The Strongest Don’t Walk Away
Did you know that globally more than 50% of ex-inmates reoffend within 2-3 years of their release? In the UK alone, that figure is north of 75%!
Why is the reoffending or recidivism rate so high?
There are many contributing factors including the social environment of the offenders, their circumstances prior to incarceration and most importantly their (in)ability to reintegrate into society, to be accepted by their families, to find a job and to return to daily life in a respectable fashion.
What we see is the immediate implication of this problem on the offenders, the victims, and their families. And it is horrifying. But what we must also recognize is the larger social cost that emerges because of such a broken system.
Repeat reoffending weakens communities and sends negative role models into society, reinforcing the cycle of crime. Moreover, it is a huge financial burden on the government that has to spend significant amount of money to imprison an offender, and by extension on the taxpayer.
Over the years, umpteen rehabilitation programs have been put in place to enable offenders to integrate back into society.
But the question is do they really work?
The prevailing rates of recidivism quite state otherwise. Which warrants the question ‘Why’? Why do such a large number of ex-inmates reoffend? Why does this vicious cycle of crime and custody exist?
In 2001, Junior Smart, a resident of Southwark, one of the most economically disadvantaged boroughs in London, was given a 12-year sentence for drug-related offenses.
Junior had grown up around negative influence, gangs, crime, drug use but he was not prepared for the reality of prison.
For Junior, prison was a massive wake-up call.
‘Prisons are a place of paranoia, fear, loneliness and oppression’
But inspite of all the horrors, Junior repeatedly saw released inmates come back. What was worse was that they got so institutionalized that they liked coming back. It was quite baffling why someone would ever want to come back to face the torment that is prison.
“I had a cellmate who had become so institutionalized that he seemed to enjoy prison. He was repeatedly serving short sentences and it seemed that the underlying issues for his troubles were ignored by the authorities. I couldn’t understand why I was the only one to see this and I started to think about what would be needed to break the cycle”
But to do that he needed to first understand what was reinforcing the cycle.
To begin with, the majority of the re-offenders came from marginalized communities trapped in gang lifestyles and weak social fabrics. With no mentoring and support to initiate behavioral change while in prison, a typical ex-offender was very likely to re-offend. Additionally, the taboo of having been to prison was enough for them to not find employment and housing, be discriminated against, and not be accepted by family. And none of the in-prison, probation, and rehabilitation services had been able to address this.
“An inmate upon release is typically told: You are free to go and we want you to stand tall in society. But we don’t care where you go, who you meet. Go back to the same place you came from, with the same associates. Here are 50 pounds to help you until your benefits kick in. Good luck.
This person is facing immediate poverty.”
Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s words ‘You must be the change you wish to see in the world’, Junior resolved not to be a mere spectator.
18 months before he was supposed to be released, Junior decided to forgo his freedom. He stayed back so that he could mentor young offenders.
It was an eye-opening experience for him where he began to understand the critical defects of the criminal justice institutions and the deficit of skills and support offered to the offenders.
But what was different about his point of view was the fact that it came from a service user, from an inmate himself. He was thinking from the ground up as against how the system thought, from the top.
What he realized was that there was no way an institution-led program would ever work. And that is because it lacked a very essential element, an element that is needed for any such program to succeed.
The element of trust.
How could an agency staff who had never known prison life, who didn’t understand what it meant to have grown up with nothing around but violence and drugs, ever form a credible relationship built on trust with an inmate? How could they ever understand the core issues inmates faced? Why would inmates ever listen to someone who didn’t have a clue about their challenges?
Such a system couldn’t possibly affect positive change.
It was clear to Junior that for enabling meaningful change, the entire model had to pivot.
It had to pivot from being vertical and siloed, to being inclusive and collaborative. It had to pivot from having limited scope to being integrated such that it addressed all the challenges that inmates faced pre and post-release. And most importantly, it had to pivot from being seen with scepticism and doubt to one which had trust at its foundation.
And that is when he conceived the idea of a model that focused on ex-offenders taking on the role of mentors. Using ex-offenders, people who had been on the same journeys as the young offenders themselves would help establish trust and build unique relationships, fulfilling a role the existing systems never could.
When he pitched this idea to the authorities, as expected, it was shot down. No one thought him to be worthy or capable of coming up with a revolutionary idea. An idea that not only opposed the thinking of those who considered themselves guardians of society but an idea that came from the very ‘type of’ person they were keeping society safe from.
How could the perpetrator be the savior?
But Junior did not give up. At a chance meeting with St Giles Trust, a charity that aims to reduce crime and social exclusion in the UK, Junior presented his ex-offender-led gangs intervention project. And they agreed to house it within the Trust.
With that, in 2006, the Southwark Offenders Support or SOS Gangs Project was born.
Through a peer-led approach, the SOS Gangs project utilizes specially trained, reformed young offenders to provide in-prison, through the gate, and post-release support to other young people. The mentors also work with the whole family as family support or the lack of it plays a big role in a young person’s decision to re-offend.
Needless to say, Junior’s work has been revolutionary.
SOS Gangs Project is now the largest ex-offender-led program of its type in the UK. They work with more than 500 inmates every year and in the last 16 years, less than 30% of the inmates they have worked with have been back in prison. Compare this to the national average of 75%!
One cannot help but marvel at the beauty of Junior’s idea, the uniqueness of his insight.
The core of any relationship, including that of a mentor and a mentee, is trust. Without trust, all efforts, no matter how big, will fail.
An ex-offender-led, peer-to-peer mentoring approach helped establish the critical yet missing element of trust between the mentors and the mentees. It gave their relationship a solid foundation on the basis of which holistic and personalized support could be provided such that inmates could overcome the challenges they faced before and after release, thereby reducing their likelihood of re-offending and helping them break free from the negative vortex of gangs and crime.
Absolutely incredible!
The true test of a person’s character lies not in who they are, where they come from or what their background is. But in how they react when confronted with a social, moral, ethical or systemic failure.
Do they stay or do they walk away?
In Junior’s own words: “At the end of a fight, it is the strongest that walks away. But in the real world, it is the strongest that stays.”
More about Junior
Junior Smart is a Youth Leader and a qualified trainer and Gangs Consultant. He regularly designs new projects, feeds into public policy through Public Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Justice, and consults with the Met Police as well as other statutory bodies on best practices. He is an Ashoka Fellow and was listed in the Evening Standard’s list of 1000 Influential Londoners in 2014 and 2015. SOS Gangs Project has received numerous awards including The Charity Awards 2014, The Third Sector Excellence Awards 2011, the Centre for Social Justice Awards 2010, and The South London Press Awards 2008.
In 2008, Junior also founded SOS+, a service that delivers early intervention work in educational settings, through preventative and awareness-building sessions for children that are most vulnerable to enter a life of crime and imprisonment. It works with those at risk and provides them with the knowledge and skills to stay safe. Today, SOS+ reaches more than 25000 children every year and works closely with more than 2000 young people who are vulnerable to child criminal exploitation, giving them essential support so that they don’t enter a life of crime.
Read further: SMART Training & Consultancy
