Member News
By Mark Johnson - 8th December 2010
Despite the predictability of Britain's unpredictable weather, last week once again saw transport services disrupted, roads frozen and many people unable to get to work.
Daz, a young man from Grimsby, was not among them.
He hitched - for some twelve hours - through the snow to attend a meeting in Westminster, work that he was not being paid for.
Daz is an ex-offender and one of a group of volunteers who helped to organise and run a discussion forum in Portcullis House last week between 29 excluded young people and MPs, policy makers and senior practitioners.
He is one of the growing number of people who works with User Voice, a charity led by ex-offenders and which works to engage those in and around the criminal justice system in service and policy development.
The discussion forum, which was attended by senior representatives from the Ministry of Justice, National Offender Management Service, the Youth Justice Board, the National Probation Service and private contractors, coincided with the publication of the interim report of User Voice's major project with excluded youth in England.
In the last six months User Voice volunteers, like Daz, have worked with hundreds of excluded young people in England.
Through an in-depth questionnaire and 22 discussion groups all over the country, the young people – all of whom have been in trouble with the police – voted for the final 30 who would represent them.
Unfortunately one had to return to prison for breaching his bail conditions.
Of the group we worked with a staggering 71 per cent had been excluded from school.
Again and again their stories revealed deep family dysfunction, early trauma, mental health problems and/or learning difficulties.
Nearly one in 10 had never lived with either parent.
Fast forward and a fifth had received ten or more different types of sentence, 43 per cent had spent time in a young offenders' institute or prison; 45 per cent said they had drink/drug problems.
Much of this, while deeply depressing, will not be news to those who work in criminal justice services.
We have long known that the people who fill our courts, prisons and young offenders' institutes are not a cross section of the public: there would be an outcry if this were the case.
Young offenders are much more likely to live in poor families, in deprived areas and with parents who struggle to parent and who are out of work and/or have drug, alcohol and mental health problems.
What is new about this work – aside from the way that User Voice has managed to powerfully capture the voices of some of the most deeply excluded – is the ex-offender led approach being taken to making change happen.
Elsewhere in public services it is practically required for the 'user voice' to be heard.
This government like the last is keen to emphasis empowerment, co-design and civic participation within communities and the services that deliver to them.
Not so with prisons and criminal justice services. This is despite the evidence – and justice secretary Ken Clarke's view – that they are not working nearly as well as they should be.
Very many of those young people we talked to did not think their local school, employment services, youth offending teams or police helped in reducing their likelihood of reoffending.
And for those who ended up in custody, few believed it helped them to get their lives back on track.
Perhaps most tragically was the number of young people who reported that there had been no interventions to help them cope as children with problems like parental violence and neglect.
Their experiences of most agencies had been poor, with social workers and the police regarded with deep negativity.
Of course, there are many and complex reasons for these failings.
As we complete this project – the final report comes out in the new year – we will neither stop at simply diagnosing problems or reach for simple solutions.
Although it is too early to be sure, a central theme to emerge is the need to be able to at the same time both acknowledge the real social and familial drivers of crime while challenging offenders' victim mentality.
We absolutely do not deny there is a place for punishment.
But we hope the forthcoming criminal justice green paper will usher in a change to the political weather around crime and that the combination of Ken Clarke's pragmatism and the need for better outcomes for less money, could mean at last a debate about what works and doesn't, not what is soft and hard.
We also hope it begins to address the backwardness of criminal justice in terms of engaging service users.
The young people and the volunteers – like Daz – who attended this event want to be part of the solution.
Throughout the project, many emphasised their responsibility for what they did and for trying to change now.
But they also place their offending in context; violence, deprivation, poverty and exclusion.
No one has a greater investment in seeing change happen than people with the experience of living through this.
We believe that User Voice is uniquely placed in helping them to articulate their views and be heard. After all we were them.
For more information about our work:
Download a copy of the interim report
Watch a trailer of a documentary in which award winning rapper, Speech Debelle, worked with excluded young people in 3 cities to produce a song about their experiences as part of this project.
Mark Johnson is the founder of User Voice.
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