Labelled a Black Villain

Trevor Hercules

Description

An extended edition of a classic work. By an adviser to Government on youth crime. Explains the ground-breaking SDM approach. Essential reading at a time of gun and knife crime. Now fully indexed.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Waterside Press
• Date de parution: 29 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910979839
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Labelled a Black Villain
and Understanding the Social Deprivation Mindset
Trevor Hercules
Copyright and publication details
Labelled a Black Villain and Understanding the Social Deprivation Mindset
Trevor Hercules
Second edition
ISBN 978-1-909976-69-6 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-910979-83-9 (Epub ebook)
ISBN 978-1-910979-84-6 (Adobe ebook)
Copyright © 1989, 2020 This work is the copyright of Trevor Hercules. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by him in full compliance with UK, European 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 worldwide.
Cover design © 2020 Waterside Press by www.gibgob.com. Photo by Milan Svanderlik.
Printed by Severn, Gloucester, UK.
Main UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex, BN23 6QH Tel: [phone]; [e-mail] ; www.gardners.com
North American distribution Ingram Book Company, One Ingram Blvd, La Vergne, TN 37086, USA. Tel: [phone]; [e-mail]
Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.
Ebook Labelled a Black Villain and Understanding the Social Deprivation Mindset is available as an ebook and also to subscribers of Ebrary, Ebsco, Myilibrary and Dawsonera.
Second edition published 2020 by
Waterside Press Ltd
Sherfield Gables
Sherfield on Loddon, Hook
Hampshire RG27 0JG.
Telephone [phone]
Online catalogue WatersidePress.co.uk
Email [e-mail]
F irst edition published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate Limited 1989. The Original Preface to that edition is reproduced with thanks to and kind permission.
Table of Contents
Copyright and publication details ii
About the author v
About the author of the Foreword v
Acknowledgements vi
Foreword vii
Original Preface ix
The Mirror x
Introduction to this Edition xi
Dedication xxi
Part 1: Labelled a Black Villain 23
1 My Journey Begins 25
2 Prison Life 43
3 The Madhouse 63
4 Respect But at What Cost? 83
5 Reflection 107
6 Consciousness 121
7 Relationships 129
8 Rebellion 145
9 Still Alienated 165
10 SDM 173
Part 2: Understanding the Social Deprivation Mindset 189
11 Introduction 191
12 The SDM Explained 195
13 The SDM and ‘The Hardcore’ 199
14 The SDM and ‘The Periphery’ 205
15 The Attributes of the SDM 207
Justification 207
Self-Preservation 208
Shutdown 208
I Don’t Care 209
16 Doing Something: Changing the SDM 211
Working in Schools 213
Working in Prisons 214
17 Changing Individuals is Not Enough 217
18 Conclusion 219
What Now 220
Black People Fall to Your Knees 221
… Others’ Problem Not Mine 222
The Changing World 223
Index 225
About the author
Trevor Hercules is a reformed armed robber who served time in Wandsworth, Wormwood Scrubs, Albany, Parkhurst and Gartree prisons. He has since spent over 25 years working with young people and developing the ‘Hercules Programme’, aka the Social Deprivation Mindset or SDM which has been funded by the Monument Trust. An adviser to the Ministry of Justice who came to despair missed opportunities to better the lives of young people and prevent offending, his other works include The Rage Within (2006). His wider interests range from watching old black and white movies to playing the acoustic guitar, calming down with Bach or listening to The Jam, Curtis Mayfield and Dionne Warwick.
About the author of the Foreword
Duncan Campbell is the former crime correspondent for the Guardian, former chairman of the Crime Reporters’ Association and author among other works of Underworld; That Was Business, This Is Personal and We’ll All Be Murdered in Our Beds! The Shocking History of Crime Reporting in Britain . He was the original presenter of Radio 5 Live’s Crime Desk and has appeared in many criminal justice-related radio and TV documentaries.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Mike Nellis of Strathclyde University for his help and advice with this book, in particular Part Two when I was developing the SDM. I would also like to thank those who have supported me and helped me begin to make and sustain a positive contribution to society: Justine Greening MP, Mark Blake, Jeremy Crook, Mark Woodruff and Jo Baden to name a few. And to Duncan Campbell for contributing the Foreword.
Foreword
Duncan Campbell
T he memoirs of people who have found themselves on the wrong side of the law in Britain are part of a long and honourable tradition. From Eddie Guerin’s Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook in 1929 to Jimmy Boyle’s A Sense of Freedom in 1977 and Erwin James’ Redeemable in 2016, they have taught us much that we need to know about both crime and punishment. When Trevor Hercules wrote Labelled a Black Villain , which was first published in 1989, he added an important work to that genre as, until then, almost every writer in the field had been white.
