crimes, he said. They have "more complex needs, more complex backgrounds, and more complex obstacles facing them on the road to rehabilitation than they did previously".