Category: documentary

The Road from Crime

What can we learn from those former prisoners who have successfully “desisted” from criminal behaviour or “gone straight?

The exit at the prison gate often appears to be a revolving door with nearly 60% of released prisoners re-offending within two years of their release. Prisons and probation departments have, almost literally, tried everything in efforts to rehabilitate offenders over the past century, but the results have been uniformly bleak leading many to conclude that “nothing works.” In the past ten years, however, a group of criminologists have hit upon what should have been an obvious source of inspiration for prisoner rehabilitation: the other 40 per cent!

In this timely and compelling documentary, Allan Weaver, a Scottish ex-offender turned probation officer (author of the book So You Think You Know Me?) asks a simple question: What can we learn from those former prisoners who have successfully “desisted” from criminal behaviour or “gone straight?”

Starting where it all began for him on the streets of his hometown and in Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow, Allan sets off to understand how individuals like himself get caught up in cycles of crime and punishment, and how they break out of these patterns and move on to new lives. This journey takes him across the UK, meeting an array of ex-prisoners and ex-prisoner activist groups, probation leaders, and criminological experts from London to Washington, DC.

He discovers that much of what the criminal justice process does actually leads to more re-offending through the labelling and stigmatisation of ex-offenders. Indeed, few ex-prisoners say they were “rehabilitated” by the criminal justice system, but many blame their experiences with the justice system for keeping them trapped in cycles of crime and punishment.

Allan learns that real change more typically involves processes of self-discovery and mutual support. Allan discovers that ‘desistance’ from criminality is an internal change process although it is almost never done without support from the outside. Ex-prisoners speak in detail about the remarkable people who believed in them when others had lost hope, and about realising that they too had something to offer others, including, for many, their children. Desistance for them is about realising one is more than just the sum of one’s crimes and re-discovering one’s humanity, potential, and true self.

The big question – especially pressing for Allan as a probation officer – is whether we can bottle and package these often intangible dynamics into our criminal justice interventions? Can criminal justice processes be improved by a better understanding of how the change processes in desistance from crime really work? How would the criminal justice system be different if it were run by people like Allan who had been through the process themselves?

To answer this, Allan finds a fascinating world of ex-prisoner-led mutual aid and activist groups championing a new model of criminal justice practice. Like Allan, many of the ex-prisoners find meaning and purpose in their lives by helping others to avoid the mistakes they made. They might also have the answer for tackling the enduring problem of criminal recidivism.

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What is county lines?

County lines: the dark realities of life for teenage drug ...

Children as young as 7 are being put in danger by criminals who are taking advantage of how innocent and inexperienced these young people are. Any child can be exploited, no matter their background.

Criminal exploitation is also known as ‘county lines’ and is when gangs and organised crime networks groom and exploit children to sell drugs. Often these children are made to travel across counties, and they use dedicated mobile phone ‘lines’ to supply drugs.

How many young people are affected by ‘county lines’?

No one really knows how many young people across the country are being forced to take part, but The Children’s Commissioner estimates there are at least 46,000 children in England who are involved in gang activity. It is estimated that around 4,000 teenagers in London alone are being exploited through child criminal exploitation, or ‘county lines’.

Tragically the young people exploited through ‘county lines’ can often be treated as criminals themselves.

We want these vulnerable children to be recognised as victims of trafficking and exploitation. We want them to receive the support they need to deal with the trauma they have been through.

How are children being exploited?

Criminals are deliberately targeting vulnerable children – those who are homeless, experiencing learning difficulties, going through family breakdowns, struggling at school, living in care homes or trapped in poverty. 

These criminals groom children into trafficking their drugs for them with promises of money, friendship and status. Once they’ve been drawn in, these children are controlled using threats, violence and sexual abuse, leaving them traumatised and living in fear.

However they become trapped in criminal exploitation, the young people involved feel as if they have no choice but to continue doing what the criminals want.

What are the signs of criminal exploitation and county lines?

  • Returning home late, staying out all night or going missing
  • Being found in areas away from home
  • Increasing drug use, or being found to have large amounts of drugs on them
  • Being secretive about who they are talking to and where they are going
  • Unexplained absences from school, college, training or work
  • Unexplained money, phone(s), clothes or jewellery
  • Increasingly disruptive or aggressive behaviour
  • Using sexual, drug-related or violent language you wouldn’t expect them to know
  • Coming home with injuries or looking particularly dishevelled
  • Having hotel cards or keys to unknown places.

