Little Joey’s Lost Childhood

One day last summer, when Joey had been arrested yet again for yet another burglary, his solicitor went down to the police station to see him. He sat down opposite him in the interview room, sighted and asked him straight: ‘Joey, why do you do it?’

And Joey looked straight back and told him, ‘I dunno. I gotta buy fags, drink. There’s drugs and things. I gotta girl. It’s money you know…’Joey shrugged, like any man with a weight on his mind. Joey was then eleven years old.

Soon afterwards, he became famous when, in October last year, he was locked away in a secure unit outside Leeds where he was three years younger than any other inmate, so young that his incarceration required the personal authority of the Home Secretary. As he was led away from court, he hurled insults at the press and then disappeared in a cloud of publicity.

He became a caricature – ‘the Artful Dodger’, ‘Britain’s most notorious young crook’, ‘Crime baby’, ‘the Houdini Kid’. He made all the papers. Soon his case was being used as ammunition in a sustained assault which has seen the Home Secretary, the Police Federation, the Daily Express and various Chief Constables campaigning to lock up more children.

They pointed not only to Joey but to a rash of other adolescent delinquents: the eleven-year-old brother and sister whose attempted arrest caused a riot at a wedding party; the six “Little Caesars’ from Northumbria who were blamed of 550 offences; the thirteen- year- old armed robber from Cheshire. Their solution was simple: these children had to be punished; the courts needed more power to put them behind bars.

Joey grew up with his father, Gerry, a Southern Irish labourer who has not worked regularly for years; and his mother, Maureen, also Irish and barely literate, who was only eighteen when she married Gerry, fifteen years her senior. The neighbours remember Joey playing with his go-cart in the street, running around with his two smaller brothers, banging on the door to scrounge cigarettes for Gerry. They say he was a nice kid. They remember him skiving off school, too, and thieving, but they don't remember it well. Almost every­body's kids skive off school, and a lot of them go thieving.

Gerry says he's not too sure when Joey first broke the law. He thinks he stole some crisps for dinner when he was four. In Gerry's family, there has often been trouble with the law: petty crimes, handling, the occasional fight, a succession of brothers and uncles behind bars.

By the time he was 10, thieving was the only game Joey knew. He had 35 arrests behind him and the social workers decided he had to be locked up. They had tried taking him into care but he had simply walked out of the homes where they put him so, in December 1990, he was sent to the secure unit at East Moor outside Leeds.

He liked it there. Everyone at East Moor agrees that Joey liked it. It is not like a prison: there are no peaked caps or truncheons. It is more like a school with extra keys. Tucked away there, far from the mean crescents of the housing estate, he was a child again.

He played with lego. He practised joined-up writing. He woke up feeling ill in the night and cried on the principal's shoulder.

Joey is due to be released from the secure unit in February. Everyone who has dealt with him is sure that he will go straight back to his old ways. They say they have given up on him. They have two options: lock him up or let him go. Everyone in social services knows the danger of locking up a child: it breaks up the family, it stigmatises the child, it floats him in a pool with older criminals.

Yet letting him go is no better, not when it means returning to the battered streets of the city. Joey is not the only child like this. Every English city has them. Joey just happens to be the famous one. He's bright and he's brave and the psychiatrists agree he is not disturbed. He is, by nature, anxious to please. In the secure unit now, he conforms with everything around him.

If you throw a child into the sea, it will drown. If you throw it into an English ghetto, it will grow up like Joey.

The names of Joey and his family have been changed for legal reasons.

10. Joey became famous because

1. he had committed so many burglaries.

2. he was always being arrested.

3. he was the youngest inmate in the secure unit.

4. he swore at the press photographers.

How did the Home Secretary and the police respond to the rise in juvenile crime?

11.

1. He wanted to see more young criminals put in prison.

2. They believed that there should be a return to corporal punishment.

3. They thought that the courts had too much power.

4. They thought that the police force should be strengthened.