A 17-year-old boy, Jonathan Beadle, has died at Polmont Young Offenders Institution, where he was held after pleading guilty to being in possession of weapons with intent to “assault and murder” a 16-year-old girl. The Scottish Prison Service has confirmed the cause of death, and a fatal accident inquiry will be held to investigate the circumstances.
Beadle’s death comes two years after the Scottish government promised to end the placement of under-18s in young offenders institutions, in favor of “care-based alternatives” and a shift from punishment to support. Wendy Sinclair-Gieben, Scotland’s chief inspector of prisons, had previously stated that sending young people to Polmont, particularly those not yet convicted, breached human rights.
Katie Allan and William Brown both took their own lives at Polmont in 2018, leading to a joint FAI earlier this year. Allan, a geography student at Glasgow University, had been jailed for drink-driving after hitting a 15-year-old boy who was knocked unconscious, while Brown had never been convicted of a crime but was placed in Polmont because there was nowhere else to send him. Jack McKenzie, who also took his own life at Polmont in September 2021, was on remand for rape and sexual assault charges.
Linda Allan, Katie Allan’s mother, spoke out about her devastation at hearing of Beadle’s death, saying that she wasn’t surprised considering the inadequacies of the prison suicide strategy and the flawed system of relying on prisoners self-reporting suicide ideation. Sheriff Simon Collins, who led both previous inquiries, will deliver his determination on all three deaths later this year, with the aim of establishing whether they could have been prevented and how to prevent future suicides in prison
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