Potentially teaching young offenders...can I ask you for smoe advice please?

[TheHouseOnTheCorner]

I'm a writer and wanted to sign up for a scheme where volunteer writers work within prisons...I missed the deadline and had the idea of offering my services to my LA and organising some workshops for young offenders.

I spoke to the relevant dept yesterday and because I have some friends who are actors, I suggested we might be able to combine a writing and acting course....my friends and I have for a while talked about running some kind of free course for disadvantaged children and teens.

The manager that I spoke to almost bit my hand off and now I feel a bit nervous...she's organising a meeting for me with some other staff to discuss logistics.

We want to do this without charging...the authority have said that it will take a lot of organisation and they will arrange transport and criminal checks etc...I have worked with children and teens...as have my friends but we've never worked with young offenders and are thinking about the realities of this now.

What if one of them has a meltdown? We won't be trained or anything...do you think the council might supply a trained member of their staff to assist? Is it really feasable for us to look after a group of vulnerable young people with no training?

The courses would be for a week during the school hols for example and we want to work with older kids at first...so 16 to 21 perhaps.

Any advice or thoughts please?

I think it is a very worthy thing to do and you may get some successes out of it which will make all the heartache and effort worthwhile.

If you're worried, it's worth asking the authorities for advice, you may be able to get a place on a training course.

I've worked with offenders and I had no official training whatsoever other than a brief chat with security about key protocol, and a few obvious basics such as always keep yourself between them and the door if in an enclosed space, etc.

The rewards will outweigh the downside, though I expect you will find it incredibly frustrating at times too.

Some advice would be to look into group work as intervention or therapy and consider some of the theory around it and have some set aims and objectives for the group, nothing big but I think this will impress as yots are very much based on things like strenghths perspectives, task centred, motivational perspectives, person centred approaches and consider some values along the lines of inclusion and anti discriminatory practices.

A good idea would also to be to recognise that some of the young people may be difficult to enage with and so I would look at how you are going to set ground rules with the young people taking alot of responsibility from this and recognising there values and expectations and how you will respond if things go wrong. Other than that I would sell your skills and what writing can do for these young people in terms of self expression etc. Is it creative or biographical? I would also make some consideration and aknowledgemnt that some things may be difficult for the young people to express in terms of their own narrative.

sounds very worth while but I do think that to get any interest from the LA and managers etc, you will need toput alot of work into reading about the YOT and young peoples experiences to give a genuine understanding in order to be taken seriously. Good Luck OP.

Oh and that some of the young people may have variable skills even those who have poor or no liteacy skills at all and so how will you be able to work with these people, think of looking at other mediums and skills such as recording maybe illustrating etc, would it be worth looking at writting a play?

OP - Why are you targetting young offenders as opposed to youths in disadvantaged areas?

I'm asking because you obviously have concerns about your personal safety.

If you want to use your experiences to help disadvantaged people then there is no shortage of needy people out there without you having to go looking for potentially violent ones.

I don't mean this in a sarcastic way but learning to act or write screen plays isn't going to be the reason why they turn their backs on crime.

Well to answer Poosh it's mainly because I was at risk as a teen myself and had a lot of help from a volunteer group which provided drama schemes every summer. I was given a grant and transport...if I hadn't had that at a critical time in my life, God knows where I would be now.

I wanted to work with young people who may have an interest in drama and I know from personal experience that it's a very powerful way of guiding teens...creative writing goes hand in hand with acting and since I have skills in that area, why not share?

Also...in SOME cases, a creative opportunity can do just what you say it can't...make people live their lives a different way.

dangerous thanks for such good advice...I will certainly think about what goals I could have in mind for the participants...I am thinking mainly in terms of confidence and learning to work as part of a group...as far as some of them not being as literate as others, I had thought about that and we plan to use improvisation as a starting point...they won't be expected to write anything at all...lines can be read out of a script for radio and if there are kids who want speaking parts who can't cope with that, then we'll feed them their lines through headphones if we have to.

