A Life Re-moulded

How should society respond to a 14 year old murderer? Having convicted me and left me loitering around the remand centre for six months, I was whisked away - 'allocated'.

Youth Treatment Centres were run jointly by the Home Office and DHSS and staffed with social workers and psychologists rather than prison staff. Glenthorne YTC had fearsome levels of procedural security and control, but had the appearance of a large modern children’s home. Tucked in the suburbs of Birmingham, only the 18 foot security fence differentiated it from its surroundings.

Unknown to me, my trial Judge had written to the Home Office to suggest that I serve ten years of my life sentence. What moral balance, what weighing of my life against my victims, produced that number? This is the essential difficulty with murder - it is unalterably final. What punishment is fitting for that crime? The obvious and populist answer is that the murderer should forfeit his own life. This sits quite easily on the lips but in reality misses great chunks of reasoning. The answer can only be discerned when another question has been asked and answered - what is the purpose of the punishment?

In my case, I was sentenced under a law which no longer exists - the Children and Young Persons Act of 1933. The date is slightly comforting, it reassures us that serious crime by the young is not a modern phenomena. This Act is explicit in its intent that, whilst punishment is inherent in the sentence, that sentence should also attempt to be reformative. This affords some special status to children, an acknowledgement that we are not fully formed and so capable of change. Children are redeemable in the view of 1933; this patina of decency broke down on the streets of Liverpool in 1992 as grown men charged at police vehicles carrying two ten year old murderers. The post-Bulger legal outlook shifted to reflect the populist punitiveness encouraged by Michael Howard. In the name of elevating the special status of children, that special status of children was undermined.

The existence of the YTC's suggests that at some policy making level a deliberate decision was made, after careful consideration, that young murderers were salvageable. My life was not to be written off. Not that I had any clue of this. Approaching a year after the crime, I had still not had any information about my sentence or what it “meant". As far as I was concerned, “life meant life”, although I assumed that I would be released at some point. Not that I was concerned; long term thinking isn't the preoccupation of teenagers.

Internally, it contrasted with prison. Where prison had sharp, hard edges, Glenthorne has rounded yielding ones. The furniture was foam, the doors were wood. No staff uniforms, although each had keys and a radio. In this way the physical security was less oppressive and obvious. The procedural security, the way it was run, was much more intrusive than prison. Whereas in prison I was left alone for hour after hour, at Glenthorne I was almost constantly monitored. Each ten minutes, staff physically checked my presence. I could be in the bath or on the loo - they still looked in. The depth of control was near absolute, down to the number of slices of toast I could have for breakfast.

This flowed from the nature of the regime. Whereas prison didn't actually try to do anything with us, Glenthorne's explicit aim was to change its captives. To this end, it ran a regime based on behaviour modification - I became one of Pavlov's dogs, being prompted to salivate at the merest whiff of a positive or negative reinforcement. That's punishment and reward to the psychologically untrained.

Daily life was turned on its head. Whereas in prison the majority of time was spent in forced isolation, at YTC it was spend in forced society. From breakfast time onwards we were held in the lounge, all doors leading away being locked. With a 1 to 1 staff-prisoner ratio, we were observed keenly and unremittingly. This extended to staff physically inserting themselves on the seating between us when we were talking to each other. Barely a moment passed that could be called 'private'. These were islands comprising short seconds of time; turning a corner, for instance, where staff were a few feet behind. This was often more difficult than sitting alone in a cell for 23 hours a day.

The main structured intervention in our lives was the 'token economy'. This was a system previously used most often to regulate the behaviour of severe schizophrenics. Nice... It was a simple system. We were allowed nothing unless we could buy it with tokens. Tokens were points earned through achieving behavioural targets. Points were awarded by staff at the end of each hour. At the start of each day we were issued our scorecards, listing our targets, and each hour we had to present these to staff to be marked. See, simple.

And demeaning. It was being perpetually judged like a child. That I had killed someone didn't mean that I needed to be awarded points for getting out of bed, washing and dressing. Points couldn't be earned until the end of the first hour of the day and so we didn't have any to spend at breakfast - we had to buy an extra slice of toast, a second cup of tea. To turn on our own radio, to watch TV, even to put posters up in our own room - even access to that room - all of these had to be bought with these phantom points.

As per the strictures of Skinner and Watson, this was behaviour modification with a vengeance. A moment by moment reckoning, an attempt to make us behave precisely as staff prescribed. As a murderer, one would imagine some grand target, probably based around violent behaviour, that would guide the daily assessment of my life. One would be wrong. My target was to increase my level of eye-contact during conversations. And as the following 28 years revealed, standing up and looking my keepers in the eye is not the benefit Glenthorne believed it to be.