This is what he said:
"I wanted to go to Feltham, bruv... By the time I was 16, I couldn't wait to get banged up. earn my stripes... I had three meals a day, my own private bedroom with a nice TV, a nice Sony stereo radio, and I got a PlayStation 2 after two months for good behaviour. I got to work out in the gym, shoot pool, table-tennis. And most of my friends were there. To me, FELTHAM WAS HOLIDAY CAMP...
A lot of the youngers I meet want to go to jail, too. They think it's a badge of honour. To them, it's more of a test than GCSEs. They see it as a place where they can work out, get muscley, make friends, and all the girls gonna fall over them when they get out. And it's a break from the grind. You don't have to hustle for a living when you banged up… To me, life's like a video game… Education is nothing these days. It doesn't even get you a job.”
“Mick… exudes confidence and charisma. HE IS BLACK OF CARIBBEAN DESCENT, born in London, the third of SIX SIBLINGS FROM A BROKEN HOME and 'admires' his hard-working SOCIAL WORKER MOTHER…
He was… 15 when he started dealing drugs… Since he was 13, he explains, when he saw a Channel 4 musical documentary called Feltham Sings - which showed the inmates of Feltham young offenders institute in Hounslow rapping their stuff and strutting around like peacocks - he wanted to go there.
Two weeks after leaving school, Mick got his wish: he was sentenced to 14 months for 23 armed robberies at knifepoint across East London… Some teenagers regard the biggest young offender prison in Europe not with dread but as a glamorised rite of passage. How representative is he?
‘For a growing number of boys growing up on the estates, going to Feltham represents the pinnacle of their lives. For these boys, Feltham is a substitute family. It replaces their chaotic home life with routine, structure and status. The politicians have not grasped this because it's too frightening to contemplate. If our prisons are no longer a deterrent, what is’?'Oh, the politicians grasp it, Ray. They know the core, they really do. Those who 'strut around like peacocks' in Feltham are their pet footsoldiers. They make war upon the world on behalf of the politician and those who own him.
Cohen added:
“Within minutes of my meeting Mick, he sells a wrap of cocaine and uses the proceeds to score weed from a 14-year-old kid on a bicycle...
The dealer we just saw is a member of an Asian gang, the Blackhawk Boys, whose ‘boss‘, Raffique, knows Mick because he ‘also graduated from Feltham‘...
How does he spend his day?… ‘I wake late morning, visit my supplier then get the stuff sold fast as possible. I got my regulars: business guys, City guys who need a fix. I keep my shit upbeat. I do home deliveries, pick-ups, whatever. Nights, I'm with my girl. Last night we were up until 5am. We watch porn‘...
He outlines his business strategy. 'Selling weed is easy but it's not what makes money. Cocaine and heroin, you making about two grand a day, mate, especially if you go sell in funny places in the countryside like Basildon and Portsmouth'...
How does he see his future? 'I want a big house with three cars: a Mercedes, a range rover, and a Lamborghini Gallardo’…
The next time I meet Mick is a week later: he is nursing a painfully swollen gashed lip with three stitches. He'd been hit with a knuckle-duster, he says, part of a long-running tit-for-tat feud with another boy.
It started about two years ago, he says, when a girl ‘grassed up his cousin who then got done on a murder charge‘. Mick ‘flipped out’ and beat her up so badly that she was hospitalised and he, in turn, was charged with assault and sent, once again, to Feltham. His second spell inside was six months...
Mick doesn't stray far from his estate without ‘tooling up’ - carrying a weapon. ‘Youngers carry knives but I prefer to roll with a strap,’ he says, referring to his 9mm Glock pistol which he once used to shoot somebody in the leg in a fast-food restaurant.'
Ray Lewis added: 'We especially have a problem with black boys. It's the elephant in the room, the thing politicians are too afraid to admit but we face a crisis of masculinity in black families where fathers are absent’…
Trig, who has also started dealing class-A drugs and has known Mick since he was 10 years old, looks only to emulate his role model. ‘I ain't afraid of Feltham,’ he says. ‘Mick handled it, I can, too’…
We all fear crossing the paths of teenage hoodlums like Mick and Trig, symbols of broken Britain.”If we fear them, we do so because we know the establishment their side. If we were to take the one or two common sense steps necessary to prevent the Headcase Micks from making our lives hell, they would be down on us like a ton of bricks.
For almost fifty years now those who rule our lives have given such murderously anarchic 'symbols' as these the green light to build the 'Broken Britain' that so many of us must now endure. If the British people want their country back from those who see prison as a 'holiday camp' and Feltham, in particular, as a 'badge of honour,' they will have to stop voting for the politicians who made it all happen.
It's as simple as that.
No comments:
Post a Comment