Theory and Practice

At this penultimate stage (hard to believe but am now at the end of week five of my six week project) I'd like to tell you that brilliant planning and foresight on my part means that I have spent the last few days pulling together all the threads of the previous weeks, visits, meetings, conversations, into a coherent whole as I began to round things off, reflecting in the rarefied academic atmosphere of Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'd like to tell you that. The truth is I only knew where I wanted to go, who I wanted to talk to and why. What would emerge from it, I had no idea. One thing that has emerged is my conclusion that working in 'silos' of expertise is something of a disability in itself when it comes to responding to human distress or need. People are not themselves silos but fluid and mercurial so our ways of dividing up responses, while sometimes practically expedient, is rarely appropriate.

I was very struck by the many ways in which  this way of working can be creatively challenged when I visited some youth justice services in Boston. The Department of Youth Services (DYS-www.mass.gov/dys) is engaged in providing various degrees of secure settings for young people in the criminal justice system and in ensuring that education provision continues, or more usually, is resumed, while the young person is in their care. I visited a detention centre for young people awaiting trial and/or sentence and a medium secure community-based setting for young people who had been convicted . In each context educators and education were key and the issue of learning support/disability/difficulty once again was viewed as endemic. ie the question was less likely to be 'which young person has a specific learning support need?' and more likely to be 'which has not?'. To this extent some of my own 'silo' thinking began to break down, as it has consistently throughout the last few weeks. 

The detention centre run by DYS in Lowell, Massachusetts.

I was reminded as I spoke with staff at the detention centre of a recent experience back home when, with representatives of other agencies, I gave evidence to the Scottish Parliament's Justice Committee on the subject of learning disability in the criminal justice system. A representative of a children's
advocacy organisation intervened several times to speak about the experience of school exclusion. The committee chair kept reminding her that this was the Justice Committee and had no remit for schools. Frustration on each part was evident but I remembered thinking that, understandable and correct as the Chair's position was, we  were all missing the point by not making the link with the early years. The silos might be working well but in the spaces in between people get lost. Here in Lowell, Massachusetts I found one example of how much more progress can be made when the relationship between education and a person's sense of their place in society is understood and the silos start talking to each other.

To do what they can to maximise this the DYS is partnering some research supervised by Professor Doreen Arcus of The Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell
(faculty.uml.edu). I also spent some time with Prof Arcus (thanks to a link made with Cornerstone's (www.cornerstone.org.uk) own research partnership with the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (www.sccjr.ac.uk)) and with her colleague in the Department of Criminology, Professor Bill Fisher who specialises in mental health and associated issues in crime. Questions of responsibility and culpability are always inherent to discussions about crime (what, if anything, can excuse wrong-doing once we have defined that an action is in fact wrong, or criminal) but especially so when there is either an obvious limitation in a person's ability to understand or an apparently 'higher' motivation for the crime. 

Among all the meetings and conversations of a theoretical and practical nature this week I also managed to finish Fyodor's commentary on the nature and impact of 'over-stepping', both on society and on the individual who does the deed. 'Crime and Punishment' ends with Rodya, having apparently gotten away with it, struggling so much with his conscience that he effectively betrays himself, is eventually persuaded to confess, serves his 'punishment' and is rehabilitated into a restored life by the love he receives from the woman, Sonya. The message, or one of them, is that justice comes from more than one source: society, yes, but also from ourselves and our sense of what we
owe to those we live with. Fyodor was commenting on a Russian society that he thought had lost its
moral compass and it's been of added interest to be reading the story while listening to other stories of those disadvantaged, through age, wealth or ability, and who find themselves 'over-stepping' in a society whose government is currently enraging everyone I've spoken to. Presently here, due to the shutdown and its impact on 'ordinary people', there is real doubt over who is in a position to exercise judgement over whom.

All a bit poignant and creating of further thought, so on a lighter note, the trees of New England in the 'fall' really are beautiful! It's still a bit early for the full bloom but in and around Harvard they are beginning to show off a bit. It's making me anticipate the end of the journey as it approaches. I am looking forward to actually pulling it all together. I'm also reflecting on all the examples of ingenuity in service, imagination and selfless hard work that have coloured my thinking since arriving here on Labor Day, and on what further influence they will have. More next week.

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.