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Published: 11 November 2010
by SIMON WROE

IN a café on Royal College Street, two ex-cons are discussing a job.

“You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to scare them,” says the older man, Charles Young.

“If they’re not listening, you bring ’em up to the front and you mug ’em off,” agrees the younger man, an 18-year-old called Jason Hill.

Young, just released from hospital for diabetes complications, swigs a cup of tea with about nine sugars in it. His eyes look tired, markers of a life he would be the first to admit had been largely misspent. Twenty of his 56 years have been behind bars; his first conviction was at the age of 12.

But that was then. Seventeen years ago, around the time of his 40th birthday and his 40th conviction, Young had what he calls “an epiphany”. He gave up burglary and carjacking and set up L.A.C.E.S. (London Anti Crime Education Scheme), which informs young people about the “Slippery Slope” towards offending.

The job being discussed across the café table is the school arm of Young’s operation. His methods are unorthodox: he sets up a makeshift prison cell in each school he visits, from which he stares out at the assembled eight to 18-year-olds, swearing at them, challenging them to fights and ignoring them.

“When you come into my class you come into prison and I’ll talk to you accordingly,” he says.

The next of these demonstrations will be at the London Nautical School, Waterloo, on November 23.

Since last May, Hill has been Young’s cellmate. A sincere, well-mannered teenager, it is hard to believe that he was until recently a thief and drug dealer. 

Hill is L.A.C.E.S.’s greatest success story: a P.Y.O. (persistent young offender) whom the courts and Youth Offending Services had washed their hands of. Facing two years in prison for two counts of burglary (one where Hill had stolen someone’s TV while they were dozing in front of it), the judge at Woolwich Crown Court took the unusual decision to revoke the court order and place him in the care of Young and his L.A.C.E.S. programme.

With the exception of a drunken fight on his 18th birthday, Hill’s behaviour since then has been exemplary. He is now a father as well, and his faith in Young’s project is so great that he has named his daughter – nine-month-old Lacey – in honour of it.

This week, at the Reducing Reoffending Forum at the London Irish Centre in Camden Square, Hill spoke for 20 minutes to a room of police officers and youth workers – an impressive turnaround for someone who three years ago “wouldn’t have spoken to the police unless they had handcuffs on me”.

“I was dealing heroin and crack but I was still a child,” says Hill. “I would go into JD [Sports] and buy a tracksuit for £70-£80, next day I wouldn’t even wash it, I’d throw it in the bin and buy a new one. I had so much money, it was nothing to me. 

“Once you become what they call ‘a career criminal’, your mind will never change. You will always look at things and say, ‘I could nick that’. But now if I think I’m going to go out and commit crime I’ll ring Charlie and he’ll come round and he’ll make me sit and think.”

Young hopes Hill’s will be the first of many court orders revoked in favour of the L.A.C.E.S. project. But despite positive results and Home Office funding, progress has been slow.

“People tell me: ‘I don’t want to pay you because you’re profiting from your criminal background’,” says Young. 

“I’ve got nothing. But I’m not moaning, because I believe in my programme. When you’ve got a criminal record, people slam doors, they don’t want to know. Which is a shame, because you can be so honest. It’s taken me 17 years to convince people that what I’m doing is worth supporting.

“Prison never works. What I do works. You can’t tell them what they should and shouldn’t do. You can only encourage them. In all my presentations I’m talking to a younger version of me, knowing that I wouldn’t listen.”

• For more information about the L.A.C.E.S. project, visit http://laces.org.uk