News
Young Offenders Need Discipline, Not Detention
19 August 2011
One of the main reasons I abandoned the Bar to become a writer of fiction (in retrospect, a relatively small step), was an overwhelming sense of the futility of a system that takes children as young as 10 and sends them round and round the revolving door, turning them into better criminals. The courtroom, it seemed to me, was a beguilingly theatrical veneer over a penal system that was perpetually feeding itself. Young people released from detention invariably emerged more violent, self-destructive and drug-addicted than when they went in.