Sentenced to read - by Sue Purkiss

I recently read an item on the BBC website which interested me greatly. You can see the full article here, but briefly, it went like this.

In September 2016, five teenagers aged 16-17 scrawled racist and anti-Semitic graffiti all over an old schoolhouse in Ashburn, Loudon County, Virginia. They didn't know that the building had historic significance; it had been used for teaching black students during the era of segregation. The local community was furious.

The young people hadn't offended previously, and the Prosecutor and Deputy Commonwealth Attorney, Alejandra Rueda, had her own ideas about what an appropriate sentence would be.

"The community blew up. Understandably. But you know, some of the kids didn't even know what a swastika meant. So I saw a learning opportunity. With children you can either punish or you can rehabilitate and these were kids with no prior record and I thought back to what taught me when I was their age, what opened my eyes to other cultures and religions… and it was reading."

The judge agreed with her, and so the young people were given 'a reading sentence'. 

"Alejandra Rueda drew up a list of 35 books and ordered the offenders to choose one title a month for a year and to write an assignment on each of the 12 books they chose.

The titles included Alice Walker's The Color Purple, My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Cry The Beloved Country by Alan Paton and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner.

Having grown up in Mexico in a bilingual literary family - her mother was a school librarian - Alejandra Rueda says she owes her own cultural and racial awareness to certain books her mother prescribed. Her mother was determined her daughters should know about the Holocaust, racial hatred and the implications of holding prejudice based on race, religion or ethnicity."

The young people read all the books and completed all the assignments - which included a 3,500 word essay on racial hatred and symbols in the context of what they had done. Two years later, none has reoffended, and all are still in full-time education.

The first thing that struck me on reading this was - wow, what a brilliant idea! The second was - these must have been very able students. These are not easy books: of those listed above, I've taught the first and third at A-Level and the fourth at GCSE. I've read the book by Chaim Potok; it's one of the best books I've ever read - and I must re-read it - but in every sense, it's a very big book. I would guess that The Kite Runner was the most accessible for these young people, though it would be really interesting to hear how they responded.

I have a particular interest in this because some years ago, I worked as a teacher for a Youth Offending Team. The YOTs were set up as multi-disciplinary teams whose job was to assess young offenders, work out what had led to their offending, address those problems, manage their sentences or orders, and prevent re-offending. It sounds easy, doesn't it? It wasn't - some of the problems were all but intractable. The young people often had chaotic lives, a lack of support from their families, and almost always, huge problems with regard to education. Typically, they had difficulties; many couldn't read, or couldn't read well, so that they were unable to access what was going on in the classroom, and as a consequence would cause trouble, eventually being excluded, which would lead to opportunities for getting involved with older kids who were already in trouble - and so it would it go.

Easy, I hear you say - teach them to read. It isn't easy. Not when they're teenagers and used to failing. Not when, at best, you see them for an hour a week - if they remember to turn up - and they realise thay are to be faced yet again with how huge this task is for them. (If it wasn't huge, they would already have mastered it.)

But there were lots of other things that could be done. A big part of my job was liaising with schools. Sometimes I went in and gave a bit of extra tuition - that could really help. Sometimes I supported them in doing a piece of creative writing - a poem, perhaps, or a piece of writing about the offence they had committed, or about a place that was special to them. Once, it was a letter, written by a 16 year old to the baby his girlfriend was expecting, telling his future child about himself, and expressing his hopes and wishes for his child's future. They loved having something they'd created, something that looked good, something they could show their parents, something they could be proud of.

I can only think of one person I worked with - a girl who had committed an out-of-character but very serious offence - who could have coped with the reading list the American teenagers were given. But it would have been a brilliant idea for her. And I do think the idea could be adapted for young offenders like the ones I used to work with. I was blundering towards the idea: my boss was very creative, and brilliant at accessing small pots of money (often from the European Social Fund - another of thos ethings the EU has done for us), and she found some for me to buy a crate of accessible books for each of the centres where we worked with the young people. I ordered Quick Reads, and lots from Barrington Stoke, and I was able to contribute books from high-low reading schemes for which I was working at the time as a reader, assessing reading levels.

Some children lapped these books up. But looking back, I realise that though it was a great idea to get the books, I slipped up at the next stage.

The people who the offenders are obliged to see, and see regularly, are their case workers. Education is not a mandatory part of their orders; they weren't actually obliged to see me - they had to agree to it. And remember, they have chaotic lives, with a lot of other stuff going on. (I'm talking here about young people who have community orders, not those in custody.) I was one person, working part-time, covering a large county. What I should have done was pushed for the case workers to be trained to use the books with the young people: I talked to them about the books, tried to enthuse them, but I should have done more and done it better.

But if in this country a magistrate could hand down 'a reading sentence', I believe it could do an enormous amount of good. Reading, as Ms Rueda declared, was what opened her eyes to 'other cultures and religions'. I'm reminded of one young man, a habitual offender, who was not in any kind of education other than the hour he had with me each week. We read together a story about bullying. At the end he was quiet for a moment, and then he began to talk about why the character in the story had become a bully - and it was so clear that he was drawing on and reflecting on his own experience. It was one of many rather moving moments.

The 'sentence' could be adjusted to the abilities of the young person - and I'm sure their are lots of writers out there who would love to contribute their enthusiasm and expertise. Of course, it would require money - but not a massive amount, and think of the benefits!

I wrote a book at the time which was partly inspired by the young people I worked with, who had such difficult obstacles to overcome. It was called The Willow Man, and it's still available as an e-book.