h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thanks for the general insult Ed - " I wish I lived in this fantasy world of Mckay's where mothers work only for a bit of pin money to afford luxuries. In my family - as in most others I'm aware of - myself and my wife both need to work to pay for the mortgage, food, clothes..."

I assume you therefore have no children Ed. Or is it that you do have children and feel guilty ?

The school I'm a governor for includes an estate classed as one of the top 10% most socially deprived areas in the country.

In a school survey we found many of the homes did not posess a single book. The percentage of families where all the children had the same parents was less than 50%. Car ownership was around 30%. Employment was around 70% of those able to work.

Its difficult to persuade children from this sort of background that many of the things deemed vital to the curriculuum are relevent to them or their lives. What use is Pythagorus's theorem when you're stacking shelves at Tesco ? (Please don't answer that)

Interstingly the one area where they do score highly is community. There is a very real sense of belonging to the area, an inverse pride in their background. Yet they vandalise the amenities afforded to them.

Many of these people recognise they are excluded from the professions, they won't be doctors or lawyers. Worse they no longer have the trades to turn to - even if they are skilled with their hands, then engineering works and tool factories are gone. Even the job on the production line has almost disappeared. The armed forces are what many aspire to, and the current government has at least ensured we have need of strong young men for the foreseeable future.

The problem is that some of them cannot envisage a future, they dream of X-factor, or getting on Big Brother, one or two hold sporting ambitions, but for many there really seems no hope.

If you've got nothing to lose - what does it matter if you risk everything - in a fight, or on drugs, or breaking into a factory ?

"don't understand the consequences"

This phrase is repeated in my corner of the world.

It really does not seem to be happening
I thought it came more naturally, but not now.
It is surprising to me.
Not learning the importance of considering consequences is a very big problem from what I have seen.

Parentng and/or society is not expecting younger youth to pay for the consequences of their actions.
Or the consequences are wrong, too generic , too harsh or non existant? Others need to impose consequences if no pain, loss money or added trouble is not an automatic swift and permamnent lesson.


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I am not knowledgeable of violent crime rates there. Here they have been declining for a decade. However murder is up

The level of fear and anger is up.
A need to feel in control has gone up with the other two.

Maybe the level of violence escalates more rapidly now.
The weapons used are possibly more often deadly than in earlier decades.

There have always been gangs of some type.
I will never understand why violent offenders are not kept in jail longer, violent reoffending is higher. The gangs have fallen under organized crime laws here and that seems to have helped some.


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Kids are better at doing rather than thinking and they need more to do.

Many of the kids needing something to do are the first to be left out. Money keeps many after school programs and availablity shut down in poor areas.

When programs are available the first kids to be dis-allowed are ones with any hint of trouble. Especially those smoking, drinking,strealing , rowdy early on. They need something to do the first time there is a small problem. Making kids take days of school is totally weird solution

I am speaking of early non violent issues.

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The anger may be worse than in past decades, I do not know.
I have sure seen a lot of angry parents who do not know how to channel their own, so cannot teach how to.

I am concerned the culture of casual gambling with lies in politics and big business is having a larger consequence than people realise on the youth.

It is expected by many college age persons and younger that you will lie and cheat in school or business when appropriate *barf* or you are a fool.

This is very sad and seems to be more commonly admitted.
It is nt even an admission, just stated matter of fact.


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There may be a void in teaching good consequences.
Doing the rigt thing is right and how we are not to expect to be rewarded. Exposing ,teaching a sense of personal reward through example is a start.

I am not sure how sports stars got to be heroes.
Teaching kids about not putting people on a pedestal goes a long way Same for preachers and every other profession , none are infallable. This specialness begins a host of problems with special expectations and entitlements.

Personal integrity is important to teach.
Good people always make mistakes,,moving on wiser hopefully.
Saying I do not know or I am sorry must be taught and experienced early.


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A (even male)person from an abuused background might make an emotional decision to stop violence or destruction at any cost, picking the wrong time and place. A person can have a lot of stored up anger. They can use it to fight back. Could be a one time thing.(with or without being fatal)Could be two sides of the same coin.

McKay:

I have three children. Thank you for asking.



R4's Any Questions last night was interesting (It's soooo much better than the inane BBC1 'Question Time'.). Amongst the contributors was Justice Popplewell. I got the distinct impression that society has moved on. We're veering away from hang 'em and flog 'em and towards more 'liberalist' measures. Agreed?

Interesting piece in today's Times, not a paper I gather many read around here

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2284163.ece

"Young boys join gangs, they told me, because they are afraid. There is nobody else to protect them, certainly no responsible adult."

Worth reading IMO.

An interesting article, SWL.

Perhaps it also has to do with how much of a 'follower' a person is?

