Scot free: How Scotland emptied its jails of youths

The young gang member is in hospital waiting to be treated for a knife wound. Even though he is still bleeding, he is on his phone to mates. “He is already plotting his revenge,” says youth crime expert Karyn McCluskey.

Karyn McCluskey has spent years turning around attitudes in youth gang crime in Scotland.

The next voice he hears is one from the streets. It is a former gang member who now works as a “navigator”. He won’t report the attack to police but is there to use his life experience to talk sense.

Behind the bravado there is an injured and frightened boy, who at this moment of vulnerability may be reached by the navigator who has been there and done that. The navigator can show the injured teenager his own scars, the dead ends and a way out.

The kid may choose to listen or may not, but the man from the hard streets has opened a dialogue and left a number. The time may not be right, but that time may still come.

They have a hotline, offering encouragement, short-term crisis advice and long-term education and employment options.

Navigators work for the Scottish charity Medics Against Violence that is part of a multi-agency approach to dealing with youth crime. Dentists are on side – after a gang brawl victims/offenders often need their teeth fixed – as are vets, as mistreated pets can be a sign of family violence.

In Victoria, we are in the middle of a youth crime wave. Our natural reaction is to want them all locked up. But what we know is the more young offenders end up in custody, the more they graduate to adult offenders.

The latest crime figures are stark. Crimes committed by offenders aged 10 to 17 are at their highest levels in almost 15 years.

Children, defined as 10 to 17, and young offenders (18 to 24) were responsible for about 50,000 offences, an increase of more than 12 per cent. (Older crooks committed another 500,000.)

Karyn McCluskey in 2011 during her time as co-director of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

The two police taskforces, Alliance and Trinity, dealing with youth-related crimes arrest nine young gang members, kid burglars and underage car thieves each day.

And the worrying thing is, catching them is not stopping them, with police arresting 7380 child offenders 23,236 times

The question is: were they so bad as kids they were always going to end up as crooks or were they further hardened in custody?

We know teenagers, particularly boys, have often not developed the capacity to comprehend the consequences. Scottish forensic psychologist Karyn McCluskey puts it bluntly:“Most young people are daft and don’t understand the risks.”

Think of the scene in a Melbourne court the other day. A 15-year-old sobbing as he faces charges of murder. In a funeral home lies the body of a boy, 16, having just been released from the morgue where his stab wounds have been examined after a fatal confrontation in a suburban shopping centre. Long after the headlines fade, the lives of their family and friends will never be the same.

While we seemed to be overwhelmed by young offenders who are repeatedly bailed, the Scots have been down that road and now see it is a dead end.

McCluskey has spent more than 20 years working to break the “hang them until they are dead” attitude that dominates the debate. And she is no bleeding heart, having spent most of her career working for a Scottish police force.

Consider this. After years of work there are no inmates under 18 in jail in Scotland. From 2010 to 2023 the number of prisoners aged under 25 has declined by 75 per cent.

Putting children in jail increases the chances they will re-offend.Credit: Illustration: Dionne Gain

Last month the last teenager was moved from the Polmont Young Offenders Institution.

Now they are sent to one of four youth care facilities. “They are very different to prisons,” says McCluskey.

One 16-year-old who has been convicted of murder is kept securely but still treated as a teenager (albeit a dangerous one) who will slowly be transitioned into an adult prison. Other occupants are kids convicted of crime or placed in the homes for their own protection.

In 2001 McCluskey was head of Strathclyde Police intelligence analysis, then became a founding member of the Violence Reduction Unit. In Glasgow alone they identified 170 gangs with 3500 members aged 11 to 23. It was part of the culture, she says, with three generations having joined the one gang.

Gangs have been part of Glasgow since the 1930s. “There would have been the grandfather, father and son,” she says. The Glasgow Southern General Hospital was treating knife victims every six hours, while Scotland was recording 1400 knife wound victims a year, with most victims males aged 12 to 19. The blade of the street was as Scottish as the kilt and the haggis. Slashing a face was so common it was called the Glasgow smile.

And the way out of the violent culture was littered with obstacles. Kids with a family history were marked for life. “There is an expression here: ‘I know your father.’ It means your father was a crook and you will be one, too,” McCluskey says.

Tough-on-crime policies had not worked and the then Chief Constable was looking for a better way.

McCluskey is often asked for a quick fix. There is none. She says there is no single answer, and if you are looking for one you are asking the wrong question.

In Victoria, Acting Superintendent Andy McKee spends much of his working life with Operation Trinity catching young offenders who are stealing cars and breaking into houses. He believes the legal, education, social welfare and employment systems need to work together. “We can arrest them until the cows come home but there has to be a better way.”

Acting Superintendent Andy McKee pulls over a motorist in the early hours of August 6 as part of Victoria Police’s Operation Trinity, targeting aggravated burglaries and associated car thefts.Credit: Darrian Traynor

In Scotland young gang members traditionally believed there was no alternative. When a 16-year-old kid was stabbed and died in the arms of a woman who tried to comfort him outside her gate as life slipped away, some neighbours showed little sympathy. “They said, ‘He was all he was going to be,’ ” says McCluskey.

McKee sees similarities here, with kids not rejecting society but society rejecting them. Some of his worst offenders can steal a car in seconds and work out techniques to avoid police, but can’t read and write. The COVID-19 lockdown meant many didn’t drop out but fell off the back of the education system.

These are crimes of envy and boredom, not of profit. They are taking what they believe they could never earn.

McCluskey says you need to set up a plan and be “shovel ready”. This means stop talking and start doing. What she knows is that punishment is not the answer. “If we can divert them (young offenders) early then 80 per cent don’t come back.″⁣

In 2005, Strathclyde Police set up the Violence Reduction Unit to stop crime rather than just deal with the consequences.

In 2005-06, of the 185 people charged with homicide in Scotland, 25 per cent were aged 20 or younger, 60 per cent 30 or younger, and 60 per cent were drunk when committing the crime. Knives were the murder weapon in more than half the homicides. Scotland was one of the most violent countries in the developed world, with 137 homicides.

Easy access to knives makes them the go-to choice of weapon for young offenders.

The Violence Reduction Unit used mothers who had lost kids as part of their push. McCluskey says even the hard nuts love their mums. Doctors showed the long-term consequences of knife wounds and police showed how the offenders would nearly always be caught.

It was also about trying to find keys to divert teenagers from crime by finding what will help them change. Spend less time getting outraged about the crime and more time trying to stop offenders committing more. “You deal with the need rather than the deed. Deal with the drama before it becomes a crisis,” McCluskey says.

The community concentrates, she says, on the worst crimes, which makes us think nearly all young offenders have no hope. And when the offenders think there is no hope, there is no incentive to change.

McCluskey is now chief executive of Community Justice Scotland, an organisation that drives alternatives to jail, particularly with young offenders. Traditionally, Scotland locks up more offenders than any other European country, but it is coming to the conclusion that jail is part of the answer, but not all of it.

As part of the shift from cops being there only to enforce the law, all operational police in Scotland carry Naloxone, a nasal spray to be given to people suffering drug overdose.

Not only does it save lives, it breaks down generations of hostilities between gang families and police. It is difficult to hate someone who has just saved your kid’s life.

The facts speak for themselves with a 35 per cent drop in Scottish homicides in about 10 years.

Teachers are being taught tactics to deal with, rather than expel, their most disruptive students who, McCluskey admits, “are a pain in the arse”.

If they are kicked out she says, “One more kid on the streets leads to one more person in jail.”

Education leads to employment and, she says, “The best way to stop a gang is jobs.”

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