In his latest article for The Guardian, Mark revisits his concerns over the Independent Safeguarding Authority, highlighting that its vetting scheme will bar the right people from helping offenders.

Read the full article at www.guardian.co.uk.

In his latest article for The Guardian, Mark talks about the idea of power-sharing in prison, highlighting prison councils as “an opportunity for the heart to talk to the head. Staff and prisoners will unite to express their views. They will offer a channel for the hidden people at society’s extremities to articulate how they can help, and be helped, to change”.

Read the full article at www.guardian.co.uk.

In his latest article for The Guardian, Mark talks about the Baby P case, and the mirror it holds up to all of us in our “dysfunctional society breeding dysfunctional individuals who breed still more”.

Read the full article at www.guardian.co.uk.

In his latest article for The Guardian Mark voices his very deep concerns over the government’s formation of the Independent Safeguarding Authority: a shadowy organisation that seems set to exercise powers of judge and jury in determining the future prospects of anyone with a less-than squeaky-clean past.

Read the full article at www.guardian.co.uk

I went to Glastonbury this year for the first time in a long time. It’s hard to admit that I sloped off early, particularly because everyone else was having fun. Maybe that’s one reason I felt so isolated. Everyone seemed to be making the experience more intense by looking at each other and identifying with the good time they were having. I couldn’t seem to do that and so I got more and more detached.

I was sixteen in 1987 when I first went to Glastonbury in a battered old Mini with my girlfriend and a bloke who was a titch and was therefore called Titch. We didn’t have a driving licence between us and the Mini overheated all the way down the motorway. We kept pulling into service stations to refill the radiator. When we arrived, with £30 worth of cannabis hidden in the back, it was time to bring out the cannabis and hide the car instead. So we drove it into a field, pushed it up to a hedge and covered it with branches.

We got into the festival by crossing a ditch on a scaffolding pole and squeezing under the corrugated iron fence. The hardest thing was getting the dog in. Did I mention the dog? I had to stand in the ditch with my Chinese Fighting Dog on my shoulders and hoist it up and under the fence to Titch. He had his own troubles getting in because of the ghetto blaster. Did I mention the ghetto blaster? Well Titch had brought one so enormous that it was almost bigger than he was, and there was no way he was leaving it for someone to nick from a Mini in a hedge. So he had to carry it around with him and it was about as useful as a hump back.

Getting inside the fence was like landing in another world. I came from Planet Concrete. My atmosphere was oxygen-starved. I had been brought up on grey, sprawling housing estates. I had finished school after an undistinguished and mostly absent career and I had left my family to escape the abuse. For years I had been trapped in concrete by anger, bad temper and violence – others’ and my own.

And now I had wriggled under a fence and found beauty. I breathed in the oxygen. Music throbbed. Faces smiled. There were colourful signs, clothes, people, ideas. Everyone here was different. Their values were different. Their appreciation of beauty was different. Their music was different. There was something innately creative about them. And from the hippies to the big rastas, to the CND activists to the people who wore no clothes at all, they were individuals every one of them. There was no featureless sprawl here. For the first time in my life, I felt I belonged. Because I was here with a bunch other people who didn’t belong anywhere else either.

We were three kids with a dog on a rope and a ludicrous outsize ghetto blaster and we walked around in total innocence. We were amazed by the people and the beauty and the colours and shapes: it was a creative world here, full of possibilities. We were probably wandering about with our mouths open. We had a tenner and our cannabis. Titch wouldn’t sell the ghetto blaster so that we could buy some food but we didn’t really care. The Red Cross gave us a pink blanket. We bought some skunk instead of food.

My girlfriend and I walked up a hill with a big spliff and Titch, staggering behind us under his ghetto blaster, kept calling: “Give me some, go on, give me some.”Below us the festival looked like a medieval village. Torches and fires and smoke lit up the night. We paused to let Titch come puffing up under the ghetto blaster, and to take in the beauty. And then it was shattered.

