The New Job

Perhaps it is a sign of the age in which we live. On my arrival at the Howard League I was handed a  PC rather than a shovel, and spent a period of time familiarising myself with various internal policies and the current campaigns. Organisational and bureaucratic stuff. Nothing too onerous!

Just after lunch - my first Big Mac - I was stopped in my tracks. A folder entitled "Child Deaths In Custody". Opened, it revealed  a list of children who had killed themselves behind bars, the youngest being the age at which I began my sentence - 14 years old. I was shaken, and remained so for several hours. Leaving work I wandered the darkening streets of London, searching for.....what? Some inner peace? Awaiting a revelatory flash to put all of this in context?

I felt drenched in misery. Events from past years and past faces rolled through my mind on an unstoppable conveyor of angst and I felt a certainty of anger at the centre of my being. It was that force that kept me plodding forwards in the face of official disapproval and semi-official brutality, it was a reconnection with the visceral anger that propelled me to dissent with my captors and their philosophy for most of my adult life.

I have had disputes with the Howard League over the years; their priorities have not always been the same as mine. And yet whenever I am asked about the purpose, the point, of such organisations as the Howard League I will now always recall the moment I opened that file.

Society needs dissenters, it craves those who sit in the aisles and shouts pointed questions. When we - and we are all responsible for the policies that put damaged and distressed children in cells - are content to have a system of criminal justice whose destination sometimes ends with a frail body hanging from a cell window then it is time to speak. It is time to act.

And it is a time to reflect. I am. Can we not do better?