What if the Universe has no end?
I THOUGHT IT WAS INFINITE 
I STILL WONDER WHAT IS IT THAT THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING INTO

SPACE


The Big Bang is widely accepted as being the beginning of everything we see around us, but other theories that are gathering support among scientists are suggesting otherwise.



By Patchen Barss 19th January 2020

The usual story of the Universe has a beginning, middle, and an end.

It began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago when the Universe was tiny, hot, and dense. In less than a billionth of a billionth of a second, that pinpoint of a universe expanded to more than a billion, billion times its original size through a process called “cosmological inflation”.

Next came “the graceful exit”, when inflation stopped. The universe carried on expanding and cooling, but at a fraction of the initial rate. For the next 380,000 years, the Universe was so dense that not even light could move through it – the cosmos was an opaque, superhot plasma of scattered particles. When things finally cooled enough for the first hydrogen atoms to form, the Universe swiftly became transparent. Radiation burst out in every direction, and the Universe was on its way to becoming the lumpy entity we see today, with vast swaths of empty space punctuated by clumps of particles, dust, stars, black holes, galaxies, radiation, and other forms of matter and energy.

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Eventually these lumps of matter will drift so far apart that they will slowly disappear, according to some models. The Universe will become a cold, uniform soup of isolated photons.


The Universe we can currently see is made up of clumps of particles, dust, stars, black holes, galaxies, radiation (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI)

It’s not a particularly dramatic ending, although it does have a satisfying finality.

But what if the Big Bang wasn’t actually the start of it all?

Perhaps the Big Bang was more of a “Big Bounce”, a turning point in an ongoing cycle of contraction and expansion. Or, it could be more like a point of reflection, with a mirror image of our universe expanding out the “other side”, where antimatter replaces matter, and time itself flows backwards. (There might even be a “mirror you” pondering what life looks like on this side.)


Perhaps the Big Bang was more of a “Big Bounce”, a turning point in an ongoing cycle of contraction and expansion

Or, the Big Bang might be a transition point in a universe that has always been – and always will be – expanding. All of these theories sit outside mainstream cosmology, but all are supported by influential scientists.

The growing number of these competing theories suggests that it might now be time to let go of the idea that the Big Bang marked the beginning of space and time. And, indeed, that it may even have an end.

Many competing Big Bang alternative stem from deep dissatisfaction with the idea of cosmological inflation.

Scars left by the Big Bang in a weak microwave radiation that permeates the entire cosmos provides clues about what the early Universe looked like (Credit: Nasa)

“I have to confess, I never liked inflation from the beginning,” says Neil Turok, the former director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

“The inflationary paradigm has failed,” adds Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein professor in science at Princeton University, and proponent of a “Big Bounce” model.

“I always regarded inflation as a very artificial theory,” says Roger Penrose, emeritus Rouse Ball professor of mathematics at Oxford University. “The main reason that it didn't die at birth is that it was the only thing people could think of to explain what they call the ‘scale invariance of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations’.”

The Cosmic Microwave Background (or “CMB”) has been a fundamental factor in every model of the Universe since it was first observed in 1965. It’s a faint, ambient radiation found everywhere in the observable Universe that dates back to that moment when the Universe first became transparent to radiation.

The CMB is a major source of information about what the early Universe looked like. It is also a tantalising mystery for physicists. In every direction scientists point a radio telescope, the CMB looks the same, even in regions that seemingly could never have interacted with one another at any point in the history of a 13.8 billion-year- old universe.

Our observable universe expanded from one tiny homogenous region within that primordial hot mess

“The CMB temperature is the same on opposite sides of the sky and those parts of the sky would never have been in causal contact,” says Katie Mack, a cosmologist at North Carolina State University. “Something had to connect those two regions of the Universe in the past. Something had to tell that part of the sky to be the same temperature as that part of the sky.”

Without some mechanism to even out the temperature across the observable Universe, scientists would expect to see much larger variations in different regions.

Inflation offers a way to solve this so-called “homogeneity problem”. With a period of insane expansion stretching out the Universe so rapidly that almost the entire thing ended up far beyond the region we can observe and interact with. Our observableuniverse expanded from one tiny homogenous region within that primordial hot mess, producing the uniform CMB. Other regions beyond what we can observe might look very different.

