So You Think You Know Me PDF
Preview So You Think You Know Me
S o You Think You ‘You never really understand a person until you S consider things from his point of view … until you Know Me? o climb into his skin and walk around in it.’ Y Harper Lee, To Kill a Mocking Bird (1960) o u T As a local hard case, author Allan Weaver took no prisoners. Neither does he in this h compelling work in which he tells of a life of violent episodes and chaotic early life. i n Teachers, social workers and ‘authority figures’ never tried ‘to get to know him’ – to unearth k the clues and triggers and discover what his offending was all about. A natural rebel and a radical, it is hardly surprising that by ignoring the real Allan Weaver this led to an escalation Y of his violent activities, tensions between family and friends and dubious associates. o u So You Think You Know Me? is packed with contradictions: the Allan Weaver involved in mayhem and aggression is not the one telling the story from inside his own head: an K often vulnerable, sensitive, articulate, unquestionably loyal and even-handed individual; n mistaken, misguided and foolish perhaps – but largely trapped by an escalating need to o live up to his ‘tough guy’ reputation. w That there can be any tidy ending to this graphic true-life account of approved school, M assessment centres, care homes, borstal and Glasgow’s notorious Barlinnie Prison is quite remarkable – yet Allan Weaver survived to obtain a degree from Strathclyde University e and to work on the inside of the Criminal Justice System with young people who, like he ? was, are in trouble with the law. The punches that he now throws are directed towards the shortcomings of a system which he believes is failing to do all that it could to turn them away from crime and anti-social behaviour – as he explains in this heartfelt autobiography. AllAn WeAver A S l la o You Think You n A must for anyone involved with young offenders, especially those of a W Know Me? violent disposition e a v e r Foreword Mike Nellis and Fergus McNeill W A T E R S I D WATERSIDE PRESS E WATERSIDE PRESS P R E S S So You Think You Know Me? Allan Weaver ii So You Think You Know Me? So You Think You Know Me? Published 2008 by WATERSIDE PRESS LTD Sherfield Gables Sherfield on Loddon Hook Hampshire RG27 0JG Telephone 01256 882250 Low cost landline calls 0845 2300 733 E‐mail [email protected] Online catalogue www.WatersidePress.co.uk ISBN‐10: 190438045X ISBN‐13: 9781904380450 Copyright © 2008 This work is the copyright of Allan Weaver. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by the author in compliance with UK and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned. The Foreword is the copyright of Mike Nellis and Fergus McNeill (2008). Cataloguing‐In‐Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library. Cover design © 2008 Wate rside Press Ltd. Front cover photograph © Tom Gibson Photography. Rear cover photograph shows Allan Weaver with his sons, Paul (22) and Allan (21). North American distributor International Specialised Book Services (ISBS), 920 NE 58th Ave, Suite 300, Portland, Oregon, 97213‐3786, USA Telephone 1 800 944 6190 Fax 1 503 280 8832 [email protected] www.isbs.com Allan Weaver iii So You Think You Know Me? Allan Weaver iv So You Think You Know Me? About the author Allan Weaver was born and raised in the Ayrshire town of Saltcoats. He began offending at the age of 12 and subsequently spent more than a decade steeped in an offending lifestyle. This culminated in years of detention in various reformatory and penal institutions. After ‘returning to school’ at the age of 31 and successfully obtaining the necessary higher qualifications, he attended the University of Strathclyde where he was awarded his Diploma in Social Work. He has been employed as a criminal justice social worker for the past 13 years and has been a team leader for the past five, during which time he also completed an MSc in Criminal Justice and obtained a Practice Award in Advanced Criminal Justice Studies. He has also supported a number of social work students through their practice placements. So You Think You Know Me? is his first book. The authors of the Foreword Mike Nellis is Professor of Criminal and Community Justice in the Glasgow School of Social Work, University of Strathclyde. He is a former social worker with young offenders, trained at the London School of Economics in 1977/8 and between 1990‐2003 was closely involved in the training of probation officers at the University of Birmingham. He was awarded his Ph.D by the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge in 1991. He has written extensively on the changing nature of the probation service, the promotion of community penalties, the significance of electronic monitoring and the cultural politics of penal reform (including the educational use of prison movies and the autobiographies of offenders). His most recent book (edited with Eric Chui) was Moving Probation Forward (Longmans, 2003) and he is currently editing a book, with Belgian colleagues, on electronic m onitoring around the world. Fergus McNeill worked for several years in residential drug rehabilitation and as a criminal justice social worker before taking up a lecturing post at the University of Glasgow in 1998. Since then his teaching, research and writing have examined crime and criminal justice issues including sentencing, community penalties, resettlement of prisoners and youth justice. He is a regular contributor to public debates and has acted as both witness and expert adviser to committees of the Scottish Parliament on these issues. Latterly, his work has focused on how practice with offenders is changing and how it should change in the light of research evidence about desistance from crime. Reducing Reoffending, his first book, co‐authored with Bill Whyte was published by Willan in 2007. Allan Weaver v CONTENTS About the author iv Foreword vii Acknowledgements xiv Dedication xv Publisher’s note xvi Chapter 1 An Education of Sorts—Uncle Jimmy Helps 17 2 First Offence to Hangman’s Noose 23 3 Maw, Madness, Mayhem and Me 31 4 Painting Lesson, Screaming Colours of my Heart 40 5 Fearful to Feared: Violence Equals Respect 48 6 Sent Down—So Much for Jimmy Boyle! 