I know I got in with quite a rowdy group of bikers who were much older than me when I was 14, and although they never did anything violent that I was aware of they certainly were selling drugs. And they also made those drugs available to me. As usual I did things back-asswards and took LSD before ever trying pot ... after a particularly bad trip I discovered I wasn't able to smoke pot without getting awful flashbacks - just as well really. Well, except for the nervous breakdown bit ...

But I used to do really stupid things as part of this group (don't think they were a 'gang' especially) like ride out to the lake at midnight on the bikes, even though the guys were clearly 'under the influence'. I now feel very lucky I didn't die back then.

And a year later I moved to a different city, found an apartment and a part-time job so I could finish high school. And I think the main reason for that is just that I've never been a 'group person' nor a 'follower'. It just isn't in my personal make up somehow.

Yet it seems many people want and need to 'follow' something, and if they are found in a particularly vulnerable state they can very easily be coerced into joining gangs or cults or what-have-you. The offer of protection and 'understanding', things they never got at home, would be very difficult to refuse, don't you think?

az

I know that at the school I attended, there were 3 distinct camps. The (relatively) wealthy who always had the latest fashions and collections of LPs, the poorer kids who grouped together and kicked out at the fashionable and the "geeks" who floated in a world of their own.

I was one of the poorer kids and I know that most of us were deeply envious of the wealthy kids. The rejection was just bravado.

It levelled out on the sports field though, where ability was the main factor. But even there it was undermined by the wealthier kids having the best equipment, being driven to matches by parents instead of in the school mini-bus etc.

I do think sport is a way of channelling energies positively (sound of Blicky hitting the floor in a dead faint), but initiatives such as the Glasgow Asian amateur football league must be resisted or we will see sport fracture along racial lines.

So, encourage sport yes , but make everybody travel in the same mini-bus.

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"Young boys join gangs, they told me, because they are afraid. There is nobody else to protect them, certainly no responsible adult."

Interestingly, one of R4's Any Questions contributors said more-or-less that. I think it was Bonnie Greer. Yes, gangs give people a sense of belonging and mutual support that they may not be getting elsewhere...not even at home.

Another quote from the same programme, from Justice Popplewell:
"Unfortunately, successive Home Secretaries only wanted to be tough on the causERS of crime."

btw...reading back...I'm genuinely puzzled as to why McKay believe I gave him a 'general insult'. What I *thought* I'd done was to comment negatively on his posting. Is this the same thing?

"this fantasy world of McKay's" is hardly complimentary - as it reflects what I see around me in a middle-class district of what used to be a manufacturing town.

Hey ho!

For the last few moths there has been a young man of 16 now attending one of my courses he has been taken under the wing a little by all the staf from the domestic workers to the chair of the charity. He has a fairly exensive criminal record and is still associationg with a gang. This gang provides him s#with money for dangerous yet failry undemeanding tasks. We are trying to get him to use his talent for design and photography. He is poised, from a position of having no academic attainment before coming to us, tp start a college course in September.

IN the time he's been with us he's done lots of thngs we could have legitamately kicked him out for. This is not to say there have been no consequences, one was making him travel in the centre's "spacca" bus rather than staff cars for off site visits. However we have conciously made our "punishments" light for a reason. He like so many others has a bad relatioship with authority to punish him and others too much doenst make them want to "get with the programme" which is surely the whole point.

An old sparring partner of mine used to quite often say "you catch more flies with honey that you would with vinegar". (why anyone would want to catch flies and if the did why they just dont get some dog poo is beyond me

The lad in question was put into care at the age of four. This is without doubt one hoody who has respoonded to a hug muh better than all the previous attention he got from the police and criminal justice system. There was an element of luck in that I shape the course mostly around sport and construction skills, but my line manager a keen photographer spotted his talent when doing a part of the course she put together. Still I think the sense of acheivement in whatever it is and the attention of a positive nature he has been given has if not turned him around atleast opened his eyes to alternatives open to him.

I was as some of you may know once (or still am) juvenile scum myself the change if there has been a change came about because I eventually saw other things I could do and be. Forget that it was sport where it happened, its *what* happened. I was exposed to the fact that despite those who want to hold us back either by keeping us in the life they live or keeping us out of the lives they want to keep for themselves there are those who genuinely wanted me to do better and wanted to help and not punish as a first response to a problem. So sorry SWL your point about Asian football leagues doesnt work, true I too prefer intergrated leagues but any that work is better than people not taking part because of their own or other peoples prejudices.


The right and the right wingers who thing they arent right wing but are none the less often tell us prison is too soft and expensive and then in the next breath say we should send more people there. Lunacy.

The kind of thing I do is expensive, but not doing it is costly too in ways that we cant really measure so why baulk at the few quid it needs. The kind od interventions we have provided are Id bet cheaper in the long run and cost less per hour than the time of judges, solicitors and prison/police officers. The same people will point to people for whom it doent work and say it doesnt work but of course neither do hospitals because *everyone* still dies regardless of how much we spend on them.

