Violence, illegal force, abuse: who will remove G4S from children’s prisons? | Eric Allison and Simon Hattenstone

After another report damning the security giant, at Oakhill secure training centre, Dominic Raab must revoke its contract

Children locked in their rooms for up to 23 hours a day, young teenagers exposed to violence and excessive force, safeguarding systems in disarray: for those of us familiar with G4S’s record of running prisons, these appalling practices found at Oakhill secure training centre, a children’s prison in Milton Keynes, come as no surprise.

The security giant G4S has a long and undistinguished history of running children’s prisons – something that the new justice secretary, Dominic Raab, who has been in post for less than two months, is evidently still naive about. The findings from Oakhill last month by the joint inspectorates Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission and HM Inspectorate of Prisons were so damning that they issued an urgent notification to Raab to respond with proposals to remedy the situation within 28 days. The situation at Oakhill was “unacceptable”, he tweeted; the details of the report “truly shocking”.

Eric Allison is the Guardian’s prisons correspondent; Simon Hattenstone is a Guardian writer

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