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 and he sat down opposite him in the interview room with all the graffiti on the wall, and he sighed and he asked him straight: “Joey, why do you do it?”
And Joey looked straight back and told him. “Fook, 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 famous when, in October of this year, he was locked away in a secure unit outside Leeds where he was three years younger than any other inmate, so young that his incarceration required the personal authority of the Health Secretary, Virginia Bottomley. As he was led away from court, he flashed one defiant finger at the press and then disappeared in a dust cloud of publicity.
He became a caricature – “the Artful Dodger”, “Britain’s most notorious young 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 in Reading, whose attempted arrest caused a riot at a wedding party; the six “Little Caesars” from Northumbria who were blamed for 550 offences; the 13-year-old armed robber from Cheshire; the 14-year-old multiple rapist from South London. Their solution was simple: these children had to be punished; the courts needed more powers to put them behind bars.
The truth is more complicated. Compiled with the help of those closest to him, the real story of Joey’s life is more bizarre and more miserable than the freak show which was staged in the tabloids and it says much less about sentencing policy than it does about the new dark age which has descended on the children of the cities of England.
Joey was born in Leeds, in November 1980, and he grew up on the edge of the city in a maze of red-brick council houses which appear from the distance, even now, to be models of working class contentment. Closer, they are dishevelled: tattered scraps of litter in the grass, gutters hanging loose, mongrels humping on the pavement, Fuck You sprayed on a wall. Behind the doors, they are a glimpse into a Victorian ghetto: bare boards, bare bulbs, damp walls, carpets sticky with dirt, the rich stink of dogs, women with fags and saggy faces, and children everywhere -barefoot, sticky-nosed, hand-me-down packs of them. It reeks of poverty.
Joey grew up here with his father, Gerry, a Southern Irish labourer who has not worked regularly for many years; and his mother, Maureen, also Irish and barely literate, who was only 18 when she married Gerry, 15 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 a fag for Gerry. He was crazy about Leeds United, though no-one ever took him to a game. They say he was a nice kid.
The neighbours 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. Round the corner from Joey’s house now, there is a family where all three sons are awaiting trial, though one of them, called Andy, who is 14, is on the run. On the same street, David, aged 10, has been arrested for burglary. Another boy has been caught putting sugar in petrol tanks, just for the hell of it; his father recently finished a sentence for manslaughter and he has been hanging around the family home, even though there is a court order which forbids him to go near the place. Kids steal. Adults steal, too. Sometimes they pocket the stuff that their kids steal for them. The pub round the corner from Joey’s home was known for years as The Burglar’s Arms, until the police closed it down.
Gerry says he’s not too sure when Joey first broke the law. He thinks he stole some crisps for his dinner when he was four. But he might have been three. In Gerry’s family, there has often been trouble with the law: petty thieving, handling, the occasional fight, a succession of brothers and uncles behind bars. Gerry says that his boy stole because he wanted things and he couldn’t pay for them. Everybody did it. Joey was just a little brighter than the others, a little braver.
There is something else, which Gerry does not mention. Maureen had a boyfriend and when Joey was eight, she ran away from Gerry and the dingey council house and went to live with her boyfriend in a van that he owned. She took Joey and his two small brothers with her and all through the summer of 1989, they lived together, roaming from town to town, the five of them cramped and filthy in their rat’s-nest home. They had no fixed address and so they had trouble signing on. They were so short of money that they were beginning to starve, but the boyfriend came up with a solution. He told Joey to go out and thieve for them.
By this time, Joey was well used to thieving. Like most of his friends, he had been pinching whatever he thought he could get away with and, like most of them, he had been arrested by the police. The first time was in December 1987, just after his seventh birthday, but the police could only tick him off and release him: he was still three years short of the legal age of criminal responsibility. Since then, he had been arrested a dozen times and released in the same way.
Maureen’s boyfriend said it would be easy. Joey would steal, and so they would eat. It wouldn’t even matter if he was caught. The police would have to release him. But Joey didn’t want to thieve for Maureen’s boyfriend and he told him so. The boyfriend thumped him. So far as anyone knows, the boyfriend thumped him a lot to persuade him to steal and, eventually, Maureen decided it had to stop. On August 14 1989, Joey and his two brothers, then aged five and six, were found wandering alone around their old council housing estate on the edge of Leeds. There was no sign of Maureen or her boyfriend. The three boys had been abandoned.
