What Are We Going to Do About Britain's Lost Boys?

It smelled like shit. What else would it smell like? You emptied the water out of the bowl by pumping it with the toilet brush. When it dropped below a certain level, the “seal” would break and air would come wafting up from the sewage pipe. That’s when it hit you. The stench. An old sort of smell—one I can’t describe, one you had to be there to know, sniffing those pipes on that day in that heat. Not many people know that smell. You need to be 16 and stupid and rob someone, like I was and I did. Then you could smell it for yourself. Sometimes as I fall asleep I can taste that smell at the back of my throat. It’s oddly comforting.

I was in an institute for troubled boys (long story), the walls were thick and we were in single cells, so it was the only way we could talk. If you wanted to chat with the guy in the next cell, you had to get pumping that toilet water. There were other ways—tying notes and paltry roll-ups to combs and sliding them across the landing, hoping it would land in the cell opposite and not the bottom of an officer’s shoe. There was always good old-fashioned shouting down the corridor, too, but the guards didn’t like that, and what can you really say anyway? It’s hardly intimate, is it? Not like talking into the shitter.

The bathrooms proved to be a superior medium. You could even talk to the guys in the cells above if they emptied their toilets. You’d hear them pumping the water out—a warning. Like someone asking to join a Skype conference, you had about 20 seconds to work out what you were going to wind them up about once they joined the discussion.

What I heard during those conversations—whether shouted down corridors or whispered through sewage pipes—haunts me to this day. I had my own problems waiting for me on the outside, but they paled in comparison to some of the stories I heard. What was I supposed to think, head stuck down a toilet, hearing my friend Smithy tell me he didn’t have any family waiting for him on the outside? And no qualifications? And no hope? People like Smithy didn’t have GEDs and self esteem; they had crap friends and drug addictions. It wasn’t hard to work out who’d end up back inside.

And they do seem to make a habit of prison once they’ve tried it, these lost boys. I remember the figure we were told—that about two-thirds of first time offenders will end up back behind bars before long. I don't think that was just to scare us; recent figures show that 73 percent of young people who’ve been in custody will commit another crime within a year of being released. Once you fuck up, the odds are you’ll fuck up again. And didn’t I know it.

It’s not easy, when you’ve lost all respect for yourself, to hope you’ll be in the minority that doesn’t re-offend. I’ll tell you something about prison that we don’t often hear: it’s full of people who are full of shame. They style it out and give it their bravado, but what I saw was a group of young men who hated not only where they’d ended up in life, but also themselves.

Of course, some of them were just plain old dickheads. You get that everywhere.

It was slightly different for me; they put me in with the vulnerable prisoners because I couldn’t stop crying for the first three days. "Induction" is one of my least favorite words these days. I wasn’t the sort of person they were used to seeing at a Juvenille Hall full of bad boys, so they did what they often do with transgender or gay prisoners. Not everyone on my wing was a rapist—some were just shy boys who, like me, weren’t cut out for the harsher side of prison life. Some shouldn’t really have been inside at all. Nice lads who, in a split second, had gone from members of the public to reckless drivers with blood on their hands. In they all went—arsonists, drug dealers and guys with a propensity to stick knives in people—with those nice boys in a bad place. Think Piper in Orange Is the New Black, only with a ratty teen 'tache and considerably shitter hair.

We’re not doing enough to help these lost boys. And it is boys, mainly. Over the past few months I’ve travelled the country meeting former prisoners for a Radio 1 documentary to mark ten years since my release. All of them were men. There are reasons judges might not send women to prison—they might be mothers, or they might be less likely to commit violent crimes and therefore pose less of a risk to society. Whatever the reason, Britain’s bulging prison population is overwhelmingly a population with bulges. We don’t have a crisis of people in prison; we have a crisis of men in prison.

I made myself a fair few fans in the probation service after I appeared on Question Time last year. The government wants to privatize probation, but I argued that it’s a shit idea—like lots of other shit ideas these parliamentary coalition cunts have come up with. That doesn’t mean I think probation is perfect, though. Far from it, in fact—I just don’t believe privatization will help anything. As I pointed out at the time, when has privatization ever improved public services? You don’t get a choice as to which probation service deals with you—there’s no "competition." Why not just make every probation service good the way we strive to make every hospital good?

And why aren’t we making sure that every convict has a dedicated mentor waiting for them on their release? Or, rather, the option of a mentor? Mentor schemes don’t work unless the ex-offender wants to work with them—and even then it can be hard work. I spoke to Julia Pennington from ADAPT, a project that works with ex-offenders in Manchester. “A lot of people coming out of prison have lost all hope—they’ve got no direction," she said. "Even when that young person has given up on themselves, we let them know that we’re not going to give up on you. We keep going back, we keep knocking on that door and we keep hounding them till they’re ready to change.”

She’s fucking awesome, frankly. We need many more people like her doing this important work.

You might say that someone who’s committed a crime doesn’t deserve special help when they get their freedom back. But who do you think is less likely to get in trouble again—a kid who has someone who cares about him and is looking out for him, or one who's shoved out the prison door with a few bucks and no clue how to even buy a train ticket? How is an 18-year-old who’s been inside for three years going to know how to look after himself in the real world? All the problems and lack of support that contributed to his fuck-up the first time round are still going to be there the second.

Tabloids would have you believe that prisons are like resorts. I’ve never been to a resort, but I can tell you now that prison is definitely nothing like one. It’s like prison. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if prison life were a bit more fun, though—in Norway, prisoners live in nice, clean, friendly jails, with good access to training and education. In fact, Norway has some of the least punitive penal institutions in Europe. And guess which country also has the lowest reoffending rates in Europe? Norway.

Maybe it’s time to look at how we treat people when they break the law. For everyone’s sake.

The British government plans to build more correctional colleges so that young offenders are sent to "education with detention" rather than "detention with education." Good. I was adamant from the moment I entered juvenile detention that I wanted to continue my schooling, and with a two-year sentence and no chance of early release for at least eight months, there should have been time. Being on the vulnerable wing made it harder to access education, though; I wanted to better myself but I couldn’t, and took a job in the laundry instead.

That was many moons ago. Staying out of prison hasn’t been easy for me—the past decade has been littered with setbacks, low self esteem and even having a job offer retracted by when they found out I had a criminal record. Still, like a 1980s-style "career girl" I’ve forged ahead and broken barriers through sheer determination.

I was lucky—I had a college place waiting for me; a job to go to; a grandmother to live with; and, perhaps most important of all, people who believed in me. I didn’t have a mentor, but I had hope.

Life is sweet these days, but I can’t quite flush away the thought of that empty toilet basin and the awful stench that was my world for eight months. It’s a black hole in my mind, filled with the faceless voices of lost boys hidden in the darkness.

BBC Radio 1’s Stories: Staying Out airs tonight at 9PM. 

@ParisLees