Theoretical physicists are increasingly finding that inflation theory fails to account for the spread of matter and energy observed in the Universe (Credit: Nasa/ESA)

“Inflation seems to be the thing that has enough support from the data that we can take it as the default,” says Mack. ”It's the one I teach in my classes. But I always say that we don't know for sure that this happened. But it seems to fit the data pretty well, and is what most people would say is most likely.”

But there have always been shortcomings with the theory. Notably, there is no definitive mechanism to trigger inflationary expansion, or a testable explanation for how the graceful ending could happen. One idea put forward by proponents of inflation is that theoretical particles made up something called an “inflation field” that drove inflation and then decayed into the particles we see around us today.

But even with tweaks like this, inflation makes predictions that have, at least thus far, not been confirmed. The theory says spacetime should be warped by primordial gravitational waves that ricocheted out across the Universe with the Big Bang. But while certain types of gravitational waves have been detected, none of these primordial ones have yet been found to support the theory.

Quantum physics also forces inflation theories into very messy territory. Rare quantum fluctuations are predicted to cause inflation to break space up into an infinite number of patches with wildly different properties – a “multiverse” in which literally every imaginable outcome occurs.

“The theory is completely indecisive,” says Steinhardt. “It can only say that the observable Universe might be like this or that or any other possibility you can imagine, depending on where we happen to be in the multiverse. Nothing is ruled out that is physically conceivable.”

Steinhardt, who was one of the original architects of inflationary theory, ultimately got fed up with the lack of predictiveness and untestability.

“Do we really need to imagine that there exist an infinite number of messy universes that we have never seen and never will see in order to explain the one simple and remarkably smooth Universe we actually observe?” he asks. “I say no. We have to look for a better idea.”

Rather than being a beginning, the Big Bang could have been a moment of transition from one period of space and time to another – more of a bounce (Credit: Alamy)

The problem might have to do with the Big Bang itself, and with the idea that there was a beginning to space and time.

The “Big Bounce” theory agrees with the Big Bang picture of a hot, dense universe 13.8 billion years ago that began to expand and cool. But rather than being the beginning of space and time, that was a moment of transition from an earlier phase during which space was contracting.

With a bounce rather than a bang, Steinhardt says, distant parts of the cosmos would have plenty of time to interact with each other, and to form a single smooth universe in which the sources of CMB radiation would have had a chance to even out.

In fact, it’s possible that time has existed forever.

“And if a bounce happened in our past, why could there not have been many of them?” says Steinhardt. “In that case, it is plausible that there is one in our future. Our expanding universe could start to contract, returning to that dense state and starting the bounce cycle again.”

Steinhardt and Turok worked together on some early versions of the Big Bounce model, in which the Universe shrunk to such a tiny size that quantum physics took over from classical physics, leaving the predictions uncertain. But more recently, another of Steinhardt’s collaborators, Anna Ijjas, developed a model in which the Universe never gets so small that quantum physics dominates.

“It’s a rather prosaic, conservative idea described at all times by classical equations,” Steinhardt says. “Inflation says there’s a multiverse, that there’s an infinite number of ways the Universe might come out, and we just happen to live in the one that is smooth and flat. That’s possible but not likely. This Big Bounce model says this is how the Universe must be.”

Neil Turok has also been exploring another avenue for a simpler alternative to inflationary theory, the “Mirror Universe”. It predicts that another universe dominated by antimatter, but governed by the same physical laws as our own, is expanding outwards on the other side of the Big Bang – a kind of “anti-universe”, if you like.

“I take one thing away from the observations of the last 30 years, which is that the Universe is unbelievably simple,” he says. “At large scales, it is not chaotic. It is not random. It's incredibly ordered and regular and requires very few numbers to describe everything.”

Our forward-time flowing universe could have a perfect reflection that also extends out in reverse from the event we call the Big Bang (Credit: Alamy)

With this in mind, Turok sees no place for a multiverse, higher dimensions, or new particles to explain what can be seen when we look up at the heavens. The Mirror Universe offers all that – and might also solve one of the Universe’s big mysteries.

If you add up all the known mass in a galaxy – stars, nebulae, black holes and so on – the total doesn’t create enough gravity to explain the motion within and between galaxies. The remainder seems to be made up of something we cannot currently see – dark matter. This mysterious stuff accounts for about 85% of the matter in the universe.

