The National Gallery has recently launched a creative arts academy for Youth Offenders. They say that these lads have been given a second chance to show their educational worth, as well as extending them to a sphere of creativity that they would not have been exposed to in the real world. Local or national government still hasn’t made an effort to increase funding to the prison for activities like these. With all three major national political parties pledging to ring fence only the NHS from the severe financial cuts in next year’s budget, I can safely say that educational prison activities like this will not be springing back in the next year or so.

This led me to ask whether the primary functions of delinquency centres is to rehabilitate these offenders, to ease them back into a world where their friends have moved away from gang-life and juvenile street crime, into a world of bills, mortgages, and young families. Do they have any key skills that would equip them to enter into Higher Education? Can they contribute to society? In an age where the media routinely market to us fabled stories of modern “folk devils” - ASBOs teens, these wretched perpetrators of Knife crime- does a thirst for justice and punishment prevent us from making our criminals more rehabilitated, and can the government actually turn the Institution from a ‘finishing school for career criminals’ to a foundation where young and repentant offenders can find the second chance they had lost in the real world?

The Feltham Young Offender’s institution is situated in leafy town of Bedfont .The building is flanked by neat little three bed roomed terraces, affixed onto a flood of prim greenery, a real portrait of unperturbed middle-class suburbia . The institution itself melds into the idyllic scenery; no macabre iron bars piercing the bluish-white sky, no unruly ‘yoofs’ can be heard bawling obscenities from the courtyards. Instead the building has a fresh, modern design, with plate glasses in all the right places. I for one find the overall clinical and placid look that the institution gives off, quite disturbing. It is quietly sealed off from the rest of Hounslow, living off the edge of suburban abyss in this hushed area of Bedfont. This just adds to my curiosity about life in the Young Offender’s prison.

The public is rarely given of how these young, often under-privileged, males cope and survive within their stay in the Centre. The arid halls and yards of the institution are remarkably free from Dispatches or Panorama reporters. However, once in a while we do see some press coverage of the prison, maybe another governor reinstated for the umpteenth in a month, a fatal stabbing every few years. But an air of obscurity hangs over the institution. Likewise, the inmates are seen as a faceless representation of society’s feral drop-outs, idlers and degenerates, not youths from ’the wrong side of the tracks’ who are in dire need of reform and rehabilitation.

However, last year, when this ingenious opportunity was given to these boys, and finally they could earn an identity that wasn’t foisted upon them by right-wing journalists, whilst glancing down presumptuously from their high horses. However, we need to make it clear to whoever will be taking the seat as Prime Minister next year, that Educational activities such as these are the way forward into giving tearaway teenagers a second chance to improve their life in Britain, and take an active life in their community, rather than ruining them.

To find out more about the National Gallery's creative academy programme, click on this link: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/press-and-media/creative-arts-academy