Common sense suggests that the last place in which a current or former police officer wished to find themselves would be in a prison. With a desire to prevent crime continuing to percolate within me, if I couldn't prevent crime as a police officer, working with those responsible for the vast majority of acquisitive crime seemed to me an obvious alternative. Yet, I'd take the indirect route into prison by spending the next eighteen months as an advocate, first for a charity supporting the victims of domestic abuse and then, after having moved from Sussex to south-west London, for another charity supporting the families of murder victims. As had become habit, I began both endeavours by asking myself what it was those who used the services needed from it and needed me to be, what I could expect to learn in each situation and what of my past experiences I could bring to bear on each role.

Based on the site of a local Sussex hospital, my role as a domestic abuse advocate consisted of providing emotional and practical support to victims of abuse. Although my stint in the domestic abuse unit would be brief, I remained there long enough to observe the devastating effects on victims resulting from the perpetrator's attempts to exert power and control over them. Regardless of any other forms of abuse, the fear instilled in the victim by the perpetrator created a formidable emotional barrier that in many cases my colleagues and I were powerless to overcome. Of the many examples of people terrorised by their partners, a few in particular stood out. The first, a lady in her late sixties, had been physically and emotionally abused by her thirty-year-old son, while in another, a young mum disclosed how her young son had witnessed her being beaten on numerous occasions by his father following which he'd begun beating other children at school. In many cases, the psychological effects of the perpetrator's behaviour on the victim was such that key-working sessions often ran into several hours during which we offered advice and support, from panic alarms and extra mobile phones to refuge placements in areas well away from where they lived. Despite the prospect of a safe haven, I'd look on and observe the extent of my client's anxiety as they contemplated leaving before realising the implications of doing so then suddenly retreating back into their shell, disgusted with themselves for having considered an act of betrayal. Furthermore, I began keyworking a rather timid older lady who revealed how her partner would abuse her by “ringing her breasts out”, as if simulating a Chinese burn. Following her disclosure and owing to understandable embarrassment, she asked to change to a female advocate as I reminded her too much of her grandson.

Come September, 2007, I moved from Sussex back to London, settling in Streatham where I shared an upstairs flat belonging to a true British gent, a man by the name of Gavin. Gentleman is a suitably apt title for one of the most honourable, intelligent and insightful men I've ever known, and continue to know to this day. Like those with both Scott and Jenny, my relationship with Gavin during my time in the police would similarly suffer following another bout of depression, resulting in another decent and altogether innocent person being pushed away. However, it's testament to his good nature, intuition and insight courtesy of his own experience with depression that he put the feelings of rejection and hurt aside and persevered with me. In doing so, he remains not only one of the few people in my life with whom I've felt truly safe but an example of the feeling of safety I've sought to inspire in others, with one notable exception!

Following my return to London and on the back of my police article in the Sunday Express, I came to the attention of one Norman Brennan. Having never heard of Norman prior to him contacting me, I'd learn subsequent to meeting him that he was a serving British Transport Police officer and founder of both the police support group 'Protect the Protectors' and the charity Victims of Crime Trust, which advocated on behalf of the families of murder victims. In addition, Norman found the time to provide regular comment to the media on a range of criminal justice issues as a self-appointed 'victims' champion'. With Norman seemingly appreciative of my stance against police inefficiency, I took a short-term role as an advocate for the trust, juggling my time between their office in Twickenham and Portcullis House in Westminster as part of my work on policing with Conservative MP David Ruffley's office.

Among the patrons of the trust were Damilola Taylor's father, Richard Taylor, Jamie Bulger's mother, Denise Fergus, and Sarah Payne's mother, Sara Payne. Although my advocacy work consisted largely of completing administrative tasks on behalf of victim's families, one request came up a number of times during many conversations with them. This request was for information on support groups or to be put in touch with families who'd lost a loved one in the same or similar circumstances, only wanting to engage with others who they knew would be able to relate to their particular trauma. Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of my time at the Victims of Crime Trust was the opportunity to observe the tireless work of director Clive Elliott, a thoroughly empathic and selfless man who had the confidence and respect of many among those families for whom he advocated.

