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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, signed and asked him straight: “Joey, why do you do it?” And Joey looked straight back and told him, “I dunno. I gotta buy fags, drink. There’s drugs and things. It’s money you know…” Joey was then eleven years old.
Joey grew up with his father, Gerry, a Southern Irish laborer 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 neighbors 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 kids skive off school, and a lot of them go thieving.
Gerry says he’s not too 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; 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 walked out of the homes where they put him, so in December 1990, 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. Joey is due to be released from the secure unit in February.
Everyone who has dealt with him is sure that he will go straight back to his old ways. They say they have two options: lock him up or let him go. Everyone in social services knows the danger of locking up 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 retuning 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. 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.
Exercise 7. Find words or phrases in the text which are similar in meaning to the words in italics.
1 Amy looked as if she had a lot to worry about.
2 The prison staff found it difficult to keep the prisoners in their cells.
Exercise 8. Circle the right answers:
1. Joey became famous because
a) He had committed so many burglaries.
b) He was always being arrested
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 wanted to see more young criminals put in prison.
b) They believed that there should be a return to corporal punishment.
c) They thought that the courts had too much power.
d) They thought that the police force should be strengthened.
