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MENACE to society ? The rise and rise of ned culture sparked the introduction of electronic tagging, but for every young person it has helped there is a story of frustration and fury. So is there another way?(The Herald Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Scott Crawford's father tried to stab him when he was nine years old. He explains this, along with the other shocking details of his life so far, in a deadpan manner, his expression suggesting this kind of thing just happens. At 17, he is unsure whether he's committed 100 offences or a thousand. He is as nonchalant about his criminal record as most people would be about his future. Last year, Crawford became one of some 70 children to be tagged under the Scottish Government's pilot programme to crack down on youth crime. Like most teenagers on the rather unsnappily labelled Intensive Support and Monitoring Service (ISMS), he had been written off. It's easy to see why. He talks about putting a boulder through someone's face in the same way most people would discuss the weather. As he raises his arms to indicate the size of the rock he used with his hands, I realise this is a different world. Crawford conforms so well to the usual stereotype of the ned: pale, tracksuited, menacing and difficult to decipher. A glossary of street terms would certainly help but he is, dare I say it, a charming ned. Last year he was one of 1388 persistent young offenders in Scotland. The accolade goes to those who commit five or more offences in six months. Crawford sometimes committed that many in 24 hours. Today he is, on the whole, a reformed character. The two of us are sitting in a sanitised business park in Clydebank, West Dunbartonshire - in one of the several unglamorous centres run by the charity helping him - to explore why. Inthe late seventies, Judge Jack Love in Albuquerque, New Mexico was ruminating on what he could do to make home leaves from the local penitentiary more secure. He compiled a wide range of ideas. One was a sequence of four pictures from a Spider-Man cartoon strip, syndicated in a local newspaper. The strip shows Spider-Man being tagged with an exploding armband by a dastardly villain. The armband enables the villain to track Spider-Man's movements and allows him to offend with impunity. Love gave the file to an electronic engineer, Michael Goss, and it was he who made the first tags, drawing on patents developed by two psychologists at Harvard University - brothers Ralph and Robert Schwitzgebel - who are, strictly speaking, the fathers of this technology. Rolled out across Scotland in 2002 for adult offenders, electronic monitoring started with just over 300 cases in its first year as an alternative to prison. Despite early indications that it was not successful in tackling youth crime, the option of tagging under-16s was introduced in Scotland under the controversial AntiSocial Behaviour Act of 2004.According to an independent evaluation by Professor Malcolm Hill of Glasgow University - which has been obtained by The Herald - tagging under-16s has not worked for the majority. In contrast, the intensive support element of the package - which has been applied to approximately 150 young people without the tag - has had dramatic results. At the end of the month, the funding for this pilot scheme runs out. Kenny MacAskill, the new justice secretary, will have to decide whether to roll it out and whether to insist the intensive support only be offered to those on the tag. For Crawford, both elements have made a difference. Well, that and the fact he says he almost died. The young man comes from a Lennoxtown family with men who have always fought and drank. He was 11 when he started "vandalising stuff", which involved smashing windows and spray-painting buildings. School is somewhere he didn't go. He would get on the bus with his classmates but spend the day sitting by a nearby burn smoking hash. "I was suspended every second week, " he says. "They would send me home for two days and I would just get drunk. My dad left when I was 13. I was already smoking a lot of hash but then I started doing eccies and coke. My papa died when I was 14. He had been told he would die if he didn't stop drinking. We had been really close and that was when it went bad. I drank non-stop for a month." Crawford's offending profile worsened as he became more and more involved in the culture of Young Campsie Teegay - the gang to which he belongs. To him it's just a matter of "hanging out with my pals and rolling about in the park". To others, it's an alien and brutal world of mindless violence. When he was tagged for three months last summer it meant he was restricted to staying at his mum's house between 7pm and 7am - a routine to which he wasn't accustomed. A worker from Includem, the charity which has provided the intensive support element of the package for five out of seven of the local authorities involved in the pilot, met with him almost every day to gain his trust. His worker went back again regardless of how many times he was told to "f- off". Research indicates that the support provided by these workers, in tandem with social work, makes a difference. It meant Crawford had access to someone he trusted 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Stickability is the charity's motto. Most of the adults these children have encountered have come and gone - parents, social workers, teachers - but Includem refuses to walk away. "If I hadn't been on the tag I could have picked up a thousand charges in that three months, " he explains. "I breached it a few times and to start with I found it tough. I still used to meet up with my pals and get pished. We would start drinking after breakfast and drink all day. "It is far harder than people think to walk away from the gang stuff. But Includem is great. They gave me time to reflect on my life. They say, 'This is where you went wrong, do you want to fix it?'" Last November, Crawford was admitted to hospital suffering anxiety attacks and a range of health problems as a result of his quotidian indulgence in cocaine, ecstasy and the infamous Buckfast. "I thought I was going to die, " he says. "I was drinking three bottles