Gerry took them back. A month later, Maureen returned home. Social workers came to help, put the three boys on the Child Protection Register, went to court and got a three-year supervision order which gave them the power to run the family’s erratic affairs. But it was too late. Joey was now thieving with a vengeance. He was being arrested routinely, sometimes three times in a week, almost always for burglary.
It was still only a game. He would steal hundreds of pounds in cash and give it away – to his family, to his friends, to people he hoped would be his friends. When the police arrested him, they had to lift him up onto a desk to search him. He was always honest with them, admitted everything he had done and then he walked straight out and did it again. He abandoned school. By the time he was ten, thieving was the only game he 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 for the first time 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 in there, far away from the mean crescents of the housing estate, he was a child again. He played with Leggo. He ran around in a Leeds United strip. He practised joined-up writing. He woke up feeling ill in the night and cried on the principal’s shoulder. He behaved so well that Leeds Social Services Department no longer had any legal excuse to hold him there and, in March 1991, they were forced to put him back in a residential home.
Soon, he was absconding and burgling his way round Leeds again, buying a television, a Hi-Fi and a computer for his bedroom at home. The police kept arresting him, but they had no legal power to hold him. Joey was now bored by appearing in court. He’d sit beneath the beak, swinging his legs off the edge of the chair and muttering to his lawyer “Fook, do we have to go through all this?” Once, in August 1991, when his impatience got the better of him, he escaped from Chapeltown police station by squeezing his tiny frame through the feeding slit in the cell door, wriggling through the iron bars at the end of the corridor and disappearing into the night. In October, he escaped from the police in Rotherham by slipping his tiny hands through the cuffs. He was just too small for the law.
Over the winter of 1991, he spent another three months in the secure unit at East Moor. It was his second Christmas behind a locked door and he made no secret of the fact that he enjoyed it. There were presents, treats, food, no violence, no pressure. Once again, he settled so well that he had to be released. On February 13 this year, he was moved to an open home in Inglewood, near Leeds. Ten days later, he absconded. Two days later, the police found him and brought him back. The next day, he absconded again. He was now running rings around the law.
He was burgling houses and pubs in broad daylight, often in handfuls. On the afternoon of April 6, for example, he burgled three pubs in two hours, escaping with £805 of cash and valuables. The only thing that ever put him off was dogs. Sometimes, he worked with other kids. One of them was his cousin, also aged eleven. He took to stealing cars and crashed one with two other boys right outside the home of the Director of Leeds Social Services. Every so often, the police would catch him; he would confess; they would take him to court where a magistrate would look at him solemnly and send him back to Inglewood; then he would abscond and start burgling again. Twice he absconded after less than an hour in the home. Once, he absconded before he even got there – simply listened to the magistrate’s speech, turned on his heel, ducked out of the court, down the steps and off into the streets of Leeds. But it was no longer a game.
Sometimes, as he ran from Inglewood, the social workers would see adults waiting for him in a car. They drove him off and used him. They stuck him through fan lights and toilet windows. They took him into pubs and let him sneak upstairs while they drank. He did whatever they said. In the living quarters above one pub in Leeds, he came across a dog that he said was as big as a donkey, but he steeled himself and crept over it to do his job. The adults let him take the risks and then they kept the money. They drove him all over the country: to Skegness and Boston in Lincolnshire; to Poole in Dorset; to York and Wakefield and Rotherham and Selby. Once, the police found him in Pontefract. He admitted burgling five places that afternoon, but he had none of the jewellery and cash left on him. The adults who had used him had taken it and driven away, abandoning him again.
Now, he no longer ran home to his mum and dad. He stayed in Chapeltown, once a genteel residential area, now a slum, the kind of place that once existed only in American cities, where there are guns and knives and gang fights and hookers who con men into bedsits where they get their wallets beaten out of them with baseball bats. Here, he sold his stolen gear – he once sold £4,000 worth of jewellery for £50 to a man on the pavement outside the Fforde Greene pub – and he bought himself safe haven. £500 in cash for a sofa for the night. He could afford it. He was taken in by a prostitute. She is called Tina. She has peroxide blond hair and she is 18, though she makes herself look much younger because the men in the Ford Escorts prefer her that way.
One time this summer when he was arrested, he admitted he had just stolen £1,000 from a pub and when the detectives asked him what had happened to the money, he told them he had spent it already – £500 on drugs and £500 on a blow job from Tina. The detectives looked at Joey. He had always been small. Even now at the age of eleven, he was barely four foot tall. He was obviously not sexually mature. They guessed he must be making it up about Tina. But with Joey, you never could tell. It looked as though he might be telling the truth about the drugs. He was pale, thin, he had black rings under his eye and on August 31 an eleven-year-old boy who matched Joey’s description was admitted to hospital in Leeds suffering from a heroin overdose. He recovered and ran away before the social workers could get to him.
