One glance at the cover of her new book is enough to tell you that Harriet Sargeant is a female Fleet Street journalist of the old school – fearless, glamorous and larger-than-life. However, there’s nothing unreal about her subject matter: Britain’s inner-city gang culture.
A standard-issue hack would rely on expert reports and the occasional fleeting visit to the frontline. Sargeant’s approach, however, was to strike up an unlikely, but long-lasting friendship with several members of a south London street gang.
Among the Hoods is serialised in the Daily Mail and provides one shocking insight after another into what Oliver Letwin once called the ‘conveyor belt to crime’. Perhaps the most revealing episode comes when, despite Sargeant’s best efforts, one of the gang members – called Tuggy – ends up in prison. Visiting him, she expected to find Tuggy "flattened by a system that had all but defeated me". But things turned out rather differently:
Of course, it’s good that the prison in question provides its inmates with work and ‘structure’, but wouldn’t it be cheaper to provide these things at a much earlier stage – i.e. before youngsters become criminals and the innocent become victims?
There were other reasons why Tuggy seemed to be enjoying prison life – in particular, he liked being with the other inmates and even the "bald Shrek-like" prison officers:
In the process of researching and writing her book, Sargeant grew in her sympathy for the hoodies, but also in her antipathy to the agencies of the state – in particular the education system. Noting that Tuggy’s aspirations weren’t that different from those of her son, she realised the real difference between them was that "Tuggy simply didn’t know how to turn a burst of enthusiasm into the day-to-day effort required for achievement and success":
Unfortunately, we don’t have such an education establishment; but at least we have the next best thing – a Conservative education minister willing make change happen anyway.