How the prison system can fail young people

I've written about this particular young man once before. He's not so young any more, having turned 21 in June. I met him on a visit to a young offender institution about four years ago. We cannot have spent more than 15 minutes in conversation but we covered quite a lot of ground, particularly about his interest in art. I promised to send him some symbols on a chart I happened to mention and our link took off from there. I stumbled upon him in other youth prisons a couple of times subsequently and visited him intentionally on one occasion.

In those few hours, I learned a lot about his life - his adoption, his learning (he has some respectable educational qualifications), his relationships (he has a child), his self-harming (on one occasion he showed me his ghastly self-inflicted wounds) and his volatile activities on the wrong side of the law. The attraction of drugs and infatuation with cars has been the primary cause of his offending. The consequence has been that he has spent more than five of the past six years in custody.