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Nineteen-year-old Dan Dutt-Hemp has spent more than three months in custody over the past year and he believes that better intervention could have helped him resist crime

Youth crime: Call this justice?

I was only 15 when I committed my first crime. I had already left school and was smoking quite a lot of skunk. I was always fighting with my stepdad and my mum couldn't control me so I went to live with my nan. Soon enough I got bored of living in a big Victorian house with nowhere to get a bag of 'green' to calm my nerves and help me sleep. I got so bored that one night at about 1am I decided to take a walk down to my mum's estate in West Norwood, south east London, to jam with my friends. On the way I saw a house with an open window. Before I knew what I was doing, I was inside the house stealing two mobile phones. On my way to my friend's house, I was offered £50 for them. I accepted the money and carried on to my mum's house where I met my friends, bought some draw and chilled out.

Lasting consequences
It didn't even cross my mind that I'd done something wrong until the next morning when I woke up in a daze and the guilt started setting in. I felt really bad. But it was only when I got caught three weeks later that the seriousness of what I had done hit me.

I had to go to Balham Youth Court where I was put in contact with the youth offending team (YOT) in Brixton. Except for sitting in a room at the YOT office talking about the effects of cannabis, I didn't really get any help for my drug problem. And even though I wasn't in school and had nothing to do in the day to keep me occupied, the courts didn't see this as a problem. Instead, I was released into the care of the local authority and placed in various hostels and eventually moved to a children's home in Bexleyheath.

After spending almost four months there, I was told I had to go back to a hostel in Tulse Hill just before my 16th birthday.

It was during this time that my problems really began. One morning I was sitting in a friend's room, rolling a spliff when a neighbour walked past the window, looked up and started shouting racist abuse at us. I'm half Spanish and olive skinned and I totally lost my temper. I ran downstairs with a hammer in my hand. When I stepped outside the front door the man was waiting with his fists clenched. He swung for me so I ducked and swung the hammer. All I wanted to do was scare him but I hit him square in the head. I realised I was in all sorts of trouble so I just ran.

Someone had witnessed the incident and told the police. I ended up getting arrested and went back to Balham Youth Court to face charges of actual bodily harm and threats to kill. Although I wasn't sent to custody, I was given a two-year probation anger management sentence and 170 hours of community service to be spent doing a carpentry workshop. It all started well but before long the woman that was teaching me anger management left and a new person who I didn't like as much took over the sessions. I didn't feel like I was getting as much out of the classes so started to skip appointments.

Mixed messages
A few weeks later, my probation officer took me off my carpentry course. Suddenly I felt like the two things in the world that I was actually enjoying had been messed up by the Probation Service so I lost faith. I stopped going to my probation appointments, I gave up on trying and I ended up in prison. I'm not pointing the finger or blaming anyone, I know that I am responsible for my own behaviour, but I do think that if probation hadn't changed my anger management worker and taken me off my carpentry workshop I probably wouldn't have ended up behind bars.

The courts and the Probation Service need to talk to young offenders to establish if they want to better themselves. They need to be reliable and supportive because that's the one thing lots of young people like me don't have in their lives. If they worked with young people to help them achieve their goals there would be fewer young people trapped in the system. As it is, endless amounts of young people are pouring through the courts. You can't stop a young person from committing a crime but you can try to prevent it and help them back on the right track. By putting them on a course or helping them into work, professionals can make a lasting difference. At least then young people can't turn round and say they weren't offered the help they needed. If this doesn't happen, we'll have even more 16-year-old hardened criminals.

Dan Dutt-Hemp
16 May 2007

http://www.ypnmagazine.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=full_news&ID=14232

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