UK looks to emulate Spanish youth custody where inmates do art and play sport to revolutionise prisons
Labour’s radical plans to modernize youth prisons will be inspired by Spain, where prisoners are educated, breed horses, make mosaics and play sports.
Last week, Youth Justice Minister Jake Richards visited three facilities run by Fundación Diagrama, a not-for-profit organization that manages the custody of young people on behalf of Spanish regional authorities, to assess what might work in the UK.
Instead of guards, detention centers have educators who provide daily guidance and discipline to inmates in the centers, which offer a variety of activities, including sports and gardening. They are divided between secure centers where offenders cannot leave and semi-open areas where young people can participate in society and meet their families.
These stand in stark contrast to England’s institutions for violent youth offenders, which routinely fail to provide the legal minimum education of at least 15 hours a week for school-age children. Children at Werrington prison in Staffordshire were left out of their cells for less than three hours on an average Saturday or Sunday last year, according to figures from the Howard League charity.
The moves are part of Labour’s commitment to “the most significant reforms to youth justice in a generation”; There are more plans to focus on early intervention and ensuring custody is a last resort for children and will be outlined in the spring.
During his trip, Mr Richards also visited two secure centres, La Villa in Alicante and La Sangonera in Murcia, as well as the open regime training center Los Pinos in Murcia. La Villa has vocational workshops for young offenders, including drawing, screen printing and sewing, and some receive training to help them with future employment, such as food handling, forklift operation and customer service skills.
Some of its other centers offer activities such as beekeeping, goat care, and classroom lessons involving maths and languages.
Figures presented by Fundación Diagrama last year showed that 16 percent of children serving sentences there reoffended. Ministry of Justice (MoJ) 2024 figures It shows that around 61.7 per cent of children released from custody in England and Wales that year reoffended.
Mr Richards, who met with Spain’s justice minister Manuel Olmedo Palacios during his trip, said: 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 is not an afterthought; that’s the whole point. The evidence is compelling. Smaller, education-focused settings reduce recidivism and change lives. This isn’t about being soft on crime, it’s about being smart about crime.”
He added: “We can’t ignore what works. I returned from Spain with a clear belief: if we are serious about breaking the cycle of youth offending and preventing future victims, we must be bold about reform. That’s why I’m determined to build a youth justice system fit for the future, and I’ll explain how we’ll do it very soon.”
Lord John Bird, founder of the Big Issue, who has spent time at Diagrama centres, said: “I am pleased to see the justice secretary visit the model Diagrama detention centers in Spain. “I have long encouraged the government to replace its own flawed youth detention framework with plans for real change.
“I know first-hand how a good rehabilitation program can enable young offenders to make meaningful contributions to their communities and wider society. But shamefully, this approach has long been abandoned here in the UK.”
Figures for the year ending March 2025 show that an average of 420 children are in custody in England and Wales at any one time; This is the lowest number in history. Approximately 44 percent of children in custody are in detention awaiting trial. The majority of children in custody are held in institutions for young offenders (63 percent), with 22 percent being held in secure children’s homes and 15 percent in secure education centres.
Youth detention in England has been marked by high levels of violence and self-harm in recent years, and the use of synthetic pepper spray against young people was first approved in 2025 by then justice secretary Shabana Mahmood.
Since taking office, Labor has ended the practice of housing girls in institutions for young offenders, instead placing them in secure schools or children’s homes. The Ministry of Justice also announced in February that any child caught with a knife in England and Wales would be given “targeted support” to prevent them reoffending, and local teams from health, education and community services would be tasked with breaking the cycle.
Announcing plans to modernize the system last month, Justice Minister David Lammy said there had been a dramatic fall in the number of children committing crimes over the past 20 years, with the number of children in custody falling by over 85 per cent since 2006/7. He said children who currently remain in the justice system are often the “hardest to reach” and those who have committed serious crimes. “They have more complex needs, more complex histories, and more complex obstacles they face on the road to rehabilitation than before.”