Throughout life, I've come to appreciate the importance of finding others with whom I can relate and who can relate to me in their turn. I'd be reminded of this fact each time a scruffy young lad in a grey sweater and matching bottoms would lean over the railings and shout down to me something along the lines of “...what can you tell me about drugs…”? In response to their question, I'd often ask what they needed me to tell them about drugs. Of course, while I could tell them very little about drugs and their related effects, for they knew far more about that than me, I could express an awareness and understanding of the reasons why people take them and the reasons to try to stop. After all, as a copper, I'd seen first-hand the devastating impact of substance misuse on communities and how, in one way or another, perpetrators often start out as victims themselves.

Although I'd eventually become a prison based and then community based substance misuse worker, I began working in HMP Brixton in June, 2008, as then governor Paul McDowell's audio typist. My task in this particular role was to produce typed transcripts of disciplinary hearings following allegations of officer misconduct. Considering the level of trust and responsibility placed in prison officers and staff, some of their misdeeds were enough to rival those of any of the men who found themselves on the other side of the bars. During the twelve months that followed I put my skills to good use, initially by clearing the huge back-log of disciplinary hearing transcripts and then as an auditor in the department of internal audit. It was there, during one particular audit on the displaying of information of the various external agencies based within the prison, that I took notice of one particular poster describing a role which, rather unexpectedly, would become my next job.

With their posters so crookedly displayed on numerous walls around the prison, before becoming a CARAT worker, I paid very little attention to the notices advertising their services. However, the more time I spent on the landings of the prison's various house blocks, or “wings” as they were otherwise known, I began to see more of these posters before coming into direct contact with CARAT workers themselves. An acronym for counselling, assessment, referral, advice and throughcare, the job of a CARAT worker involved everything the acronym suggested and more. While the role required good listening, organisational and record-keeping skills, CARAT workers were not trained counsellors although this was perhaps the most important aspect of the role. Again, I posed the question to myself of exactly what I needed to be in order to bed effective in my new role and whether that was characteristically me or something I could learn to be. For this, I brought to bear all that I'd learned in both the children's homes and in the police. Before long, I realised that all it would take for those with substance misuse issues, from the seriously malnourished to those who strutted through the door all muscled and menacing, to open up to me was to present to them someone willing to listen to their life experiences without judgement and in front of whom they felt safe enough to break down.

Again, despite not being trained as counsellors, we quickly fell into a therapeutic role and had to skilfully balance the need to make clients feel listened to while gathering valuable information about their drug use to be collated and fed back into the government's National Drug Treatment Monitoring System (NDTMS). Interestingly, I'd learn subsequently that whether in prison or out in the community, a client sitting for an initial assessment would count for monitoring purposes as them being “in treatment”, even if they went out and scored drugs immediately afterwards. Naively, I thought “in treatment” meant they were in rehab or similar short or long-term program designed to actively address their substance misuse.

Much like the time spent as a police officer, my time working within the penal system exposed my naivety yet provided those precious opportunities to observe and learn. Of those things which shouldn't have surprised me but did was the ease with which, between corrupt officers, unscrupulous prisoner visitors or the prisoners themselves, drugs entered the prison. This realisation took me back to a moment in the police when, after having read the charge sheet out to a suspect following interview and asking if he had any response, he replied by pleading not to be sent back to prison as the last time he went to prison he became hooked on heroin! Indeed, the lengths a perpetrator would go to in order to smuggle drugs into prison beggared belief, from disembowelled rats and tennis balls stuffed full of drugs being thrown over the prison walls to female visitors secreting drugs either in their vaginas, under their breasts or within the clothing and blankets of their babies. The regularity with which some prisoners secreted drugs in their anuses gave credence to the statistic that illicit substances have been up approximately ten backsides before reaching their intended recipient.