53 7 Rage to Ritalin—Who is the System For? 61 8 A Sad Twist to the Beautiful Game 68 9 Does Anyone Have Boundaries? 74 10 A Night at the Theatre (the Hospital Variety) 83 11 On the Rampage—Living Up to ‘Type’ 91 12 Juvenile Chain Gang to Barlinnie Prison 98 vi So You Think You Know Me? 13 Dark Days, Rainy Nights: More Living Hell 108 14 High Maintenance Lifestyle and Reputation 117 15 Out of Control or Just Plain Indifferent? 124 16 The Best Interests of the Child 130 17 Wilful Deviance: Road Map for Borstal 138 18 Reformative Aims, Brutal Regime 145 19 Alternative Reality: Strangeways/Strange Days 152 20 Sins of the Children Visited On the Parents 160 21 Blood and Violence Within Prison Walls 164 22 Lone Wolf Surprised by His Reflection 170 23 Crossroads but no Signpost 177 24 Meeting My Beautiful Boy 184 25 Back to Barlinnie—Barricades Not Required 188 26 More than One of Everybody 195 27 Know Me Better Now? 202 Epilogue 211 Allan Weaver vii Foreword Mike Nellis and Fergus McNeill Glasgow School of Social Work Academics like us long ago learned to take good offender autobiographies seriously; by dint of their obvious ‘human interest ‘ they tend to get the attention of the public in a way that our books don’t, no matter how similar our concerns. Clifford Shaw, a social worker turned criminologist in 1920s Chicago famously persuaded a young thief he knew to write out his life story and the resulting account, The Jackroller (Shaw 1930), remains a classic to this day, still culled for insights into criminal behaviour and lessons for criminal justice, though surrounded on the bookshelves by many more recent examples from around the world. In Britain there is a long history of ex‐prisoner autobiographies making serious—if all too often short‐lived—contributions to debate on penal reform and the rehabilitation of offenders. This one will be no exception, and its influence deserves to last. The genre of offender autobiography has been somewhat degraded in recent years by a certain type of ‘true crime‘ book in which maybe‐former gangsters recycle and celebrate their former misdeeds as entertainment for impressionable young men. The newer genre of ‘painful lives‘—usually stories of abusive childhoods, som e of which propel their victims into crime, ‘care‘ and imprisonment—is often touching and less exploitive of public gullibility, but can veer towards the mawkish. In some shops at least So You Think You Know Me? will suffer the indignity of being marketed as ‘true crime‘, but actually it restores one’s confidence in what good offender autobiographies can achieve—and what social work can achieve—and it could just as easily, and more intelligently, be shelved under social science, criminology or even Scottish literature. Scotland—and Glasgow in particular—has produced more than its fair share of offender autobiographies. Jimmy Boyle and Hugh Collins come to mind, but they are not the only ones. Allan Weaver’s story is mostly set in Saltcoats, a small town 30 miles west of Glasgow on the Ayrshire coast, but in its wry and evocative depiction of truancy, of early rebellion against authority, of peer pressure to be a ‘hard man‘, of viii So You Think You Know Me? drinking, constant thieving and fighting, of the failings of the care system and of the inevitable, criminality‐confirming imprisonments, it has recognisable affinities with the offender autobiographies that preceded it. The reason is simple—though we are talking about different generations, the lives and prospects of the men who wrote them barely changed. A culture was handed down. Allan even writes at one point that as a teenager ‘Jimmy Boyle was my hero and I wanted to be like him‘—a simultaneously dismal and exhilarating thing for a boy when you look back upon it, but an aspiration in which Allan would not have been alone. Glasgow’s apparent flair for producing offender autobiographies constitutes a literary legacy about which—despite the various writers’ emphases on overcoming adversity—respectable elements in the city are understandably ambivalent, often embarrassed and sometimes angry, fearing the effect on municipal reputations. It is a commonplace of the genre for writers to point out that given the circumstances they were born into, their lives up to early adulthood, and sometimes beyond that, could hardly have been different. Conservatively‐inclined commentators almost always baulk at this, insisting that there is always choice, that not everyone who grew up in violent families or gang‐ridden schemes went to the bad themselves, not realising that while this is true, it is these exceptions who need special explanations, not the many who became hard and cruel because this is what survival and status‐seeking amidst poverty and disadvantage demanded of them. The steel and stone of HM Prison Barlinnie figures prominently in parts of So Think You Know Me?, as it has in so many Scottish offender narratives, but the first Glasgow connection here comes in the form of Allan Weaver’s father, a violent man who beat his wife and traumatised his children, instilling the resentments in which his son’s rage festered, flourished and eventually became a core ingredient of his identity. But Weaver senior was himself the son of a violent, slum‐born man, and, without education, no more able to free himself from tradition or imagine himself to be different than Allan himself initially was. Writing of the era when Allan’s father was a boy, with an uneasy mix of sympathy and despair, socialist Edwin Muir (1935) had famously lamented the milieu in which such viciousness arose: These people are [not] a special class outside the bounds of humanity, but merely ... ordinary men and women in a hopeless position, who have been placed there by the operation of a process over which they have no control.
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