On the Switchback interviews
Background to the assignment for London charity Switchback
The vast majority of young people in UK prisons have grown up in situations of entrenched disadvantage: poor housing, poor schooling, high levels of unemployment, and all the knock-on effects those three are bound to have in terms of mental and physical health.
For many, prison marks the latest in a long line of depressing and disempowering interactions they will have had with the various tentacles of the state.
Totally refashioning each prison-leaver’s relationships — with crime, with society, with themselves — is a Herculean task, but it is precisely this that Switchback is all about.
Although the mentoring charity gets measured on the same metrics as every other rehabilitation provider out there — progress into work, rates of recidivism — their ambition is so much greater, more human, and more long term.
This charity sets out to do nothing short of giving each Switchback Trainee that they take on the chance to turn over a totally new leaf.
It is hard to overstate how hard it is to pull a feat like this off among young men who have seen as much, earned as much, and been let down as much as these men often have.
But Switchback’s approach is to work uniquely intensively with each individual, forging one-on-one mentoring relationships characterised by phenomenally high levels of support and appropriate challenge.
It is these extraordinary relationships that act as the foundation for all the changes that follow: and which ultimately give Switchback one of the lowest rates of recidivism of any charity in the country.
Switchback asked me to review their communications and to write a new bank of case studies to illustrate the scale of the task they set themselves and the change they help their Trainees achieve as the charity approached its 10th anniversary in 2018.
My main piece of advice to the charity was to ‘get out the way’: that is, to stop telling their Trainees’ stories in the third person, and to instead give these young men the chance to describe their own backgrounds, and how their lives had changed, in their own words.
Their stories were among some of the most powerful I’ve ever been told.