Further opportunities to reflect and learn came courtesy of the prison environment, prison regime, and candid admissions made by prisoners themselves. Having had the opportunity of working in prisons run by the Ministry of Justice and those run by the private sector, I couldn't help noticing the reduced numbers of prison officers on the landings in those establishments run by the private sector relative to those overseen directly by the Ministry of Justice. However, common to both was how young, unsure and inexperienced many officers appeared and how negatively many older prisoners responded to taking orders from officers so much younger than themselves in addition to the long periods of time prisoners often spent in their cells and also the ever present smell of weed on the landings, especially on the house-blocks occupied by prisoners with a heroin addiction. In order to stabilise these particular prisoners, they were given daily doses of methadone, a prescribed substance which mimics the effects of heroin and reduces the symptoms of withdrawal. Interestingly, alongside these specific prisoners and those non-users involved purely in drug supply, I took the opportunity at one particular prison to sit in on a therapeutic support group entitled “Supporting Change & Recovery (SCAR). Arguably the two most significant nuggets of information came courtesy of prisoners who explained that, as dealers, they could earn several thousands of pounds per week selling drugs and make more in a week than they would in a year working a typical nine-to-five. When the facilitator pointed out the inherent risks in terms of getting caught, the prisoners dismissed this as merely an “occupational hazard” and explained how they get away with it far more often than they are caught.

Despite being fathers, there were those who lamented missing their children while in the next breath professed to being seduced by the luxury lifestyle their illicit activities afforded them. Fuelled by a belief that it's the system which is at fault and not them, rehabilitating these prisoners would undoubtedly prove a challenge to their offender managers and which put me in mind of a burglar I once interviewed who rationalised his activities on the basis that if he didn't have something he wanted while someone else did, he felt justified in taking it.

All this led me to realise that if for no other reason than to protect the public, there are those for whom incarceration is the right thing until such time as they're motivated to make different choices. Meanwhile, there are those whose choices are largely influenced by their entrenched drug addiction for which they may or may not receive the appropriate support in prison. While it goes without saying that the public must be protected from the devastation wrought on communities of drug abuse, for a prison based support worker one of greatest challenges is presented by methadone prescribed prisoners coming into the prison on short sentences. With the requirements of my role being to assess an addicted prisoner's drug use and their social care needs, provide them with talking therapy type exercises as part of key-working sessions (otherwise referred to as “psychosocial interventions”) and arrange a prescribing appointment back in the community upon release, short sentences, in many cases of merely a week, served to frustrate most if not all of these objectives. In the best case scenario we barely managed to complete an initial assessment and arrange a prescribing appointment while in the worst, albeit rare occasion, some prisoners were discharged without a prescribing appointment in place, which increased the likelihood of them going to their dealer upon release to “score”. On the other hand, there were also those so chaotically entrenched in the cycle of addiction and crime that coming to prison provided temporary relief not only to the individual themselves but also to the community so disrupted by their drug use.

In order to cope with the psychological demands of such a role while working meaningfully with service users, a supportive management is essential. However, this was not the first time, nor would it be the last time I'd find myself hamstrung by unnecessary duplication of information resulting from onerous processes and outdated IT systems which together served to significantly reduced my overall effectiveness. Nor was it the last time I'd be part of a client-facing team beleaguered by an incompetent and self-serving management team more inclined to protect their own interests than challenge the calamitous decisions passed down to them from their superiors. While I'd witness more of the same in the not too distant future, perhaps the most egregious example came courtesy of a pilot scheme intended to improve efficiency in drug treatment services between custody and community. However, rather than improve efficiency, the project led to the thoroughly predictable consequence of tearing apart two separate teams working rather inefficiently yet relatively contentedly while leaving service users feeling unsupported and, in some cases, abandoned.

As was the case with the rest of my colleagues in the CARAT team, I applied for the role in order to work in a prison. The same could be said for the majority of the London Borough of Lambeth's community drug team, who joined to work specifically in the community with no interest whatsoever in working in prisons. Nonetheless, in mid 2010, merge we would to become the pilot scheme entitled “End2End”. As the name suggested, the year-long pilot had be created to ensure that the same support worker followed Lambeth residents involved in drug related crime through the criminal justice system. This journey would begin in Lambeth's police custody suites and into Brixton Prison for those given a custodial sentence, or back into the community for those handed a community sentence by the courts.

