POLICE are now awaiting a decision from the Crown Prosecution Service over whether they can bring charges over alleged abuse at a former youth detention centre.

Cleveland Police said numbers were growing all the time in respect of complaints from individuals who were housed at HMP Kirklevington Grange, near Yarm.

To date 414 alleged victims have come forward after the first complaints were received by police in April 2014.

A 62-year-old and a 72-year-old man, both former employees at Kirklevington, were arrested and quizzed by police last year.

They were subsequently released, but remain under investigation, police said.

A spokeswoman said the allegations were spread over four decades, between the 1960s and 1990s.

She said: “The enquiry is on-going and preliminary papers have been submitted to the CPS for their consideration.

“We’ve moved a step forward and now wait to see if we can go ahead with charges.

“We are receiving complaints all the time and the number of calls are going up.”

Kirklevington was a detention centre operated by the Home Office, now the Ministry of Justice.

The facility housed boys aged 14-17 sentenced to between three weeks and four months’ detention.

It is now a semi-open prison for adult offenders, the last step before they are fully released into the community.

The 72-year-old was arrested on suspicion of rape and the other man on suspicion of misconduct.

Last year a number of men told the BBC’s Inside Out documentary programme how they had been repeatedly abused as teenagers.

One man, David Ginelly said: “All aspects of the daily routine was physical violence, serious assaults from 6am in morning until 7pm at night you were assaulted, you were kicked, you were punched.”

Another complainant, Andrew Brabarek claimed he was punched so hard he went blind for three days.

Police forces across the region have investigated a number of cases of so-called institutional abuse with Durham Police carrying out a widespread criminal inquiry into complaints from former youth detainees at Medomsley, near Consett, and also at the former Stanhope School.