One Mistake Means Being Forced To Live A Life Sentence In The UK
By: Michelle Torez
Tags: Mental Health, Criminal Justice, Criminal Records, Criminal Justice Reform, Healing From Trauma

One Mistake Means Being Forced To Live A Life Sentence In The UK

Turned away from most jobs, denied college and university courses and even stopped from traveling. That’s a reality for someone with a conviction in the UK. Michelle Torez Oct 18, 2020·11 min read

Image by Freetousesounds on Unsplash.com

This article is about being brutally forced to relive the past. Not just once, but constantly for the rest of your life when all you want to do so desperately is to move on and improve yourself.

Joe is 25. Joe has got settled into a nice house, made friends, has hobbies and a girlfriend. He is starting to really believe that he is finally moving on and things are looking up for his education and job prospects after a mistake when he was just 15. He has applied for a new job as a support worker as all he wants to do is help others. He gets told by the potential employer that a DBS check is needed. A few weeks pass. Unsuccessful. Later on that day, he struggles to sleep. He keeps thinking to himself if it was the conviction on his record from 10 years ago when he was just fifteen or if they did a google search of him and saw his full name and ‘what he did’ accompanied with his age, city, street address and a full colour photo of him looking at death’s door. His CV is now in the bin, along with that opportunity to progress his career and achieve his dream. This isn’t a one-off example, this has happened to me so, so many times. This is the reality of life in the UK if you have any sort of conviction on your record. Millions of people just want to move on and better themselves but society and the ‘system’ won’t let them.

I read on the criminal conviction information site and forum UNLOCK (I contribute there sometimes) about a man who was caught with some cannabis, around five or six spliffs worth. He was doing a mental health nursing degree at the time but sadly this conviction resulted in the university dropping him from the course. I also read another about a man, in his fifties, writing about how sad his life turned out after he got a conviction in his late teens for assault. He had gotten drunk and hit a man who was talking to his girlfriend in a nightclub and the fight turned nasty. He had hoped to become a solicitor but this dream never became a reality due to the inhumane criminal record system in the UK. His criminal conviction plunged him into depression and he attempted to take his life. The fact is that you don’t just do your time. You don’t just ‘have your day in court’ and it’s forgotten about, here in the UK, it stays with you for the rest of your life. It stops you from going to university, applying for jobs, even voluntary jobs, getting house insurance and even traveling to certain countries.

Nearly half of all convictions revealed on basic checks were acquired in youth. Of the 68,860 basic checks in the last 3 years that contained convictions, 49.4% contained convictions from childhood (4,040) or early adulthood (30,020). The fact is that over a third of a million people have been affected by the disclosure of a childhood criminal record. 337,346 standard and enhanced checks contained a caution or conviction received when they were a child.  (Source- http://www.unlock.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/youth-criminal-records-report-2018.pdf)

As these figures below show, a criminal record acquired in youth is a life sentence. Here in the UK we are doing it all wrong. In many countries, including the USA, some criminal records can be wiped completely at a certain age. In the UK, people are going to prison and learning new skills and given basic jobs only to be told they can’t continue doing them when they are released and can’t get the course they want at college or university due to what’s written on an official bit of paper from many years ago. Nothing makes sense in this system.

People are not robots. Is that what the UK is wanting, to stop seeing humans as people? People make mistakes. Life is hard. Some people grow up in absolute poverty having to not eat for days in order to have heating. Is the UK wanting a legion of people with absolutely no convictions, no speeding tickets, nothing at all but the relevant tick box qualification to get them into the job, whilst at the same time lacking any real-life experience of what it’s like to actually live?

People’s convictions shouldn’t be thrown into the cyberspace for eternity. Social media, apps and the internet is a part of most people on this planet’s everyday lives, we use it to talk to friends and loved ones, play games, send work emails, share photos and videos, read the news, but sometimes we just ‘surf’. We just go on websites not looking for anything at all really. All it takes is someone to come across Joe’s conviction article on the internet and share it all over social media or, as trends change, make a ‘meme’ of it. Joe’s Facebook friends see this and question him about it, bringing the haunting memories and the painful cocktail of guilt, shame and regret flooding back again. It’s traumatizing for him. Joe explains that he has moved on after 10 years, but one of his so-called friends has an argument and blocks him on social media. He sighs deeply as a tear comes to his eye as he removes his Facebook account. People that were mentally ill, going through really traumatic times or just made a one-off mistake as a teenager are being vilified and being made to look like thugs. I’ve spoken to various people who have been arrested and got criminal records, I’ve watched various documentaries and I’ve read many, many reports on criminal justice and employment and it stands out that nearly all of these people couldn’t get the right support because this uncaring conservative government has shut most of the support services down.

I’ll now talk about my own personal experiences of having to deal with this corrupt, broken system. The year 2016. A fucking awful year for me; I ended up in prison twice, lost friends to suicide and attempted suicide myself. I was cutting my arms, drinking heavily and walking the streets at night manic and suicidal. I felt so alone and scared. I kept ringing my local crisis team for support, as it’s what the leaflets they churn out tell you to do, but they simply told me that I had rang too often and had me arrested for ‘wasting services time’ and ‘harassment’. The case they presented at court was that my suicide attempts weren’t life-threatening enough to be taken seriously and that I was just lonely and attention-seeking and that I was taking the service away from people who were worse off than me. Let me explain. I cut my arm and wrist so deeply that they needed multiple stitches and I’m now left with permanent scarring for the rest of my life. I took multiple drug overdoses, one resulting in a four day hospital admission on the resus ward in hospital. I was struggling to get over the breakup of my first girlfriend, I was living on my own in a flat next to people who used to leave heroin needles about, I had recently lost a friend to suicide, was grieving and all this on top of having spent seven years of my life being sexually and mentally abused in NHS mental health services. I was struggling so much. I felt angry, let down and so alone. I have no contact with my mother, she left me at birth and has serious schizophrenia, so the only family that I have is my father who suffers from suicidal depression and PTSD and often goes out of touch for long periods of time. After everything I had gone through, living on my own with no partner, close friends, etc at just twenty one years old was a huge challenge. Everyone needs that certain someone, absolutely everyone. During this time I was clinging on to the last straw of hope that I had. All I needed was empathy, compassion and guidance. I was craving acceptance as everything was falling apart all around me and everyone was rejecting me or dying on me. Nah. No acceptance for me that year. Yet again the NHS mental health services let me down.