Hercules gives us his own childhood background — brought up in children’s homes after his mother had departed for the United States — and his first experiences of the racism that has defined so much of his life: the schoolfriend forbidden to play with him by his racist father, the London tobacconist who wouldn’t serve a teenage Hercules for the same shocking reason. When he was first arrested as an innocent 16-year-old, he found himself beaten-up and racially abused by the police he had been taught to trust.
He became an armed robber, a career previously pretty much confined to white criminals and ended up, fairly predictably, being jailed for seven years. His description of his trial and the barristers — ‘black-caped Draculas with wigs’ — is particularly telling. Time to be served in Brixton, Wandsworth, Wormwood Scrubs, Gartree and Parkhurst prisons was to follow where the main lessons he learned were of self-preservation and disrespect for much of authority.
As he explains in the book, he was ‘a worse criminal when I left Parkhurst than I’d been before.’ He had made many useful contacts inside and was now able to move freely between black and white members of the criminal fraternity. He found himself back to prison in 1999 but when he finally emerged he decided that he would not return and has stuck by that pledge.
The second part of the book is his reflection on why so many young black men and boys — and so many of their white counterparts — end up behind bars and how best to address that. This is what lies behind what he calls the Social Deprivation Mindset, which he explains in detail. He has worked hard to try and bring his theories to wider notice and influence Government policy on the subject — what one might call a Herculean task. In the talks he has given at schools about what imprisonment is really like and to newly-arrived prisoners in some of our jails, he has already engaged successfully with young people at risk and believes that more can and should be done to stop them from suffering the sort of damage he has personally experienced.
Britain jails more people per head of population than any other country in western Europe and many of our over-crowded prisons are now little more than warehouses of drug addiction and fear with little chance of rehabilitating their ever-growing number of inmates. As more and more young men, many of them still in their teens, are jailed for fatal stabbings in gang fights over mainly pointless arguments about territory or ‘respect’, Hercules’ anger and concern could not be more timely. As he told me: ‘You can see people crying now as they don’t realise what they’ve done, what murder is. They don’t even know who the guy is they’ve killed.’
This is, above all, an unflinchingly honest book. One would hope than anyone involved in politics or in the criminal justice system — or indeed anyone interested in the way that society labels and treats those it punishes — will read and study this book. Quite apart from anything, it is an absorbing and revealing life story, told with a vivid frankness.
Original Pre face
I wrote this book because I felt certain things needed to be said, and because those black people in a position to be a real voice for the black community have failed to speak out on our behalf.
The black community still cry out for someone to put forward their real grievances about living in a white society; yet the few black people in a position of power have put across only a diluted version of our anger and frustrations, leaving the white community to go about their daily business without having to confront their conscience head on.
We want society to be in no doubt as to how we as black people — and indeed all third world peoples — feel about the destruction wrought on our lands by the white colonialists of the past and by the economic and political policies of today; and how we feel about the total disrespect shown by white societies for peoples and cultures other than their own.
These things have to be brought out into the open without pulling any punches so both black and white can see where we all stand. We challenge society to a confrontation with its own conscience, to face up to the inequality that divides the world.
At the end of the day, if there is unrest and mass dissatisfaction in the black community, which was and is a feature of American life, let no one say they don’t known the reasons.
Secondly it is my wish that we as black people take a closer look at ourselves, and put our lives in order. We have to remember that nothing has to be the way it is. We have to be constructive in our endeavour to improve our lives. With the right state of mind, we can achieve great things. Negativeness will only eat away at our souls, and the good in