Little Joey’s Lost Childhood
One day last summer, when Joey had been arrested yet again for yet another burglary, his solicitor went down to the police station to see him. He sat down opposite him in the interview room, sighed and asked him straight: ‘Joey, why do you do it?’ Joey looked straight back and told him ‘I dunno. I gotta buy fags, drink. There’s drugs and things. I gotta girl. It’s money, you know…’ Joey shrugged, like any man with a weight on his mind: Joey was then eleven years old.
Soon afterwards, he became a household name when, in October last year, he was locked away in a secure unit outside Leeds where his peers weren’t that far off from coming of age. His incarceration required the personal authority of the Home Secretary. As he was led away from court, he hurled insults at the press and then disappeared in a cloud of publicity.
He became a caricature – ‘the Artful Dodger’, ‘Britain’s most notorious crook’, ‘Crime baby’. ‘the Houdini Kid.’ He made all the papers. Soon his case was being used as ammunition in a sustained assault which has seen the Home Secretary, the Police Federation, the Daily Express and various Chief Constables campaigning to lock up more children.
They pointed not only to Joey but to a rash of other adolescent delinquents: the eleven-year-old brother and sister whose attempted arrest caused a riot at a wedding party: the six ‘Little Caesars’ from Northumbria who were blamed for 550 offences: the thirteen-year-old armed robber from Cheshire. Their solution was simple: these children had to be punished: the courts needed more powers to put them behind bars.
Joey grew up with his father, Gerry, a Southern Irish labourer who has not worked regularly for years, and his mother, Maureen, also Irish and barely literate, who was only eighteen when she married Gerry, fifteen years her senior. The neighbours remember Joey playing with his go-cart in the street, running around with his two smaller brothers, banging on the door to scrounge cigarettes for Gerry. They say he was a nice kid. They remember him skiving off school, too, and thieving, but they don’t remember it well. Almost everybody’s kid skives off school, and a lot of them go thieving. Gerry says he’s not sure when Joey first broke the law. He thinks he stole some crisps for dinner when he was four. In Gerry’s family there has often been trouble with the law: petty crimes, handling the occasional fight, a succession of brothers and uncles behind bars.
By the time he was 10, thieving was the only game Joey knew. He had 35 arrests behind him and the social workers decided he had to be locked up. They had tried taking him into care but he had simply legged it from where they put him so he was sent to the secure unit at East Moor outside Leeds.
He liked it there. Everyone at East Moor agrees that Joey liked it. It is not like a prison: there are no peaked caps or truncheons. It is more like a school with extra keys. Tucked away there, far from the mean crescents of the housing estate, he was a child again. He played with lego. He practised joined-up writing. He woke up feeling ill in the night and cried on the principal’s shoulder.
Joey is due to be released from the secure unit. Everyone who has dealt with him is sure that he will go straight back to his old ways. They say they have given up on him. They have two options: lock him up or let him go. Everyone in social services knows the danger of putting away a child: it breaks up the family, it stigmatizes the child, it floats him in a pool with older criminals.
Yet letting him go is no better, not when it means returning to the battered streets of the city. Joey is not the only child like this. Every English city has them. Joey just happens to be the famous one. He’s bright and he’s brave and the psychiatrists agree he is not disturbed. He is, by nature, anxious to please. In the secure unit now, he conforms with everything around him.
If you throw a child into the sea, it will drown. If you throw it into an English ghetto, it will grow up like Joey.
1. Joey became famous because
A. he was always being arrested.
B. of his lifestyle.
C. he was the youngest inmate in the secure unit.
D. he swore at the press photographers.
2. How did the Home Secretary and the police respond to the rise in juvenile crime?
A. They imprisoned a handful of other famous juvenile offenders.
B. They wanted courts to do their job better.
C. They thought that the police force should be strengthened.
D. They wanted a crack down on serious young offenders.
3. What can the neighbours recall about Joey?
A. He used to steal for his father.
B. He was a bully.
C. He started stealing when he was four.
D. He played truant from school.
4. Why was it decided that Joey should go to a secure unit?
A. He refused to give up thieving.
B. He kept running away from the homes.
C. He behaved better in a secure unit.
D. He was too old for the children’s home.
5. What dilemma faces the authorities on Joey’s release from the secure unit?
______
6. What does the writer conclude is the main cause of Joey’s behaviour?
______
Shortages of Nurses
The average working life of a nurse is 7.1 years with 30,000 leaving every year: a fairly (0)______statistic. There has always been the (1)______that those leaving could be replaced by an (2)______supply of 18-year-olds. Nowadays, however, such keen 18-year-olds are (3)______thin on the ground and the profession is facing a (4)______crisis. The general perception is that nursing is badly-paid, stressful and not the best option open to young people on the job market. This has mostly been fueled by the media. Moreover, nurses who take a break to have children and then wish to return find that the (5)______of shift work does not fit in with school hours and holidays.
Training, too, is an issue. Many may have severe gaps in their working knowledge, often lacking (6)______. Recent scandals involving the (7)______of patients in hospitals around the country have highlighted the fact that (8) ______candidates for nursing are being taken on. Many believe, however, that the media has, once again, played its part. Nurses, themselves, feel aggrieved that a few high profile stories are tainting their profession. What, however, remains is that until these issues are (9)______addressed, staff shortages will continue to threaten the successful running of many hospitals. For the government, it remains a political hotcake, and a top policy concern for the (10)______national election.
0. DISTURB DISTURBING
1. ASSUME______
2. END______
3. COMPARE______
4. RECRUIT______
5. FLEXIBLE______
6. CONFIDENT______
7. TREAT______
8. SUIT______
9. ADEQUATE______
10. COME______