The Mirror Universe model predicts that the Big Bang produced a particle known as “right-handed neutrinos” in abundance. While particle physicists have yet to directly see any of these particles, they are pretty sure they exist. And it is these that make up dark matter, according to those who support the Mirror Universe theory.

“It’s the only particle on that list (of particles in the Standard Model) that has the two requisite properties that we haven't directly observed it yet, and it could be stable,” says Latham Boyle, another leading proponent of the Mirror Universe theory and a colleague of Turok at the Perimeter Institute.

The entire picture of what we know nowadays, the whole history of the Universe, is what I call one ‘aeon’ in a succession of aeons – Roger Penrose

Perhaps the most challenging alternative to the Big Bang and inflation is Roger Penrose’s “Conformal Cyclic Cosmology” theory (CCC). Like the Big Bounce, it involves a universe that might have existed forever. But in CCC, it never goes through a period of contraction – it only ever expands.

“The view I have is that the Big Bang was not the beginning,” says Penrose. “The entire picture of what we know nowadays, the whole history of the Universe, is what I call one ‘aeon’ in a succession of aeons.”

Penrose’s model predicts that much of the matter in the Universe will eventually be dragged into ultra-massive black holes. As the Universe expands and cools to near absolute zero, those black holes will “boil away” through a phenomenon called Hawking Radiation.

“You have to think in terms of something like a googol years, which means a number one with 100 zeros,” says Penrose. “That’s the number of years or more for the really big ones to finally evaporate away. And then you’ve got a universe really dominated by photons (particles of light).”

Penrose says at this point, the Universe begins to look much as it did at its start, setting the stage for the start of another aeon.

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology predicts that much of the Universe will be pulled into enormous black holes that will then boil away (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

One of the predictions of CCC is that there might be a record of the previous aeon in the cosmic microwave background radiation that originally inspired the inflation model. When hyper-massive black holes collide, the impact creates a huge release of energy in the form of gravitational waves. When giant black holes finally evaporate, they release a huge amount of energy in the form of low-frequency photons. Both of these phenomena are so powerful, Penrose says, that they can “burst through to the other side” of a transition from one aeon to the next, each leaving its own kind of “signal” embedded in the CMB like an echo from the past.

Penrose calls the patterns left behind by evaporating black holes “Hawking Points”.

For the first 380,000 years of the current aeon, these would have been nothing more than tiny points in the cosmos, but as the Universe has expanded, they would appear as “splotches” across the sky.

Penrose has been working with Polish, Korean and Armenian cosmologists to see if these patterns can actually be found by comparing measurements of the CMB with thousands of random patterns.

“The conclusion we come to is that we see these spots in the sky with 99.98% confidence,” Penrose says. The physics world has, however, remained largely skeptical of these results to date and there has been limited interest among cosmologists about even attempting to replicate Penrose’s analysis.

It is unlikely that we will ever be able to directly observe what happened in the first moments after the Big Bang, let alone the moments before. The opaque superheated plasma that existed in the early moments will likely forever obscure our view. But there are other potentially observable phenomena such as primordial gravitational waves, primordial black holes, right-handed neutrinos, that could provide us some clues about which of the theories about our universe are correct.

“As we develop new theories and new models of cosmology, those will give us other interesting predictions that can that we can look for,” says Mack. “The hope is not necessarily that we're going to see the beginning more directly, but that maybe through some roundabout way we'll better understand the structure of physics itself.”

Until then, the story of our universe, its beginnings and whether it has an end, will continue to be debated.

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---30---

How a boy from Vietnam became a slave on a UK cannabis farm

ANOTHER REASON TO LEGALIZE/DECRIMINALIZE

CANNABIS IN THE UK

It was a horrifying death for the 39 Vietnamese nationals found in the back of a trailer in an industrial park in Essex, in October last year. The story shone a light on the subterranean world of people smuggling and human trafficking, reports Cat McShane, specifically the thriving route between Vietnam and the UK.

Ba is slight for 18. His body shrinks into a neat package as he recalls his experiences. We're sitting in a brightly lit kitchen, a Jack Russell dog darting between us under the table. Ba's foster mum fusses in the background, making lunch and occasionally interjecting to clarify or add some detail to his account of his journey here from Vietnam. She wants to make sure his story is understood.