of [tonic] wine and a bottle of voddy every day. My whole body went into spasm. I had to stop. I had to be a man. "I was watching the telly when I was at home with the tag and it showed a 12-year-old who had been stabbed in Glasgow. I started to think about whether this was the kind of thing I wanted to see happening. One of my friends was almost shot. A few of them have been chopped. I realised there is a lot more to life than f-ing getting drunk and fighting." The practicalities of dating also became a factor. "It's difficult telling your bird you can't meet them at the cinema because you've been locked up, " he says with a grin. "Since I've stopped the fighting and smashing people up, I've met a lot more birds. Now I'm not drinking I'm more confident. I feel like a better person. I can actually sit next to my friends while they do drugs and get gassed [drunk] and not be tempted, because I just think there isn't any point in f-ing my head up. Everybody can say they've got a hard life so there's no point blaming that. You just have to move on. Now I want a job and somewhere to live." Darren Sinclair, or Sinky as his friends and other gang members call him, is 16. He's from Drumchapel - one of the most deprived areas in Scotland - and he has an even longer list of victims than Crawford. He has served time in HMP Greenock and been to Polmont Young Offenders Institute four times. He was just 15 when he was sent to the adult jail. I ask if he was afraid and he looks puzzled. "It wasnae as bad as I thought it would be, " he says, then explains he's not afraid of anything. Showing any inkling of weakness, emotion even, is not part of surviving in an area like Drumchapel. When Sinclair was tagged last year for three months, he breached the order so often and so dramatically that he was sent to a secure unit for seven months. He was charged, he tells me, with committing three attempted murders on the same day. His weapon of choice was a screwdriver. Does he feel remorseful? Not really, it appears. He was simply quicker to draw his weapon than the others. "It was just gang fighting, " he says. "If you've not got a weapon they will, and they'll do you before you do them. There are hunners of gangs in Drumchapel. If you walk through someone else's territory the fighting starts straight off. "You can't stop a ned being a ned. Well, not by putting a tag on. When there is nothing else to do you just get mad with it [alcohol] and fight. The tag made me angry. The tag didn't help. It just meant I got the jail more often." When he was seven, Sinclair was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but the Ritalin he was prescribed made him feel so drowsy that he stopped taking it. At primary school he says he was "a wee rogue". Once he moved to secondary, he says, things changed and not for the better. "We always had blades and baseball bats, " he says. "In third year I got thrown out for going down the school with a kitchen knife. Someone had battered my pal so I was getting him back." Sinclair wants to be a mechanic. In January he hopes to start a six-month apprenticeship. Through the ISMS programme, he is currently doing an anger management course and after years of daily offending, he has broken the cycle. In the past two months he has been charged once; a blip he doesn't remember because he was "out of it" on Buckfast. He has cut down his drug taking and stopped gang fighting. "I was getting the jail every week but going to secure for seven months gave me a bit of a fright, " he says. "I can't blame anyone for how I am, though. The only person to make me worse is myself. I guess Includem helps because they fill our time and that means we're not out offending all the time. Sometimes it's good to have someone to talk to." It is difficult to look at Sinclair or Crawford without thinking of Alex de Large - the ungovernable protagonist of A Clockwork Orange. In Anthony Burgess's book the authorities try to cure his sadistic tendencies with a fictional form of aversion therapy. This involves Alex being forced to watch violent images while under the effect of drugs that cause intense nausea and discomfort. The idea is that the patient will assimilate the sensations and then become incapacitated either attempting to perform or just witnessing acts of violence. The technique cures Alex of the need to commit senseless bloodshed but he begs them to reverse the process as it also destroys his only legal pleasure: classical music. For Alex, like many young offenders, the lure of meeting young women and settling 'down also helps with his desistance. Delinquency is, the research suggests, something many young people grow out of. Girls often stop earlier than boys because they mature faster and sometimes because they fall pregnant. However, simply waiting for serious and violent offenders to grow out of criminal behaviour is anathema. Erring on the side of retribution, though, is equally pointless if it doesn't work. Sinclair's reaction to the tag has been mirrored across the country. The findings indicate that for a small minority - particularly those struggling with peer pressure - the use of electronic monitoring helps, but for most it is the intensive support without the tag, the slow and often tedious process of building trust, aspirations and self-belief, that makes the difference. Angela Morgan, the new chief executive of Includem, says, "Through the intensive support element we can work with young people on anger management and their attitude to crime and help to build their confidence. Ultimately it is about being hopeful that people can change. It is about being available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, once other services have closed. We also act as a kind of brokerage service to put people in touch with other services and help them to get to appointments. "The tag has worked for some young people but not for others. It has, though, acted as a gateway to enable people to get support." Susan McVie, a senior research fellow within Edinburgh University's School of Law, says, "The punitive approach does not work because the kids have no incentive to stop offending. With these young people the carrot is always much more effective than the stick because they have