In addition to providing continuity across police custody, prison and the community, another objective of the pilot had been to reduce both the number of assessments conducted with the service user and, consequently, the administration burden. As anyone working on the front line in public sector services countrywide would attest, any opportunity to meaningfully reduce the burden created by both onerous and inefficient processes and outdated IT systems is always welcomed. However, rather than improve efficiency across all three location, all the End2End pilot ultimately achieved was to highlight the inherent difficulties one worker would encounter working across the three locations, difficulties which could've been identified by the front line workers themselves had they been invited to participate in the brainstorming process instead of, as was actually the case, being brought into the fray on the Friday before the pilot went live the following Monday.

At this particular meeting attended by both prison and community based drug workers, it became clear that fatal errors of calculation had been made in terms of the proportion of prisoners in Brixton prison who were actually Lambeth residents and how we would still need to provide assessment services to the remaining service users involved in drug related crime from other boroughs who formed the majority of the prison population. Furthermore, with additional recruitment of drug support workers not getting underway until after the pilot had commenced coupled with prison security clearance taking several months to come through, having to provide sufficient cover across all three locations proved logistically challenging and left Brixton prison on many days with only one or two support workers in situ.

As a result, rather than the barely manageable chaos of working within one site, we found ourselves working amid the unmanageable chaos of the three sites of police custody, prison and the community. As for reducing the paperwork burden, those responsible for the End2End pilot had failed to take into account that paperwork completed within the prison establishment could not be removed from the prison which resulted in two sets of paperwork, one for prison and one for the community, having to be completed. This careless oversight served to frustrate the pilot's main aims of reducing the admin burden and repeated reassessment of a client group whose members may come into custody as often as every few weeks!

Suffice to say that I didn't stick around long enough to witness the inevitable scrapping of the End2End pilot, as I and many of my fellow colleagues abandoned ship long beforehand. However, after having experienced the chaos and inefficiency of prison based drug treatment, my interest in whether or not community based services were similarly hampered had been piqued. Based in the south-east London town of Woolwich, the place of my birth, in August 2010 I joined the team at the Greenwich Drug Intervention Program (DIP). While it may be true that the grass is rarely greener on the other side, for what I was about to encounter, not even a ride-on mower could cut through the kind of chaos which awaited me there.

It has to be said that the obvious advantage of working in prisons is that at least you know where to find your client. Alas, the same cannot not be said working as a community based case worker and given the chaotic nature of addiction, I could expect my client to be absolutely anywhere, anywhere that is, apart from the DIP offices. At this point it may provide context and clarity by explaining the work of a DIP in addition to how services are commissioned and by whom. In the case of both Lambeth and Greenwich, the borough council commissioners put contracts out to tender on which various organisations bid against each other to provide services in that particular borough.

At that time, the contract for Greenwich DIP was held by a charity called CRI (Crime Reduction Initiative). CRI held a number of contracts among the London boroughs and home counties, including Lambeth, until the advent of the End2End pilot. Having experienced the “not enough bums on seats” phenomenon as part of the prison team's amalgamation with Lambeth CRI, I should have anticipated what was to come having subsequently learned how CRI, by undercutting their competition, would win contracts easily while failing to recruit a sufficient number of case managers to work meaningfully with service users. Therefore, it should've come as no surprise to me to walk in on my first day to discover I'd inherited the case load of a departing colleague consisting of upwards of one hundred clients. Specifically, my caseload comprised live clients who were actually engaging, those who had fallen off the radar, referred to as “community tracking” and those previously active although were now in prison, known as “prison tracking”.

At this point it's worth taking a moment to describe the kind of circumstances which lead to addiction and subsequent accessing of drug treatment services. In most cases, service users come to treatment services having suffered various forms of abuse, such as physical, psychological and sexual abuse, as both children and adults, or other forms of emotional trauma, such as relationship breakdown and PTSD, or other forms of hardship such as debt, loss of a loved one or simply getting in with the wrong crowd.