Ba's lived here for nearly a year. He was placed with his foster parents after being found wandering, confused and scared, around a train station in the North of England, with just the clothes he was wearing. "You feel safe now though, don't you?" his foster mum asks, needing affirmation that the mental and physical scars Ba wears will heal with enough care.

His story is one both extraordinary, and typical of the growing number of Vietnamese men and women recognised as being potential victims of trafficking in the UK. For several years, Vietnamese have been one of the top three nationalities featured in modern slavery cases referred to the National Crime Agency, with 702 cases in 2018.

The Salvation Army, which supports all adult victims of modern slavery in the UK, says the number of Vietnamese nationals referred to them over the last five years has more than doubled. It's estimated 18,000 people make the journey from Vietnam to Europe each year.

Ba believes it was a Chinese gang that trafficked him to the UK. He was kidnapped off the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, where he was a street child, an orphan who slept in the bend of a sewage pipe. He sold lottery tickets for money, although older men sometimes beat him and grabbed his takings.

A 2017 Unicef report described Ho Chi Minh City as "a source location, place of transition and destination of child trafficking". And a 2018 report by anti-trafficking charities said numerous trafficked Vietnamese children had reported being abducted while living on the streets.

That's what happened to Ba. "An older man told me that if I came with him, he could help me earn a lot of money. But when I said no, he put a bag over my head. I couldn't believe what was happening," he says. He was then bundled into a small van, bound as well as blindfolded, his shouts stifled.

Somewhere along the way, Ba's captors changed, and now he couldn't understand the language they spoke. When they finally came to a standstill and the bag was removed, Ba found himself in a large, empty, windowless warehouse in China, and was told to wait. "I knew they were preparing to send me somewhere to work," he says.

During the months that Ba was held there, a guard regularly beat him. "I don't know why," Ba says with a shrug, "there was no reason." When he was caught trying to escape, his punishment was far worse than kicks and punches - the guard poured scalding water over his chest and arms.

"It was agony. I was shouting at him to stop but he didn't listen," he says. Ba became unconscious with the pain. "I just lay still for days. I couldn't walk. It was painful for a very long time."

His foster mum adds that his scarred skin is tight all over his body, and a permanent reminder of what happened to him.

Ba was then moved to the UK in a succession of trucks. He remembers the silence of the final container, where the human cargo hid among boxes. The quiet was broken only by the rustling of cardboard being ripped up, to be used as insulation from the gnawing cold. His long-sleeved top offered little protection.

"I was always scared on the journey, and very tired. I couldn't sleep because I was so worried. I didn't know what was happening to me. I wasn't told anything about where I was going."

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In fact, Ba was destined to work as a "gardener" in the UK's illegal cannabis trade - which is valued at around £2.6bn a year. In an abandoned two-storey house surrounded by woodland, he was locked-up and told to look after the plants that grew on every available surface. It was a mundane vigil of switching lights on and off over the plants at set times and watering them every few hours.

But it was also punctuated by violence. When a plant failed, Ba was starved and kicked by a Chinese boss, who would aim for the burns on his chest.

Ba never received any payment for his work, and wasn't told he was earning to pay off his fare to the UK. He was a slave.

"How did I keep going? I kept telling myself to keep eating, keep working and to wait for the opportunity to run away," he says.

He finally escaped by smashing an upstairs window, and jumping to the ground. Then he ran for as long as he could.

"I was frightened, depressed and panicking. If I had been caught I would have been beaten even worse," Ba says. But he had to take that risk, because his life in the cannabis farm was "unbearable".

With no idea what direction to head in, he followed the path of a train line. He only had a packet of biscuits to eat. "I didn't even know I was in England."

The train line, predictably, led him to a train station - and to what was for him a very happy meeting with British Transport Police. "It had been a long time since anyone had been nice to me," he says.

Ba has now settled into British life. He recently won a prize at college for his grades, and celebrated his first Christmas. He'd never unwrapped a present before. The translator who met Ba when he was taken into police custody says the transformation is remarkable. She recalls how skinny and scared he was. "Like a rabbit in the headlights," adds his foster dad.

