1. Damned if you do and Damned if you don’t
Dr. Joanna Phoenix
Department of Social and Policy Sciences
University of Bath

2. Young People’s perceptions of YOT work
Significant proportion had only the most basic idea of what YOT did or what YOT was about
Highly personalized (don’t care, care, its about the individuals not the work)
Alienation (don’t understand my life, just in it for the job, don’t listen, constant changing)
Confusion about roles (Advise to help, confident or befriender and enforcer)

3. Good YOT workers Demonstration of care or concern
Well, XXX used to ask questions and be generally concerned and you could tell, you can tell when someone wants to know something and when they’re just asking it because they have to. I mean, XXX, was dead really concerned about me and wanted to help me basically.
Yeah, that’s what I mean, I can chat to XXX. Like all you have to do is respect a person and if you’ve got respect for that person then you can go somewhere.
I don’t know, you can tell when someone cares because like they ring you up like before your interview, like say you had a job interview, they’d ring you up and wish you luck. Stupid things like that.

4. Alienation
Inconsistency (visiting in town, different appointment times, different YOT workers, reports are personalised)
They write whatever they think down. Like I say this is what’s going on in my life and they may or may not write I down. They write what they want to see
In it for the job
Yeah, you need more people up there who want to help than just be in it for the job.
Some of them, it’s just a normal job to them. To me, it’s my life.
Everyone up there, they just there to get paid and wouldn’t really give a toss what I was saying to them.
This YOT worker I had, you could tell it was all like they were reading off a bit of paper. This is the questions that I must ask like and to get the answers they’re just writing down and not trying to help me in any way.

5. Alienation Yot workers don’t listen Don’t understand
They don’t want you to bring out too much issues, because they’ve got, it’s more hassle for them. They’d rather be short. ‘Yea, you’re life is absolutely hunky dory. Everything’s great. Now you can go.’
Don’t understand
They don’t understand what my life is like.
I don’t think they know life. You’ve got to live life to understand You don’t know until you’ve gone through it. They ain’t gone through nothing bad in their lives, well they might have but as far as I’m concerned they haven’t, the way they drive around in their nice cars and loads of money and not really bothered about anything.

6. Giving up
Action plan and supervision orders, they are all the same thing. There was nothing different in there. They might write up on a bit of paper a bit different, but what’s actually happening is no different. It’s all the same thing and its nothing.
There’s not really a hell of a lot to do. I just come up here, sit maybe half hour, talk. Then go.

7. Giving up cont.d
I don’t think there is no benefit at all. They don’t help me out and the way they do these little courses, they teach you – it’s crap, it’s really just helping them. I’m quite happy to do them, but I’m not going to sit there and let someone tell me about how my life should be and what I should have done.
They try and get you to do paperwork sometimes. I just whip through some questionnaire what they ask me to do or something. I tell them what they want to hear on a bit of paper and then off I go. I know what they want to hear. They want to know that I’m thinking about what I’ve done and they want to know that I’m a changed man and they want to know that I know that I hurt the victims.

8. Confusion
Yeah, but they have to follow rules, that’s all, same as everyone else. It doesn’t matter if you’re the nicest person in the world. They still have to go by three strikes and you’re out sort of thing.
I think the problem is … I like to give my ideas about it, because they always say at the start of every single order they’ll say ‘It’s a two way thing’. I do push it as far as I possibly can. And it don’t matter what you way, it never really makes a different because they don’t really tell you the truth.
They’re there to stop me. They’re there to like recommend the best thing for me. Obviously jail ain’t the best thing for me. I’ve been in four times and I’m still getting into trouble. Obviously it ain’t working. So what does work? I don’t fucking know.
She’ll say things like, “I want you to tell me the truth now.” I’d be like, “Okay so I will.” And she’ll say something like, “What do you think of so and so?” and I’ll give her my opinion, and she’ll say, “Well, that’s wrong.” And I’m thinking, how can it be wrong if it’s my opinion? I can’t say she’s wrong because she’ll give me bad reports if she wanted to.

9. Nothing works
I breach everything now they give me at the end of the day you see, but I don’t feel any amount of work they can do with me, and me going up to the YOT team and me sitting down and talking about shit ain’t going to change fuck all. So I may as well go up there, I sit down and I’ll talk to them for a bit but then I’ll go, I’m not sitting there.
How can they help me? I’m in the office five minutes. How can they get me money or a house? They can’t help me.
The thing is really what could they do? I don’t think, you know, the whole couple of years people saying well what do you want them to do, what do you want us to do, but at the end of the day, there's not really a hell of a lot I don’t think. I mean nothing that ever, I don’t really think there's anymore literally could they do, I can't think what they could have done.

10. You have to do it yourself
So it's more a sort of like that support, you know, I'm really grateful for but it's not really any sort of, you know, it's not the only problems I had, it's like it's my drinking, I just got to cut down on my drinking and all the other stuff like the offending stuff will kind of stop with it. So that’s what I'm more working on really, is to stop drinking to have a reason, more reasons not to drink and to have a bit more of a life.
And I could see it getting worse and worse and then suddenly it's just this one last time that, you know, I really - the time before that I did make my mind up, look I'm never going to wake up in a cell again, I don’t like it anymore because I went through a stage, you know, kind of
The thing is really what could they do? I don’t think, you know, the whole couple of years people saying well what do you want them to do, what do you want us to do, but at the end of the day, there's not really a hell of a lot I don’t think. I mean nothing that ever, I don’t really think there's anymore literally could they do, I can't think what they could have done.

11. Having someone to care
XXX said why did I offend, I don’t know, because there’s no one there to stop me if you know what I mean, there weren’t no one there to stop me. I was just like on my own if you know what I mean. I never had no one to impress, I never had no one to like be good for, if you know what I mean.
They’re like what’s the point in doing that, because at first I was just one of them people that thought I was like proper big getting in trouble, and they just made me realise that it wasn’t, it was pathetic basically. It’s made me grow up basically.

12. Conclusion
Deep sense of alienation that current policy and practices cannot address
Too much care, too little care
Relationships are more important than pieces of work