Positive intervention is not a panacea, and I make no such claims for this being the case but why put any faith in a system like prison that has been comprehensively failing for thousands of years.

Davisd Cameron despite what you think of his policies and Prince Harry are to people who have induld#ged in illegal substances and lets call them hig jinks of the sort that might have had different outcomes and responses if they were trac suited "chavs". A large part of the differnce in outcomes is due to the intense investment people put into their structured upbringing.

Im not for a moment we introduce pre-emptive imprisom#nmen or as its more commonly known boarding school for every child int he UK. However where there is a lack of family support I think its in the best interests of the chld AND society to put in the extra fundswhen ofr before things go wrong.

Yes Imtalking about the much derided self esteem building trips to Africa and such like because (I fancy that as a work trip)

No seriously, I think they work not bescause they are great trips you can do that same kind of thing potholing or raft building in the Peak District, but because they make people feel positive about themselves and instil a sense that they can acheive something more than being a hero to a bunch of other underacheivers.

We are are only as good as the sum of our parts. If we dont look after everyone then...well take a look at the news.

one love

"In the past five years, 500 more social workers have been recruited for children, as well as the introduction of a youth crime action plan and Asbos for the under-16s.

Over the same period the number of persistent young offenders has gone up."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/6959513.stm

Actually...only two ASBOs have been served on children in Scotland. And I think one of them was appealed. Them as are responsible for ordering them widely regard them as A Silly Idea.

Interesting that various people are citing pressures on Reporters and the Childrens' Hearing system. Yes, it's severely understaffed. Beefing up these areas woukd allow the types of early intervention they're talking about. Although I'm biased, of course.

"In the past five years, 500 more social workers have been recruited for children, as well as the introduction of a youth crime action plan and Asbos for the under-16s.

Over the same period the number of persistent young offenders has gone up."

SWL, how does one cause the other? The fact that you've brought it up at all implies that you think it's not just correlation. Unless you're being mischievious.

Note, incidentally, that one thing that has *really* shot up is cases of abuse and neglect against children. Youth offending has only gone up slightly. Since youth offenders overwhelmingly first come to attention as victims of abuse or neglect, does this suggest that the additional social work resources are having some effect, but that more is needed?

Me? Mischievious?

I'm not suggesting one causes the other. What it can indicate is that social workers do not reduce youth crime.

Admittedly, this has been a helluva week for teenage criminals. An 11 year old shot dead whilst out playing. A handicapped man beaten to death in a park by a group of teenagers. All on top of the initial Mr Newlove story. But away from the headlines, can anyone deny that teenage criminality is escalating?

You want mischievious?

As someone on here once remarked, "Things started going wrong when we stopped sending people *to* be punished, and started sending them to prison *as* punishment.

IMO, we need a firmer approach.

1) The Police should tear up the bulk of their paperwork and go back to catching criminals. I don't want a touchy-feely Police Force (not Service), who are scared of offending people and not catching offenders. I want the Police to be absolute bastards. They've got an intrinsic leaning to it anyway. Let's have criminals genuinely in fear of the Police instead of sniggering at them.

2) Judges should utilise the powers given to them. I seem to recall that the maximum sentence for carrying a knife in Scotland was raised from 5 to 7 years, specifically to deal with an endemic knife culture. To date, no-one has received even the 5 year sentence.

3) Sentencing should reflect what it says on the tin. Five years means five years.

4) Prison should be a horrific, horrendous experience. It should be so bad that no-one in their right mind would contemplate going back in. Anyone who does re-offend is obviously not in their right mind, so jail them for life second time around.

I don't support the death penalty, but I do support harsh punishment. There is one inescapable fact - criminals cannot commit crime whilst they are locked up. If they do, it's against other criminals, so who gives a toss?

It is not society's job to accommodate the needs & wants of the delinquent. It is up to the delinquent to fit into society.

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Maybe, maybe not. The article wasn't actually very clear on cause and effect. I'm not really sure what to make of it.


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Yeah, sure. So..

1) Take people who generally come from the worst backgrounds society has to offer, have the worst education etc etc.

2) Have a place so awful it would probably drive people halfway round the bend anyway, and

3) Once they're truly ****ed up, when they go back in they deserve it.



Truly insane, well done. Oh, mischievious, nearly forgot.

I think one thing you've missed out on is that criminals generally don't think they'll get caught. Change that (through a tough prison regime, or namby-pamby liberal measures that would embarass some namby-pamby liberals?) and you might get somewhere.

Of course, it's known that tough sentencing doesn't act as a deterrent. Research has repeatedly shown that offenders simply don't consider consequences. It's also well known that imprisonment alone does not reform criminals.

Nope. We need to have the guts to resist the impulse to put in place the obvious, knee-jerk, reactive measures. We need to have the guts to act upon the causes of crime.