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Ba doesn't know whether he'll be allowed to stay in the UK. His last meeting at the Home Office to discuss his application for asylum didn't go well. The official tried to persuade him that if he returned to Vietnam he'd be helped by the authorities, which Ba finds impossible to believe.

He is sure that if he is sent back, he will be trafficked again. That's a worry shared by Vietnamese trafficking expert Mimi Vu, who says that people who have been trafficked and returned are at serious risk of being re-trafficked, especially if their traffickers claim they owe them money.

It's the quiet that Ba likes about the tiny hamlet he lives in, filled with old stone cottages and sprawling bungalows. Crowds make him anxious; he's scared he'll see the man who held him captive in the cannabis farm and kicked his injured chest.

Chinh's scared too, but not of the people who smuggled him here to the UK. He's scared of the Vietnamese authorities.

These fears are grounded in bitter experience. The 17-year-old was forced to leave Vietnam early in 2019 to escape a 10-year prison sentence for distributing anti-government literature door-to-door. "I didn't think I would come out alive," he says.

There are harsh punishments for people who criticise Vietnam's Communist government. In a report last week, Human Rights Watch said that at least 30 activists and dissidents were sentenced to prison in 2019 "simply for exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of expression, association, and religion". That even includes writing something deemed anti-government on Facebook; Amnesty International says at least 16 people were arrested, detained or convicted in 2019 for this offence.

"[The year] 2019 was a brutal year for basic freedoms in Vietnam," Human Rights Watch's Asia director, Brad Adams, commented. "The Vietnamese government claims that its citizens enjoy freedom of expression, but this 'freedom' disappears when it is used to call for democracy or to criticise the ruling Communist Party."

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Chinh's arrest was due to his family's membership of Vietnam's Hoa Hao Buddhist community. The religion is recognised by the government but there are many groups that don't follow the state-sanctioned branch, and these are monitored and forcefully suppressed by the authorities. It's the same for other unapproved religious groups. Human Rights Watch says followers are detained, interrogated, tortured, forced to renounce their faith and imprisoned "in the national interest".

Chinh lived in Hai Duong, a city in northern Vietnam. His dream, along with millions of other teenage boys and girls, was to be a footballer, and he avidly followed the Portuguese star, Cristiano Ronaldo. But he was also happy working on his mum's household goods stall, when he wasn't at school. He was very close to her, and to his grandfather, who lived with them.

In 2018 Chinh attended a demonstration with his grandfather. He recalls his nerves in the morning and the flags of 100 people waving in the wind as they chanted, calling for freedom of religion and the release of political prisoners. After that, Chinh struggles. "I find talking about that day very difficult," he says. Chinh's grandfather was arrested and sent to prison, where he died not long after. "When we visited him, he looked very weak," Chinh says.

According to Amnesty International, jailed activists are at risk of torture and other ill-treatment. Vietnamese prisons are reported to be unsanitary, with inmates denied adequate access to medical care, clean water, and fresh air.

His grandfather's treatment spurred Chinh to continue protesting but in early 2019 he too was arrested, for distributing flyers. He was held in a small, narrow cell for 10 hours and questioned alone. His faith helped to get him through, he says.

"Of course, I was scared. The police would come to the cell and question me about my family and why I had anti-government literature. They shouted at me when I didn't answer. I was very scared they might hit me." In court, he wasn't allowed to defend himself, convicted, and told his sentence would start when he turned 18. His mum then raised the money to pay an agent to smuggle him to the UK.

"My mum's last words were, 'Go over there, find someone to help you, and never come back.'"

At the airport, she handed him over to two agents, who kept his passport. "We got lots of flights and stayed at people's houses until we got to France," Chinh says. He hasn't a clue what countries he passed through, apart from Malaysia and Greece.

In France, one night, he was put into a lorry container. There was only one other man inside, but they didn't speak until they arrived in the UK, terrified of alerting a border official to their presence.

"It was very cold and it was very difficult to breathe, because it was a confined, small space," Chinh says. "I was lying on top of boxes piled up high on the lorry, almost to the top, so I only just had enough room to lie down. It was very dark. I just slept. I had nothing with me - no food, no water."

When the lorry finally stopped, Chinh was taken to a Vietnamese family, who fed him and gave him a bed for the night. "I can get you somewhere safe," his host said.

