NOTHING LOOSE AND LITTLE LEAFY

Remember Oscar Wilde and Reading Jail ? Probably. The ballad too?

Do you know who the Governor was while he was there? Probably not!

Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, that's who. And if ever you visit the village church in Finchingfield (Essex) you'll find a plaque to his memory, praising him for founding the Borstal system.

The way teenage criminals are dealt with in England has swung around through history. At the beginning of the twentieth century, boys were put in ordinary prisons alongside older, harder men; men more experienced in crime. Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise decided this was inappropriate and set about reform and, in 1908, the first official 'Borstal' was established. (In the village of Borstal, hence the name.)

When I was growing up in the 1960s, going to a borstal didn't seem much of a big deal. It was a sort of Approved-School add on; as much a natural progression through life as prep-school to public school to university is for many children in wealthy families. Maybe this was a local attitude and demonstrates little more than the kind of area I grew up in. Maybe the boys who were sent there took it more seriously than I did (I didn't know what happened to criminal girls) but I don't think they saw it quite as 'prison' - not like the Young Offenders Institutions we have now.

AN ASIDE
This article on borstals points out that they were not necessarily humane places and says not to confuse them with 'approved schools' - which might more warrant the boarding school analogy. Certainly, I was surprised when I first saw the plaque in memory of Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise. To have invented Borstals didn't strike me at the time as something to be proud of. It's difficult, this. There are often contradictions between what is intended and what actually happens. (Just as Secondary Modern Schools weren't planned to be what they developed into.) Bravado has to be taken into account too. And, as time goes by, ideas change about what is harsh and what is helpful.

* * *

This morning, I spent a pleasant hour rifling through the find-a-camp-site page of ukcampsite.co.uk which tells you where you can pitch your tent or park your tourer in England and Scotland. This afternoon, when preparing this post, I came across Her Majesty's Prison Service  Find-a-Prison page. What a turn up!

I was looking for information on the Grove YOI (Young Offenders Institution) on Portland in Dorset.

Here's what it looks like across old quarry ground.

This is its page.

Between 1848 and 1921, it was a 'convict prison'. Then it was a borstal until 1988 when it was changed into a YOI. It now houses 483 young men between eighteen and twenty-one. (2010.) Borstals no longer exist. They were abolished during the changes brought in with the Criminal Justice Acts and their revisions in the 1980s.

Another prison service page explains

'Prison life for a young offender held in a Young Offenders Institution (or YOI) isn't that different to prison life for adult prisoners, however there are some differences in the way YOIs are run.'

Prisons are, of course, very different from what they were like in Oscar Wilde's time. None the less, I wonder what Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise would have made of this. His idea was that young people need something specially formulated for them. That doesn't seem unreasonable. Secondary schools are different from Universities and Universities are different from paid-work places. Different ages need different environments and levels of input.

I don't know what it is like to live in an institution like this; nor what it feels like for families when they come to visit. It is a long way from nearly everywhere and must seem very remote. It's on a semi-island, joined to the rest of the country by a nine mile long bank of pebbles and by the causeway (which I described in a previous post).

There are, of course, brilliant views from beside the prison  . . .

. . . but for a young man used to the bustle of city life, I imagine emptiness must come as a bit of a shock. The sea can be as bleak as it is beautiful. Families who make the trek to visit must sometimes wonder if their sons and brothers have been sent to the end of the world.

I have nothing to say here about what it's like inside the prison but I do know this is meant to be the beginning of a new life for the people locked inside it. The information on the find-a-prison page says it does not accept anyone whose sentence is longer than ten years. Ten years is a long time - some of the young men here may have committed pretty serious crimes. But whatever they have done (and some, I would guess, in the scale of criminality - not a lot) this will be their home for a while and . . . we are getting to the point . . . most readers of Loose and Leafy will have an idea that what grows around our homes profoundly affects what goes on in our lives.

This was the scene yesterday (May 27th 2011) when I walked along the prison wall.

As you will know from previous posts, I do not recognise the conventional distinction between weeds and the wild plants of the streets. Some young men are allowed 'out' to help in a community garden. Could they not have been asked to pull out these plants? To do a bit of light weeding? Clearly not. Someone has been the length of the wall (and this is only part of it) with poison. This is what you see when you arrive - a high wall and a great line of dead plants.

People arriving in prison vans won't have time to look up, except perhaps to glimpse the razor wire.

But those of us at liberty to stop, will see plants, not many of them, but plants, gripping into the crevices between the stones.

And the lichens and woodlice and clumps of leaves lower down.

Life is so encouraging.

So far, no-one has killed the plants along the more recently built bank which holds up a lawn nearer the prison gates.

Did they leave these bits of grass and barley because there is a poppy - or is the poppy on the list for next week's weedkiller?

This is not a post about how young people should be treated when they break the law. It is post that says what we see has an impact on how we are; that seeing dead vegetation is unlikely to be an inspiration to live a better life or to put your trust in the people who will be caring for you (guarding you!) over the months to come; that killing plants without need is . . . well, I think it is wrong.

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