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Life Inside Bali’s Infamous Kerobokan Prison

To many, Bali’s Kerobokan jail is a place of creepy fascination, a repository of misery in an island playground. But what’s it really like in there?

For the first time a TV crew has obtained virtually unrestricted access to all corners of Kerobokan’s men’s prison. The Foreign Correspondent team spend a week roaming the jail, filming and interviewing prisoners and guards to capture life inside.

“Yeah, this is my little piece of paradise” – Bali Nine member Matthew Norman.

Resilience

“The Child may not remember, but the body remembers.”

Researchers have recently discovered a dangerous biological syndrome caused by abuse and neglect during childhood. As the new documentary Resilience reveals, toxic stress can trigger hormones that wreak havoc on the brains and bodies of children, putting them at a greater risk for disease, homelessness, prison time, and early death. While the broader impacts of poverty worsen the risk, no segment of society is immune. Resilience, however, also chronicles the dawn of a movement that is determined to fight back. Trailblazers in pediatrics, education, and social welfare are using cutting-edge science and field-tested therapies to protect children from the insidious effects of toxic stress—and the dark legacy of a childhood that no child would choose.

Website

A Second Chance

This 90-minute feature documentary accompanies two serving prisoners on their journeys through a unique training programme – each with a genuine chance of employment on their release.

These journeys are punctuated by encounters with four former prisoners, now Timpson and Max Spielmann employees, who have embraced the world of work and are now living normally outside the walls.

How do you turn your life around when you’ve been written off by society? This is the challenge faced by all prisoners – men and women, career criminals as well as first-timers – who find themselves marginalized and stigmatized on leaving jail.

Providing a unique glimpse of lives regained, this film documents the importance of a second chance through employment and tells the heart-breaking and uplifting stories of prisoners trying to transform their lives.

This is a film about hope.

Official Website

Homelessness and the penal system

The new prisons minister, Robert Buckland MP, recently replied to a Parliamentary Question from Richard Burgon MP, the shadow justice secretary, concerning the number of people received into prison who are homeless. This was interesting because most debate has centred around people being homeless on release from prison, which is, of course, still a major problem.

The response was staggering. The number of people known to be of no fixed abode when they were received into the 51 prisons listed increased from 18,493 in 2015 to 23,488 in 2018. This includes men and women but excludes children. The figures will include people remanded to prison by the courts and those who are sentenced.

Bizarrely, some big prisons that receive from the courts were missing from the list and the total number of homeless people sent to prison is undoubtedly even greater than the information provided by the minister.

Missing from the list were 73 prisons. Most of them do not receive people from the courts, or indeed the streets, because they are high security or training prisons; nevertheless prisons like Wormwood Scrubs and Preston were missing. This means that the full picture of how prisons are being used to sweep up the homeless is not clear and is being under-counted.

We do not know how many children and women who are homeless are being sent to prison. Missing from the list are prisons like Styal, which holds women, and Feltham, which holds children.

I have always argued that the penal system is used to sweep up the poor; now it seems we have definite proof. As the cuts in funding for local government have sliced into services for people with addiction, health, mental health problems the number of the homeless has increased exponentially. They are forced into petty crime to survive.

Spend a few hours in any magistrates courts and you will be transported back to the eighteenth century. The shock is that anyone thinks that this is humane, and it certainly is not economically efficient.

This week an Urgent Notification was issued to Bristol prison because it is in such dire state. Hidden in the litany of failures the inspector noted that almost half the men released from the prison were homeless.

The government admitted that, of the 6,000 women released from prison in 2017/8, only just over a half had settled accommodation, 240 were known to be going to rough sleeping and 831 women were ‘other homeless’. Nothing was known about 778 women released from prisons. Inspectors have noted that prisons have given sleeping bags and tents to men and women released from prison.

People who are homeless are being swept into prison and then dumped back onto the streets. Prisons are a merry-go-round for the people too poor and too fragile to sort their lives out. But instead of providing support, we are spending billions every year policing them, criminalising them and incarcerating them.

There is a chink of light. Overwhelmingly these are the people who are given short sentences by the courts. The government is planning to consult on its plan to get rid of short prison sentences. Let’s hope that this happens expeditiously and that we can close down some of the prisons holding the homeless so that funding is diverted to the local services that would prevent anti-social behaviour and support people to live healthier, happier lives.

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