Right from Wrong

 I started my first academic job in October 1983 = a long time ago. As with other work, I was usually at my desk some time before 0900hrs. This gave me time to chat to Eileen the woman who cleaned the rooms on my corridor. Over the next couple of years we got to be good friends although I also got to know rather too much about her circumstances and family. Her son Stephen was working as a lorry-driver and happy-out to set his own times and make good money. By Eileen's account, he had been precociously brilliant in primary school particularly with maths but he was also a handful: always jigging around in class and being mildly, sometimes charmingly, disruptive. Years later, Stephen and Eileen were watching a TV documentary about the epidemiological connexion between ADHD and tartrazine = E120 = Yellow 5b. "Blimey Mum, that was me!?!" If there'd been less Fanta in the fridge he might have gone to college like me and be driving a particle accelerator not a truck. The stars had to align for a working class kid to get a BSc; but those were the days when third level education was effectively free to users.

Jacob Dunne grew up on an estate in Nottingham with even fewer advantages than Stephen. We met him a month ago talking about Prison Reform, Masculinity, Restorative Justice . . . and killing a random chap with an unlucky punch. After that interview, I reserved his book Right From Wrong (2021) in the library and read all 200+ pages on Twelfth Night. The advantages of being retired include being able to spend a Monday on the sofa reading a book pausing only to get more logs for the fire and tea for concentration.

I dithered about starting the book for a couple of weeks because a) I had other library books to read b) I had the 1 hr exec summary of his life story already c) there's only so much gritty Northern working class grind a chap can handle. But once I started, it was hard to put it down. Despite many failings on the copy editor front: p.3 "Widford has a more gentile, village feel . . ." p.63 "that wasn't not the case". And some tired repetitive phrasing: rumours / news always spreads like wildfire and on the weekends everyone lets their hair down. 

As a child in primary school Jacob was bright and engaged when he chose to be. But, like Stephen, he was easily bored by school and tended to be distracted and drifty. Things plunged into the abyss academically in secondary school but got exciting, and not in a good way, out on the streets: drink, bare-knuckle fights, vandalism, theft, dealing. 

Remarkably, after jail, with help from the probation service and social services and some lucky breaks with the media, he restarted secondary schooling ten years late. He is smart and articulate, so aced exams and was sponsored to University by The Longford Trust; getting a 1st class honours degrees in . . . Criminology. Twelve years on from prison, he's elbowed a rung on the property ladder, and married with two kids. He's learned from his journey and is determined to give back to the community with raised (and failed) him. Talking a capella to schools, TEDx, prisoners, prison officers, the telly: initially pro bono, latterly for money like all the other experts / pundits / grifters [pick whatever suits your prejudice] on the circuit. 

One of his points is that education and training is largely irrelevant to the skills needed to thrive in life and in the workplace. A bit like me being ace at The Calculus in school and college but never using those tools at any time during 40 years as a professional scientist! You can get a permanent pensionable job as a prison officer after only eight weeks training. Only half a day of which explicitly addresses mental health! The square logo is an aide memoire for those in an asymmetric relationship: officer/prisoner;  teacher/student; parent/child. 

• to is when power tells the dispossessed how things will be.  
• My way or the highway thinking gets people's back up and is therefore counter-productive
• for is when power tries to be kind by helping people to the correct answer / behaviour / solution
• but cutting the apron-strings is an essential part of adulting  
• with is usually better: through example, empathy and tough love, the dispossessed are given the chance of sorting it out for themselves
• it can be work and requires a long game to break the cycle of learned helplessness 
• not is worse than everything: when power walks away with "I taught them but they didn't learn" and "they're too ugly, disrespectful, stupid, angry, other to learn anyway".

I had a rush of aha! with this characterization: in class at The Institute we all learned more and better when I, nominally the adult in the room, professed to know-not the answer. And every year on my watch, every kid in the room got to be autoclave liaison officer ALO at least once.

Victim-blaming is much easier and cheaper than fixing the systemic societal issues that generate victims. Breaking generational cycles (of anger, despair, violence and disrespect) is hard.