I should have mentioned that we have the chance to use a community radio station to record a radio drama if this idea gets off the ground.

I did think about simply targeting the disadvantaged...I have a pang now...thinking of the kids who aren't offending and why shouldnt they have the opportunity too, but I feel that the kids who are offending are at more risk.

I will look into offering more workshops for a group in a neghbouring town who supports disadvantaged children, I had looked at them once before and I'm sure if this works out then there is nothing stopping us working with more than one group in more than one area.

i think using the radio will be great idea and a very usefull tool in getting them to work to a deadline and encourage and organise comitment.

another idea for extra bodies to help, could you contact your local university and see if you could drum up a couple of volunteers from the social work and/or media department. Im social work student and this is the kind of project many students would want to get involved in to boost cv and work experience.

There's a thought dangerous, I don't suppose these departments are exactly brimming over with staff to spare are they?

Have you contacted your local BBC station? They sometimes have people who do volunteer work with young people, might be an option.

I worked in a PRU for a while and am a youth worker, and tbh teens are teens. The ones at PRU swore a bit more, smoked more dope and had appalling time keeping skills but they are still just teenagers.

Make sure you have reasonable and clearly stated expectations of behaviour - i would tolerate swearing but not spitting, for example, and obviously swearing at people/aggression/intimidation are out - but you could discuss and agree those at the first session.

Teenagers are just teenagers, and most offences will be at the shop lifting bike nicking graffitti writing level rather than wife beating and rape

I've worked both in running community arts workshops with disadvantaged young people and with young offenders and I would insist on two things:

• young people are chosen for the course who WANT to be there - no persuasion or coercion for young people who don't want to be there and who may be more disruptive
• that adequate numbers of support staff are provided so that THEY - the people who are trained and paid to do it - deal with the support needs of the young people on the course, Including dealing with any trouble. It's not your role to do that, leave that to those whose role it is and you concentrate on your role which is teaching and engaging them.

The other thing to be aware of is it's likely that some of the young people will have literacy or attention difficulties. Do go for it though - you'll find it hugely rewarding and it'll be great for the kids. Good on you.

if you are doing it over the summer i would contact the unis now before the staff finish for summer, they can put an email out with your details to students.

You might find this article interesting.

I work with young offenders.

You need to know who your cohort is. You might even want to put some stipulations in place yourselves. How old are they? Male / female ratio? Are they just 'known to the YOT', or serving non-custodial sentences, or recently released from custody? What sort of offences are covered? Do you want to work with young people who have been convicted of knife crime, for example?

I wouldnt enroll violent offenders on to this sort of course, run by untrained volunteers, personally, so I doubt they will, but perhaps you should be assertive and stipulate 'no violent offenders' to the YOT?

At the very least, you should have had some basic Safeguarding, Behaviour management and Safe Restraint training, as well as an Enhanced CRB, to be left alone with young people with offending behaviour, but I doubt very much you will be left alone. More than likely at least one YOT Officer will attend, but do find this out, and make sure the staff supporting you from the YOT/L.A are clear about what their role/responsibility is, and what yours is - and what the bottom line is re: behaviour.

In my experience, working in any capacity with young offenders is life changing. You will learn as much from them as they do from you.

Good luck, and give me a shout if you need any further advice

I think if you are planning to work within a YOTC you will be fine as there will be plenty of staff on hand to manage any difficulties. If you will be working in a more fluid environment without the back-up of trained staff I agree with ThisAintKansas that you need some basic training.

I think you need to abandon any preconceptions you have about what the children will be like. Going in thinking they will be 'like you were as a kid' could set you up for disappointment.

Prepare yourself for children who cannot form a reciprocal relationship and have poor theory of mind and therefore cannot understand other people's point of view or appreciate the subtleties of social and emotional cause and effect.

If you go in planning to work on this- great, but if you go in expecting these skills already in place you might be quite dissapointed by how they respond. You might find the odd 'heart of gold, had a crap life' kid but I think the 'callous-unemotional' profile is likely to be more common.