So how they find themselves in the system and how they're kind of held there I guess. So it's probably worth saying I'm a social scientist so I'm interested in the kind of people's lived experience and the the institutions and the context and the settings that influence those lives. And I always like to start by telling people I'm not, so I'm not a neuroscientist or a psychologist or anyone that understands the inner workings of the brain.

But I guess my contribution has been to try and draw some of those understandings and understandings from law and public health and other places to try and get that kind of composite understanding of the journeys that...

And even that's tricky to answer. I mean you'll be familiar with the myriad of different ways that people might kind of define the brain injury or measure that that injury, whether it's about kind of lifetime occurrence of an injury or kind of particular symptoms or whatever. So they kind of the overall you know getting a magic figure on it is tricky but the straightforward message is whatever whatever measure is used the proportion of people with a brain injury in our kind of youth prisons is much much higher.

We'd probably argue that at least a half of children in custody typically report having had some kind of brain injury and often the rates are reported to be even higher than that.

They are seeing, they are supporting, they are hopefully nurturing young people in their prisons with brain injury every day. They're in everyday interactions and they really need to understand that and what that means for the support that those young people might need and why their approaches might need to be changed.

Neurodiversity and broader kind of sense of neurological differences and disadvantage possibly. So I'm interested in a range of different forms of neurodisability and developmental challenges. Brain injury is perhaps the most prevalent among those within this population.

Whether it's the best understood and most understood I would doubt. But there is a growing understanding in our youth estate about these sets of issues.

Something happens perhaps when they're young and then how do they end up there?

The impact of those injuries can be very different. But we do know that some of the kind of common symptoms or particular symptoms that might emerge from a brain injury, a number of those do overlap with some of the things that as a criminologist we might call kind of risk factors for offending. So things like difficulties with impulse control or you know emotional regulation or inhibition or planning or peer relationships.

There's a whole load of factors that that we know to be things that may occur for a young person who's had a brain injury that in a kind of criminal justice, criminology context we regularly label as risk factors for that behaviour. And you can see how some of those sort of symptoms and challenges might play out as the forms of behaviour that might turn into something aggressive or you know impulsive and provocative that might lead to antisocial or even criminal behaviour. So there is a direct link but as we've already said it's not that most young people with brain injury are engaging in offending and actually the far more complex processes are those that mean that the child ends up in prison, sort of deeply embedded within you know criminal justice system and they're the processes that we're kind of most interested in.

So as a social scientist I might kind of describe this as a kind of social model of disability kind of way of sort of thinking about and approaching this. And I guess many of your listeners will be familiar with that kind of way of thinking but to kind of basically explain it we would think about the social model in the same way that's been thought about in other forms of disability and in particularly the example that people often use is where someone might be in a wheelchair. So there is a there's already impairment there where someone can't walk and that's a very real impairment that only becomes disabling when the environment, the buildings that that person's trying to access are not suitable for them.

So the doors, they can't open the doors, they can't use stairs etc. There's no facilities for them to access that space and that's what becomes disabling. And we can take that kind of analogy and apply it to the to the systems that we're interested in.

So a young person may have a particular brain injury and a particular set of needs but if those needs are understood and if our systems and our processes are responding to those needs they don't necessarily lead to the same disabling experience and what we would call discrimination and the rights of that child not being met that might lead them to be caught up in our criminal justice systems and eventually in prison. So we have to understand that journey of disablement and discrimination and criminalisation and how we can we can impact on that.

So are they then more likely to drift into criminal behaviours and get caught up with the wrong gang and people maybe exploit them?

If you imagine some of those kind of you know those behaviours and those expressions of the brain injury that we've just been describing. If a school doesn't associate those difficulties with an underlying brain injury with something that might be sort of sitting behind those behaviours then the response to those behaviours might be the wrong response. So if someone's not sitting still or if someone's not understanding the rules and engaging in the right way or someone's forgetful or fatigued or whatever it might be.

If it's not understood as something related to a brain injury it might get treated as something which is behavioural which is you know someone disobeying the rules. So it's underlying that is about recognising you know as I say underlying causes and responding in the appropriate way. I should say my wife's a teacher so I say this every time it's not this is not going to be like a you know it's all about the schools and it's a criticism of teachers and so on.

