Whoah! That poem caught me right in the guts on today's page. I often defend youths. I hate doing it, not cos they don't deserve a good defence, or because they are difficult to deal with, but because the entire Youth Justice system is stacked against them - who will believe the word of a kid against an adult? - and it breaks my heart to see a kid of 15 with his hoodie and his baseball cap coming to the end of the road in terms of Youth Offending Programmes, who has fallen into the system and can't get out of it... and to hear him say to me "Yeah, well...I'm pleading guilty even though I didn't do it cos I will get found guilty anyway. I don't give a fuck if they send me to Feltham. I've got some mates in there - they're doing alright."
Well their mates in Feltham are not doing alright. They will come out scarred, abused and tormented, and hating the "system" that put them there even more than before. The only difference is, for most of them, it will just have made them "harder".
Someone said something very cynical to me the other day in the Family Courts - "you need to take good care of the clients in these dysfunctional family cases - the drunken fathers, the beaten mums. Cos you will end up with their kids as criminal clients one day".
