The brothers aged 10 and 12 are almost certain to be sent to secure children’s homes like the units that once housed Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the boys who murdered James Bulger, 2.
There are 15 such homes across Britain, run by local authorities that are paid by the Youth Justice Board to provide placements for children given custodial sentences. The youngest inmate is currently 12.
Children in these establishments have access to a range of specialists with expertise in emotional, behavioural and mental health issues that often need to be addressed with vulnerable young offenders.
A high staff-resident ratio is present in each unit. The smallest has only five beds, the largest, at Aycliffe, Co Durham, once home to the child killer Mary Bell, has 36.
Up to 30 hours of education classes are provided for each child and other activities are likely to include dance, drama, music and sport, plus training in life skills such as cooking, laundry, personal care, banking and budgeting.
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Peter Minchin, the Youth Justice Board’s head of placement and casework, told The Times that considerable care would be taken in choosing the most appropriate home for the brothers, with support tailored to their individual needs.
It is possible that they will be held at the same home, but more likely that they will be taken to separate locations, with units in Co Durham, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Merseyside and Nottingham among the most likely destinations.
It costs the taxpayer £210,000 to keep a child in a secure children’s home for one year. However, more than 78 per cent of children released from custody in secure units, secure training centres or young offenders’ institutions reoffend within 12 months. Of the 2,500 under-18s in custody in England and Wales, only 165 are in a secure children’s home.
Andrew Neilson, assistant director of the Howard League, said that because of their ages the Edlington brothers would “engage with the best part of the criminal justice estate”.
It is possible that no British court has heard of young children setting out to inflict such injuries since 1993, when Thompson and Venables were convicted. Their victim was taken from a shopping centre in Bootle, Merseyside, and led to a railway line. There, he was battered to death.
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The pair, now aged 26, freed and living under new identities, became model residents at the homes where they were held for eight years, in Manchester and Merseyside. Each had a broken, disturbed childhood but no one has been able to come close to explaining their crime.