such complex needs." Jack McConnell, the former first minister, would not agree. When the new Act came into force in October 2004, he promised to crack down on ned culture with "tough love". Penalties including dispersal orders, parenting orders, Asbos and tagging for under-16s were introduced to crack the whip. The new powers have been used far less often than expected - there have been only nine Asbos issued to under-16s - partly because social workers, children's charities and even some police officers stated at the outset that simply penalising these young people wouldn't work. Undeterred by the low take-up rate, McConnell made repeated calls for them to be implemented and even organised trips to Manchester, known as the heartland of "junior Asbos", to show off their benefits. Despite McConnell's rallying cries, the numbers of persistent young offenders increased significantly from 1201 in 2003 to 1388 last year. The somewhat meaningless ministerial target to cut this figure by 10-per cent by 2008 has now been dropped. Last week, Detective Chief Superintendent Neil Wain, of Greater Manchester police, publicly denounced the use of Asbos for children, and said there was growing evidence that they might be more of a political stunt than an effective tool. Most of the young offenders I have spoken to have few hobbies and difficult family backgrounds. But Chris Donnelly, 16, played rugby and was picked for a Scotland under-16s training camp. His offending therefore seems all the more surprising. In February, he and a friend stole a neighbour's car to go joyriding. They crashed it. He broke his back. When he first got in trouble with the police in the summer of 2006, Donnelly was charged with drinking and a breach of the peace. Soon he was fighting with the police. "I got suspended a few times from school but until I was 15 or 16 I didn't really get in trouble, " he says. "I was bored. I got chucked out of school and then I just got drunk." He stayed with his mother until earlier this year when they fell out over the joyriding incident. He now lives with his father in the North Ayrshire town of West Kilbride, and has taken part in the ISMS scheme. "Includem meant I had someone to talk to and they kept me busy so that kept me out of trouble, " Donnelly explains. "Sometimes with my Includem worker we'd just go for a drive or play pool.When I see trouble now I just walk away and I try to think about what I am going to do before I do it." In August Donnelly started a college joinery course in Glasgow. He gets up at 5.50am every day to travel the hour and 20 minutes into college on the train. For going to college he gets a bursary of pounds-80 a week and gets pounds-40 in travel expenses. Such costs are paltry compared to the expense of keeping someone in secure accommodation - pounds-4600 a week - or tidying up after vandalism and street fights. The cost of intensive support is pounds-600 a week. The ongoing and extensive Edinburgh Youth Transitions study, an evaluation of 4300 children in the city, found that the "fairly widespread" delinquency among minors was largely the fault of parents. Parents who supervised their children closely but were happy to negotiate with them and allow the child to believe he or she had some degree of autonomy were most likely to avoid problem teenagers. Both of Roz Provan's daughters are on the ISMS programme as a result of their prolific offending and the fact they repeatedly placed themselves in danger. Her older daughter Stacy, 17, has just finished a six-week stint in secure accommodation. Christina Jenkins, 15, is preparing for her Standard Grades and planning a career as an undertaker. Neither of the girls live with her. They both stay in children's homes. "I blame myself and I know people often blame the parents, " says Provan. "I should have got rid of their dad a long time ago. He was forever in and out of jail, breaking into cars and taking heroin. We met when I was 12, got married when I was 16 and I had Stacy when I was 18." I ask whether she believes parenting classes - an initiative propagated by ministers and not used nearly enough, according to the police and academics - would have helped. "I did a 10-week parenting course when Stacy was three because she was diagnosed with ADHD, " says Provan. "I don't know if it helped. Stacy was so difficult she would only sleep for three hours a night even as a baby. As she got older she started shoplifting and getting done for assaults. She was on Ritalin by the time she was six. She was put in secure last year mainly for her own safety. The girls just don't seem to see the risks." Provan says Christina was a "wee angel" until her father left them two years ago. When I put this theory to Christina she shrugs her shoulders.Her explanation is that she "just got in with the wrong people". "I dogged school every day and started drinking and going about with boys who were a lot older than me, " she says. "The police took me home but I used to go straight back out again. One time we tried to steal a bus. "To start with I drank at the weekends and then it was every day. With Includem I've realised that when I drink or take drugs then trouble comes with it. Now I go to school part time and ISMS class part time. I've started hanging out with different people and I've built up enough good behaviour points that in October week I'm going snowboarding." Christina, who narrowly avoided the tagging element after offending and absconding almost daily, has turned things around. In the past six months she has picked up three charges. I ask what advice she would give to those starting out on the same path to offending. "I would say don't do it, " she says. "It's stupid. I thought I knew everything but I never did. But older people need to listen. If they order us to do something we'll just do the opposite." As Christina dashes off to her ice-skating date, I wonder who will listen to what she, Crawford, Sinclair and Donnelly have to say. I wonder too who will read the details of the research. Unlike the plots of Spider-Man's dastardly villains and A Clockwork Orange's drug-induced aversion technique, it sounds like common sense. Copyright 2007 Newsquest Media Group Ltd, Source: The Financial Times Limited |