Yeah we recognise of course we do we all know that the schools are under enormous strain but it's having it's enabling our teachers and our schools to have the lenses and the resources to understand brain injury and to respond to it.

Are there more sort of concrete actions that we can take if we start to see a sign that someone's hitting sort of 13 14 and things are going off a bit on the rails is there stuff that we could that we should be doing at that stage yeah I mean

The challenges of a young person presenting to a police officer in the way that they expect them to and how the police officer might interpret that behaviour. The challenge of the police custody suite when they're being interviewed and the support they might need to effectively engage in that and the challenges similarly in the courtroom of how a young person engages and represents themselves effectively in that context and all those are contexts where without the right support that child is gonna have a really difficult journey. These are difficult situations anyway for a child but the child with some of those you know potential underlying difficulties they were really challenging situations and there's plenty of evidence about those various sort of stages of the criminal justice system that show that young people will you know trip themselves up will have negative experiences because of that.

So offering a plea which isn't the reality but they answer question in particular way to get out of that that situation, not being able to answer questions accurately to tell the story in a chronological order or often not in a chronological order and you know being asked very difficult questions in difficult orders and having to think really really carefully and abstractly sometimes about what they're saying. Being able to demonstrate empathy or understanding of the the impact of what they may or may not have done on the person that they're dealing with. All these things are inbuilt in our criminal justice processes but pose very particular challenges in the context of a brain injury particularly of an unrecognised and unsupported brain injury.

So we have this sense in our thinking about how the net might be wider or might entangle a young person with a brain injury more easily than it does to others. But then as you say it's then about how are we responding in that system, how do we change that behaviour and again it's a similar story if we don't recognise those kind of underlying sort of functional challenges that may be impacting a child's behaviour we're not going to address them and we're not going to change that behaviour. And there's a classic example in terms of our youth justice processes where we typically take these kind of cognitive behavioural kind of intervention approaches where we try and make young people reflect on their behaviour and think about how they might act differently when in that situation again.

And that's a really classic example of where people with particular neurodiverse conditions might find that really tricky when in the moment you can really explain how you know when you're with your friends you shouldn't do particular things and you shouldn't engage in particular behaviours. When you're in the context again and your brain is functioning in the way that your brain functions that kind of cold reflection on what's right and what's wrong and how we should behave is gone and it's the hot cognition of the moment that's driving you. Now if we don't understand that we keep using that that intervention to try and change that young person's behaviour and it doesn't work and then they're back in in the court again and they get a higher dosage of that same intervention and it doesn't work again and you know so the cycle that you described goes on and you know people are caught up in the systems and eventually our final resting place for children for whom youth justice interventions don't work is is a youth prison. That's all we have left and hence why we would argue we find you know such a high concentration of these needs in this population.

So how do we make our courts think differently? How do we make our courts ask the right questions of brain injury and respond in the appropriate ways? How do we how do we make police think differently and divert children when they when they should and when they can?

How do we think as we've said about about schools and the fundamental changes in school practises both at the point of exclusion and at the point of kind of support in the classroom. How do we think about that intersections we said from from health services into our school systems and the information and sharing and so on. So we think there are lots of points across these systems where there are these kind of points of intercept as we call it or the places where you can disrupt this this spiral of this challenges and we've documented those and you know they're widely shared and it's yeah we know we know what we can do it's the the appetites and the you know the resource and the will to do it.

We're in the turmoils of new Prime Minister and new government stuff so who knows when that will appear but is that the kind of thing you think could drive this change? Will we get that real sort of top-down commitment to it?

You need to bring those government departments and the institutions that they control together to think systematically about how you do that and that's the beauty of that kind of cross-government action plan wasn't it? That's what we recognise that's what we need to do. This is not a single service or single government department issue.

This is something which cuts across everything. From our perspective, from the criminal justice system's perspective, they would often argue that they're picking up the bill for the failure of other services to do what they could and should do and it's a very expensive bill when it gets to a prisoner's stay. So the resource is there if you move it from prisons into those other sectors and settings to work more positively and proactively and support young people.

So quick email to info at ukabif.org.uk we'll get you on either the Nables or the Acquired Brain Injury Justice Network.

Thanks very much.