A Land Rover, full to bursting with massive uniformed policemen, appeared from nowhere and pulled up right by us. So here it was then. That other world, the one I usually lived in, had just arrived here at Glastonbury. The coppers pressed their big round faces up against the windows and at the front one of them put his head out and stared at us and at the spliff. We stared back. We knew they had us. The dog didn’t even bark.

But this was Glastonbury where all the rules were different. A huge bloke in ragged jeans, dreadlocks and no shoes suddenly leapt out of a shabby caravan, star-shaped like a football hooligan, his fingers almost touching the Land Rover.

“Fuuuuuuuck oooooooof!” he roared.

And they did.

So then I understood the usual laws didn’t apply here but another form of protection and, unlike the kind of law the police enforced, these laws were looking after me. We ate some sloppy lentil food from a caravan and stayed up the hill and snuggled down under the blanket with a spliff and some Special Brew and listened to the music. Not the kind of stuff people at home listened to. Naked people wandered past. Some of them were old. Some were laughing and bright red because they’d taken acid. A few stopped to talk about their lives, which were hedonistic, devoted to drugs and music. Most were travellers who had rejected society’s conventions and values and were ploughing their own furrow. Titch was suspicious of them all and held on hard to the ghetto blaster, convinced one of them would nick it. As for me, I loved them. I wanted to be one of them. By the following year, I was. I’d gone to art college and met a bunch of arty travellers. We took a lot of drugs and I used a bit of heroin. The women breastfed their babies in public. There was sloppy lentil food. Even though Glastonbury was cancelled, we still travelled around that summer in old buses.

However, although I was stretching a hand out to art and my new arty friends, I was still stuck fast in my concrete background. I had been arrested for violent, drug-related offences and at the end of the summer I would be sentenced and sent to jail.

In 1990 I was out again, and in love with raves, ecstasy and the four/four beat which dominated the new music. I found a musical home in deep house. This brought an enrichment to the musical experience, a new purity which was deepened by drugs and buttressed by free parties. Dealing was one way of participating. I went to Glastonbury that year with the guys I bought my drugs from. It was a darker place but it still had the exciting smokiness of a mass gathering and the exuberance of the free parties. And the music was good.

I didn’t get back there again until 1995. Too much music, too many drugs, and by now the dark side was beginning to take over my life. I was addicted to heroin but I was just about managing my addiction. I’d been accepted at a respectable university to study on a renowned photography course and I was living with my girlfriend in a camper van which was stashed to the gunnels with drugs.

We travelled all over the country selling and Glastonbury was a retail opportunity. I didn’t listen to much of the music. I tried not to think about the wide-eyed kid who had been dazzled by the place just eight years earlier. My eyes were slits, I was so paranoid I locked my girlfriend in the van, and I sold 10 Es for £8 to dealers who walked in a line through the tents shouting: Pills, Es, Speed, Weed.

By that time you could almost get cannabis resin for free and I didn’t even bother to sell it. But I had a stack of pills I knew were bad and I sold them anyway. My hands shook as people handed over the money. I mixed paracetemol with nitrazepam and packed it all into clear, orange dog worming capsules. I didn’t care. I didn’t care where I took my drugs, whether in a grey concrete estate or at a festival: it was all about the insular feeling of getting high. Gradually, my only truth was becoming heroin. It wasn’t long before my addiction soon got bigger than a university course, bigger than my relationship with my girlfriend, bigger than everything else.

So this year was the first time I’ve been back. It’s been 14 years. I’m 38 years old. I’ve been clean since 2000 but I had to get to rock bottom before I could start to change. Rock bottom for me was street homeless with a £400 a day crack and smack habit. But I did change and I continue to change and over the years I’ve found my focus. Now I work, both in a campaigning and practical role, for ex-offenders and addicts who are behind me in their journey. I wrote a best selling book, Wasted, about my own journey and when I got to Glastonbury this year, I wasn’t behind the wheel of a Mini.