In the morning, Chinh was left outside the local Home Office building with a piece of paper showing his name and date of birth.

He remembers how strange he felt because he couldn't speak English. But he felt safe, he says, "because I was in the UK". The Home Office has recently granted him refugee status, which entitles him to remain in the UK for five years. Then a decision will be taken on whether he can remain indefinitely.

Chinh was lucky. His mum was able to pay his passage in advance.

When the bodies of 39 Vietnamese nationals were found in Essex last year, it was reported that these were economic migrants from some of the poorest regions in Vietnam, who had taken out loans of up to £30,000 in order to get here. Family houses had been used as security and they would have been obliged to pay off their passage once here, by working illegally in cannabis farms, nail bars and restaurants.

We may never know what the 39 people found in Essex had been promised, but it's likely that some of them would have ended up in slave-like conditions.

Jakub Sobik from Anti Slavery International says that Vietnamese people who have taken out loans to pay for their journey here are more vulnerable to being exploited.

"They start their journey believing they have paid to be smuggled in the search for a better life, but end up being victims of trafficking.

"The extent that they have to hide from the authorities makes it easy for traffickers. You are illegal and it is a criminal offence to be here. They can't risk being deported to Vietnam with huge amounts of money owed over their heads."

Some of the data in this article is drawn from BBC Briefing, a mini-series of downloadable in-depth guides to the big issues in the news, with input from academics, researchers and journalists. It is the BBC's response to audiences demanding better explanation of the facts behind the headlines.

• Download the complete BBC Briefing on immigration (11.3MB)
• What would the UK be like without immigration?
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While males are typically siphoned off into cannabis factories, Vietnamese women are at risk of sexual exploitation. I have read an account given by a boy of 15, who said that while working in a cannabis factory he could hear the screams of women downstairs. He believed they were being sexually abused.

A young single mum, Amy, was raped on many occasions during her journey to the UK, and again after her arrival, until a health worker identified her as a potential victim of trafficking.

She had been excited to leave the family farm with her sister back in 2013, she told the charity that eventually started looking after her in the UK.

Two men had convinced her family to send the girls abroad to earn money. There was no upfront fee, so they would need to work to pay the fare. Amy left her young son with an uncle.

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She was trafficked first to a clothes factory in Russia, where she worked for 10 to 12 hours a day without pay. She slept in a small room with about 10 other people, where she was raped repeatedly by the male workers.

After two years, she and eight others were taken overland to the UK, and told that if they worked hard they would be paid. Instead, after waking up alone in the lorry that brought them across the Channel (the traffickers had left her behind for reasons that are unclear) she was sucked into a fresh world of exploitation. She ended up being forced into prostitution in the home of a Vietnamese couple, which doubled as a cannabis farm.

It was only after becoming pregnant, and getting arrested in a raid on the house, that a midwife noticed that something was wrong and referred Amy to the National Crime Agency as an apparent victim of modern slavery. Then the Salvation Army found her a place in a refuge.

Now she's a mum again, focused on doing the best for her baby.

Chinh is living with a foster family. He is working hard on his English - and even the local Northern slang - and he remains a practising Buddhist. His 18th birthday, the day he would have been jailed, is fast approaching.

Ba still suffers nightmares and flashbacks to his time in the hands of traffickers. He is waiting nervously for a decision on whether he will be granted asylum. But he recently started counselling, and day by day, under the loving care of his foster mum and dad, he is beginning to feel safer.

The names Ba, Chinh and Amy are aliases

Illustrations by Emma Russell

CHILDREN IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN THE UK

Children in custody forced to go without showers or phone calls in ‘harmful’ solitary confinement, inspectors warn

Calls for major overhaul of ‘horrific and shameful’ separation regime

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IS CLASSIFIED AS TORTURE BY THE UN

May Bulman Social Affairs Correspondent @maybulman

HM Inspectorate of Prisons found 'fundamental flaws' in the use of separation in the five YOIs in England and Wales, with one in ten child inmates officially separated and several others kept locked in their cells without formal oversight ( iStock )

Children in custody are being forced to go without showers or phone calls as they are held in “harmful” solitary confinement, according to a report from the prison watchdog which calls for a “major overhaul” of separation in young offender institutions (YOIs).