I got vilified, dragged to court and given various criminal convictions for ringing the emergency services when I wasn’t in ‘genuine enough’ need. I actually ended up in the mental health wing of the prison to add to the bizarreness of the whole thing.

A few weeks after I left the prison, I remember waking up one day and then checking my messages on my phone as per usual. I had so, so many. Over thirty. Most of them abusive, from people telling me that I was evil and nasty for what I had done and that they had seen me on the front page of the Hull Daily Mail and The Sun. What the hell were they talking about? I checked online. What I came across was deeply, deeply disturbing and still upsets me to this day that a person could lie about a suicidal young woman the way that Humberside police managed to get away with doing. The headline from The Sun was this:

‘FAKE 999 CALLS- YOUNG WOMAN, 21, BOMBARDED EMERGENCY SERVICES WITH CALLS AND USED THEM AS A PERSONAL TAXI SERVICE.’ I froze in disbelief. I felt totally betrayed. They knew full damn well the extent of my suicidal feelings and how much I was suffering. Hell, half of them had sat with me, whilst I was in my pajamas and talked me out of cutting my own fucking throat. But, despite this, they chose to print a load of lies. How evil. Sensationalist lies created to sell papers, earn income. The version in the Hull Daily Mail was even more alarming. They had chosen to print my age and my street address. This immediately put me at risk. How low for them to print such intimate details about someone suffering. I remember needing to get some toilet roll that day, but, even though I lived just a few streets away from the shop, feeling the absolute need to wait until late that night before I went. I felt I needed to wait for my own safety. I feared people would recognize me in the street and come up to me and attack me. The authorities were trying to make me look like the ‘bad one’ for asking for help, because the sad reality is that if they admitted that there are no services left people would be outraged. ‘Young girl asks for help, no help given’ makes them look bad you see. I eventually picked up the toilet roll and decided to get a copy of the lie riddled paper. I still have it in a box somewhere. The next day, whilst out, a mother walking with her little toddler said ‘it's that girl’ about me whilst walking past me crossing the road. The woman looked me in the eyes as she said it. My life was falling apart even more. For simply wanting help.

After this, I couldn’t stay in Hull much longer and I no longer view the place as my hometown. The place just reminds me of what the police did to me. I decided to move away to Leeds for a fresh start and change my name to what it is today. I checked online a few weeks ago, and the article about me is still easily available on google for all to see. If I hadn’t have changed my name, my job prospects would be non-existent for the rest of my life. I’ve asked Google to remove the post to no use. This shouldn’t be the case. First of all, police shouldn’t lie to the papers. Second, printing a vulnerable young woman’s street address in the paper should be made very much illegal. Third, having people’s past records available forever on the internet serves no purpose apart from making it even harder for individuals to actually move on from the issues and stop committing crimes. It makes no sense. In one breath, the courts and police are saying that they really want to help people move on and stop offending, yet in the other breath, they are purposefully creating policies that make convictions life long in the UK. Doesn’t make sense, does it?

I’m glad that I was able to move away into a stable home, change my name and focus on my writing to create a career and steady income for myself, but not everyone is so lucky.

The only way to aid ‘rehabilitation’ is to try and have empathy for individuals. Listen to them and find out what is making them do what they do and help them. Encourage them to pursue hobbies and support them in this. I’m talking about more community centers, more libraries, more places for people of all ages to practice skills and get qualifications. I’m talking about more mental health support services that actually care and support you, more drug and alcohol services, more domestic violence shelters. But, sadly, it is very much evident that the UK Government doesn’t care at all about these things because they are constantly cutting mental health funding, closing down mental hospitals and drug and alcohol rehab places, and bringing in policies that enforce people to pay for any support. My Dad is 60, an ex-soldier, and has PTSD and serious depression. He is paying over 300 a month for a support worker, welcome to the UK.

We should take a look at Norway and how they are doing things because it works. Norway has one of the lowest crime rates in the world and is renowned for some of the best and most humane prisons in the world too. The staff undergo many years of specialist training before working there, whereas our staff are not trained in mental health or drug addiction. Our prisons are dirty with very few facilities, underfunded and understaffed to the point staff don’t feel safe and prisoners rarely have anyone to talk to. Suicides happen so often. When I was in jail two women killed themselves in just under two months. In Norway inmates are given intensive psychological help, courses, jobs, hobbies to pursue and they have a proper bedroom to decorate. They are made to feel human. In the UK we lock them up, do very little with them and hope for a miraculous change. People are committing crimes due to mental health issues, going to prison, not getting help, and going back out and doing the same things again or going on to commit suicide. It’s so sad. People that are homeless are going to prison only to be released to a sleeping bag. Our criminal justice system is broken in every way.

I had to completely start again with my life with a new city, new name, new everything to escape from my past. People shouldn’t have to do this. That’s torture. Change is desperately needed to reduce reoffending and suicides, one of them being that convictions on your record don’t stay on until the day you die, however, it seems the UK government just doesn’t care.

Thanks for reading, but please, no matter how awful your situation is, don’t give up. Things do get better. Look at me, I made it. So can you :)

-Michelle