At the end of September, when Joey was arrested yet again for yet another bunch of burglaries, his solicitor, a bluff and amiable man in his 30s called Steve Culleton, went to see him and found him sitting sullen and dejected in a stone-cold interview room in Horsforth police station.
“You know they’re trying to lock you up again?”
Joey shrugged.
“Where’ve you been?…They’re going to try and lock you up, Joey. Do you want that?”
Joey shrugged again. “Don’t care.”
Culleton was worried about him. He could see he was shaking. He looked terrible, very thin. “Are you ill? What’s wrong with you?”
“Stuff I been taking.”
“You taking heroin? Is that what you’ve been using?”
Joey nodded.
“Do you want to stop taking it?”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Anything… Can’t go on like this.”
Culleton looked closer. Joey was weeping. He was a professional burglar, he had slept rough in Chapeltown, he had lived with a prostitute, he was mixed up with heroin, but somewhere inside, buried under all the layers of thickened skin, he was just a miserable little boy. Culleton felt full of anger at the utter lack of any hope that he could offer this child, and at all of the adults who had taught him to steal and encouraged him and pressured him and used him and then run away and let him take the blame.
Joey went back to the secure unit. It was his third visit but, for some reason, it was this one that caught the eye of the press. Staff at the unit did their best to shield him from the publicity. They were worried that it would encourage him to see himself as a big villain. They weeded newspapers and avoided TV news programmes which might mention him. But then his mother, Maureen, turned up to visit him armed with a sheaf of newspaper cuttings about him which she proceeded to let him read, full of pride. When he was mentioned on television, she rang him up from home to tell him about it.
This time, the staff at the unit saw that he no longer relaxed and became a child again. He wasn’t interested in Leggo or anything that smacked of childhood. All he wanted to do was to play the part of the professional thief. He boasted to the older boys about his many burglaries. They ignored him, so he sneared at them because they had been given longer sentences for stealing far less than he had got away with. He wrote letters to his old partners in crime, some of them children. “Come and get me over the wall,” he told one of them. “Then we can screw some more pubs.” He wrote about sex he’d like to have with men and women and about various people he thought should be bumped off. He left the letters lying around where the staff could read them, as if he were punishing them for their care.
The English teacher tried to get him to write a story. She showed him a picture of a crowd at a football match and asked him to imagine what happened next. He told her that he would pick money out of everybody’s pocket and then run away with his mum so that they could spend all the money together. She showed him a picture of a rock concert, and he came out with exactly the same story.
The staff tried to let him relax and to admit that he was only eleven. They all found him very easy to deal with. He was friendly, obedient, helpful. He was cheeky and he loved to boast about his crimes but most of the time when they looked at him – still so small with his round pink face and his huge brown eyes – they found it hard to believe he was any older than eight and anything other than an ordinary little boy. But the outside world kept creeping in.
After his first visit from Maureen, the staff discovered that Joey had acquired a lighter and some cigarettes. When Maureen next visited, the staff took her aside and asked her about it. She said it must have been her seven-year-old son who was to blame. She was sure he was smoking, and he had probably passed something to Joey. During this second visit, the staff watched discreetly and they saw Maureen pass a lighter and more cigarettes to her seven-year-old son and send him off to the toilets with Joey. When the visit ended, staff found that the two young brothers had pinched several things from them and stuffed them into their pockets. Maureen appeared unconcerned.
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 Chapeltown and to his old ways. They say they have no hope for him. They have only two options: lock him up or let him go. Everyone in social services knows the dangers of locking up a child: it breaks up the family, it stigmatises the child, it floats him in a pool of older criminals, the whole idea of jailing an eleven-year-old smells barbaric. For all these reasons, they resist the Daily Express and its friends, all yelling for more punishment with flecks of foam on their lips.
Yet letting him go is no better, not when it means returning to
the chartered streets of the city. Joey is not the only child like this. Every English city has them, plaguing the social workers and the police. Joey just happens to be the famous one. He’s bright and he’s brave and the psychiatrists all agree that he is not disturbed. He is, by nature, anxious to please. In the secure unit now, he conforms, just as previously, growing up on his dog-turd council estate, he conformed with everything around him. Fags, drink, drugs. “It’s money. You know…”
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.
* The names of Joey and his family have been changed for legal reasons.