HM Inspectorate of Prisons found “fundamental flaws” in the use of separation in the five YOIs in England and Wales, with one in 10 child inmates officially separated and still more kept locked in their cells without formal oversight – some getting as little as 15 minutes outside a day.

In one case, a child was left to lie on a mattress on the floor of a filthy cell for more than 22 hours a day with no meaningful contact. Eight child inmates meanwhile spent a combined total of 373 days in separation unable to access a therapeutic regime that met their health needs.

Chief inspector Peter Clarke called for an “entirely new approach” to separation, saying the findings – based on 85 interviews with separated children and the staff responsible for their care and detailed analysis of 57 of these cases – were “a cause for significant concern”.

He said there were dramatic variations in children’s experience of separation across the five YOIs, which was “inexplicable” in a small custodial estate holding just over 600 people.

“The regime offered to most separated children was inadequate. While it tended to be better on designated segregation units, nearly all separated children spent long periods of time in their cell without any meaningful human interaction,” Mr Clarke said.

“We found children who were unable to access the very basics of everyday life, including a daily shower and telephone call. In the worst cases children left their cells for just 15 minutes a day.”​

The Howard League for Penal Reform welcomed the report, saying it had received more than 30 calls last year from or on behalf of children who had been separated from peers and were spending all day locked up alone, including one child with learning difficulties and mental health issues who had been in segregation in a prison for 76 days.


In another case seen by the charity, a 15-year-old boy was spending weeks locked in his cell and not accessing education because the prison could not keep him safe. The Howard League raised this with the prison and eventually the boy was allowed to access education.

Frances Crook, chief executive of the charity, said it was “horrific and shameful” that children in prison were spending days on end locked alone in their cells, adding: “If this were happening in any other setting, we would expect to see criminal investigations.

“The time has come to stop this practice and work for a solution where boys and girls are given the care and support that they need and deserve. It starts with keeping children out of prison.”

Shadow justice minister Imran Hussain said: “Holding vulnerable children in solitary confinement is barbaric and must end now. Despite clear evidence that doing so is seriously harmful to the mental health of these children, the government has so far failed to act.

“Ministers must now listen to the chief inspector [of prisons], children’s commissioner and a long list of experts who have criticised this practice and finally end the use of solitary confinement of children in line with the internationally recognised Mandela Rules.”

The report comes amid growing concern about the use of solitary confinement, with medics and children’s rights experts calling for change.

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Teenager being locked up for almost 24 hours a day speaks out

Last April, the Joint Committee on Human Rights recommended that the government “must immediately take steps to ensure that separation of children from human contact never becomes solitary confinement”, while a report by the Children’s Commissioner for England in 2018 raised serious concerns about the use of segregation and isolation of children in secure penal settings.

In April 2018, leading doctors issued a joint position statement calling for the solitary confinement of children and young people to be abolished and prohibited, while a report by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture a year earlier revealed that children in Cookham Wood prison in Kent were “regularly held in conditions akin to solitary confinement for up to 80 days for reasons of discipline and good order”.

In a ruling delivered in 2015 concerning adult prisoners, the Supreme Court held that there were “well known” risks of solitary confinement and that prolonged solitary confinement – defined as being locked up alone for longer than 15 days – is particularly harmful.

The Supreme Court cited expert evidence that the prolonged solitary confinement of adults can have an “extremely damaging effect on [...] mental, somatic and social health” and “some of the harmful psychological effects of isolation can become irreversible”.

Overall, Mr Clarke said: “The weaknesses of current practice and oversight are of such a magnitude that we recommend an entirely new approach, and that current practice be replaced.

“A new model of separation should be implemented that enables managers to use separation to protect children from harm and prevents separated children being subjected to impoverished regimes.”

Justice Minister Wendy Morton said: “It is difficult to read this report and not conclude that we are failing some of the children in our care – that is completely unacceptable and I am determined it will not continue.

“Separation can be necessary to prevent someone seriously hurting themselves or others, and the reality of managing children who can often be violent means that it is difficult to do that while providing full access to everything they can normally do.

“However, there is absolutely no excuse for some of the practices highlighted in this report and I have asked my officials to urgently set out the steps we need to take to stop them happening.”