14-year-old who took his own life

When Adam Rickwood hanged himself in his cell last month he became, at 14, the youngest person to commit suicide in a British jail.

He had been locked up for a month for removing an electronic tag, which he had been ordered to wear while on bail for a wounding charge.

On the day his body was found, he had been due to make a fresh bail application. His grandmother Margaret Rickwood said: "All we get now is a little mangled body."

Adam died in Hassockfield secure training centre near Consett, County Durham, 150 miles from his home in Burnley, Lancashire, where he lived with his mother, stepfather and three sisters. Relatives claimed they had warned staff that Adam - who had once taken an overdose - should be on suicide watch.

His mother, Carol Pounder, alerted officials to her son's "distant" mood when she visited him five days before his death. Although he had been in trouble with the law before, it was the first time he had been sent away to prison. His grandmother claimed he had started to "go down a slippery slope" at 11 when he was unable to cope with the death of two grandparents to whom he was close.

After the tragedy, prison reformers called for a public inquiry into the youth justice system and in particular the use of secure training centres, privately-run institutions which hold children as young as 12.