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What Humanity Can Be
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Our primary task,” explains Andrez Harriott, “is to change the trajectory for children who are most at risk of becoming involved in criminality, or children who are currently involved in criminality.” We’re discussing The Liminality Group (TLG) of which he is founder. They know, the CEO states, that children who are excluded from school, and children lacking early intervention programmes, are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. From his home in Kent, he also points out that children released from custody are likely to reoffend within the first year. So, TLG provides schools with crime
OX MAGAZINE JULY 2020
diversion workshops, also finding young people work experience during school holidays, and arranging university visits for them. In prisons, the organisation works with young offenders “who are there for anything from murder to robbery”, running offending behaviour programmes and looking at how they can find employment following release. In the TLG newsletter, ‘Connected’, he has written about Covid-19, which has seen children confined to dangerous spaces (as researched by the NSPCC). Schools can offer respite, he says, to pupils whose family members abuse them physically, sexually or emotionally.
I wish I could say that America has its own issues which are not replicated in the UK