Dealing with the feelings created by any one or more of these issues can, for various reasons, be too much for some to bear and so they self-medicate to avoid them. However, in certain cases they self-medicate with a substance, such as heroin, upon which the body becomes dependent. The dependence then requires regular intake to avoid the symptoms of withdrawal and the return of the emotional turmoil which led to their misuse of heroin in the first place. Most will turn to crime in order to fund their increasing dependence. This in turn creates a huge burden on the criminal justice system and blights communities, to say nothing of the effect on the users themselves in terms of infection, incarceration, further abuse and unwanted pregnancy, relationship breakdown and, in many cases, homelessness.

It goes without saying that engaging a client group whose unresolved trauma and related addiction perpetuates a cycle of chaotic substance misuse and crime is no easy task and the demands placed on empathic drug workers to support their clients are considerable. It's lamentable that the working environment consisting of high case loads, onerous processes, unnecessary duplication of paperwork and outdated IT systems is not conducive to meaningful working with an inherently difficult to reach client group. Inevitably, the many and varied yet familiar accounts of abuse, loss, infection, addiction and crime as related to the support worker by their client can and does weigh heavily on the empathic support worker, who takes on not only the pain of their client but a sense of obligation to try to relieve it.

Therefore, it's not difficult to imagine the stress and burden which accompanies the responsibility of managing a caseload of one-hundred people. For me, in practice that meant actively engaging my live clients in regular keyworking sessions in addition to contacting various local services, such as the nearby methadone prescribing service, in an attempt to locate those “community tracking” clients who were now designated as such having dropped out of the service. Where that proved fruitless, the only other option would be to conduct an outreach service to my client's current address in a last-ditch attempt to locate and re-engage them. As for my “prison tracking” clients, managing them proved somewhat easier as long as I remembered their release date and the prison from where they were due to be released.

Mirroring the chaotic lives of service users deeply entrenched in the cycle of substance misuse and crime, before long I found myself battling to contain the chaos that had become my caseload, as clients moved from active to community tracking having suddenly stopped engaging, then from community tracking to prison and from prison tracking to active. Amid the chaos there remained a steady stream of new clients coming through the door, each with similar stories to reveal to their weary and overburdened support worker steadfastly committed to helping them change their lives.

Working in such chaotic ways led me to two specific conclusions. The first of these is that there are no quick wins when trying to support someone to address their substance misuse. Indeed, the fruits of any meaningful work may not bear fruit until such time as the client grows tired of the cycle of drug addiction and crime and is then motivated to become substance free. The other is that there were those among my clients who would only engage when in crisis, needing help to get their benefits restarted when they'd failed to attend appointments, or needing their tenancy saved having been served an eviction notice or needing a new appointment with the prescribing service for their methadone or buprenorphine having missed three consecutive appointments. Once I'd helped fix the issue, my briefly active client would disappear again, soon to be relegated to the ranks of “community tracking” and back into a self-perpetuating cycle of self-medication, supplied to them courtesy of their dealer, along with the kind of abuse associated with substance misuse (whether as victims or perpetrators) and, inevitably, crime. In the case of these client, I felt my intervention was merely enabling their chaos, not helping them to address it.

Needless to say that after ten years of working in public service roles and rendered hopelessly inefficient by poor management, onerous processes, unnecessary duplication of paperwork and outdated IT systems, I started to feel the effects of burnout. Seeking a change of pace, I'd work for a time in domiciliary care before returning to prisons to co-lead a team of prison based drug support workers. By now, I'd identified a pattern of inefficiency and incompetence emerging in our public services and would find myself battling these familiar foes once again in the future in an attempt to provide the public with the service they're paying for and the service which they expect. Before then, I'd meet another significant individual from whom I'd experience the opportunity to learn about life which would once again see me leave British shores.

For now, however, those questions remaining unanswered from my time in drug treatment relate to our current drug policy and the endless dispensing of opioid substitutes. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to me that the prescribing of opioids, such as methadone and buprenophine, is an example of a sticking-plaster measure which, while preventing to some extent the effects of withdrawal, appears to have had no noticeable effect on the demand for illicit drugs, with the supply of potentially lethal and adulterated substances still very much in the hands of the dealers. Yet, who is allowing the status quo to prevail and why, who does it benefit and is it an example of yet another system that appears to be broken but in truth is working just as those who created it intended?