Chapter Four The Legal Perspective

The Legal Perspective

Sarah Parsonage One Question

Imran Mahmood Barrister and Author of You Don’t Know Me

Approached from a legal perspective, the question “is education the answer” takes on very serious implications indeed.

“Are we dealing with complex social conditions? Is where you’re from as important as anything else? Is your upbringing key to this idea of criminology? Why don’t we get criminal gangs in Mayfair or Knightsbridge? Why are people in affluence not heavily criminalised?” Imran Mahmood

With the most recent data published by the Ministry of Justice showing that 57% of adult prisoners had literacy levels below those expected of an 11-year-old, the impact of education – or rather, the lack of it – on deciding the course of someone’s life couldn’t be clearer.

Imran Mahmood’s novel You Don’t Know Me imagines a closing speech given by a young black defendant, protesting his innocence and detailing the circumstances that culminated in his being in the dock. From gangs to guns, You Don’t Know Me offers an insight into the way that environment and nurture can push people into the orbit of a criminal justice system whose gravitational pull is hard to resist.

Working by degrees rather than binaries, the legal profession necessarily stands in opposition to black-and-white morality. When it comes to recidivism, offenders are unsurprisingly more likely to repeat criminal patterns where they feel they have no other option. Drawing a line from class to education and education to crime is easy; breaking it is another matter, but nonetheless imperative if we are to interrupt the socalled revolving door of prison. “It’s difficult to exaggerate how much the education system [impacts people’s lives]. I’ve had probation officers telling me about young people aged 14, 16, and they are illiterate. [...] if you reach them at a point in prison, then it is possible to change that course, but it’s hugely difficult work because [...] the temptations are legion when they come out – quite often, it’ll be the head of the gang or the drug dealer that’s waiting outside the gates to draw them back in. [...] That intersectionality between criminality and being excluded from the school system [...] is huge.” One Question Audience Member

“From a legal perspective, what we need is accessible, conversational material at a super young age, that helps us get ahead of the rumours – like, I can carry a gun as a 14-yearold and I can probably get away with it. If I understood those conversations as a sixyear-old, they would stay with me forever. That message will fundamentally attach to me as a human, so when I’m given misinformation, I know to put my hand up and challenge it.” One Question Audience Member

“What is the responsibility of the One Question community and of society to create a change, so that the ‘input’ for young people – their socioeconomic privilege, their culture, and race – does not determine the ‘output’?” Sarah Parsonage

The legal perspective, then, seems to be one from which the answer to our central question is a resounding yes – but because these issues (class and deprivation, institutional racism and environment) are systemic, rectifying them cannot be done by schools alone. Only by setting in motion top-down changes in every aspect of our lives, from the distribution of wealth to where we live and how we earn money, can we hope for meaningful change; for the line between who is failed by the state and who ends up incarcerated by it, to look a little less stark.