I couldn’t find my way around the site because I didn’t recognise it. I looked for the hill where, as a kid, I’d sat stoned under my blanket feeling that this was the dawning of a new world. I couldn’t identify the spot because now it’s part of the crowd control system. There was no patch of ground left to pitch my tent so I slept in the car. Roads, drainage, concrete: it’s a hard, ordered, fixed site now. And it’s easy to imagine the risk assessments and health and safety reports which have gone into managing the Glastonbury experience. I listened to some good but heavily processed pop music with more people than I could have imagined possible.

The festival is a big success. It’s a music festival now, no more and no less, the biggest on a well-trodden festival circuit. I don’t want to knock it. In our world it is a fact that anything new and pure eventually becomes a commercial caricature of itself. Experiences which might once have been spontaneous are no longer created but reproduced, branded and spoon-fed. This is inevitable. So is aging. I’ve aged and so has Glastonbury. I wandered around in my wristband trying to hook up with old mates. It seemed the hippy traveller types from my first Glastonbury were extinct now, until I joyfully discovered a few huddled in one corner like an endangered species. But I knew the deep house crowd were around and that a free party, just like the old days, was scheduled for about three in the morning.

Crowd control was peaked at that time. It was any grey, sprawling provincial town centre on a Saturday night, with gangs of rowdy drunks threatening violence and groups of women dressed identically and walking in lines. I found the right tent. The same djs were playing the music which has electrified me over the years, although they were playing it at a low volume. The tent was packed, too packed for dancing. A lot of the people were the same age I was when I first heard deep house and they listened to it respectfully as they poured pills down their throats. They enjoyed it. They just didn’t seem excited.

I looked at my old mates up on the stage. They were pouring pills down their throats too. For about twenty years now they’ve been playing the same music in the same way and taking the same old drugs. I don’t do drugs any more and the music has lost its freshness for me.

We’ve all aged. I’ve moved on. I’ve changed. They’ll always be my friends although maybe, deep down, they’ve watched me go and regarded me as a sell-out. But there’s only one way to experience the sense of discovery and wonder all through life that started at my first Glastonbury, and it’s not by doing the same thing over and over again. It’s by continually growing and changing as you age.

Thanks, Glastonbury. Maybe you’re still doing amazing things for some people. But once I belonged with you and all the other misfits. Now I’m a misfit inside your fence too. So, from me, it’s good bye.

In a new article for The Guardian, Mark discusses the problems faced by ex-offenders with limited choices and resources in the face of the often tough rules imposed on them on release from prison.

Writing for the Times Educational Supplement, Hannah Frankel talked to Mark about his background and the choices and decisions that have led him to where he is today:

Mark Johnson was eight years old when he started to see a psychiatrist about his violent tendencies. That was the same year he first got drunk. Three years on he took heroin in a squat.

His descent into a world of drug-fuelled crime, addiction and homelessness is powerfully recounted in his memoir, Wasted. Even Mr Johnson himself is not sure how he survived the onslaught of crack, heroin and alcohol for so many years. Some higher power must have been at work, he muses.

Now 38 and clean for the past nine years, Mr Johnson is not about to flout his good fortune. Instead, he is on a path to prevent other marginalised teenagers from following in his footsteps. This year he set up a new national charity called User Voice, which aims to ensure disadvantaged young people are properly supported and heard at the highest level.

Read the full piece at www.tes.co.uk. Learn more about User Voice at www.uservoice.org.

This article was written by Mark and was published in a recent issue of The Big Issue magazine in the UK:

G is a former medical student whose wealthy and generally happy childhood had a dark side: sexual abuse. In adulthood he suffered from depression. Smoking weed progressed to smoking crack and soon his medical career was over. Occasional drug-induced psychosis became a permanent state. Whenever he was admitted to hospital, despite self-harming, he was released after one night because his illness was drug-induced – although you could argue that the drugs were illness-induced. Before long, G was taken into custody instead of hospital.

“I was really acting crazy, walking down the street naked, hearing voices, including the Queen’s. I was put in a cell shouting and barking like a dog. The officer came in and said keep quiet but that incarceration was terrible. I walked around and around and I banged on the door until I got myself taken down. I mean 5 or 6 officers jumped on me and tied me down and took me to a cell where there was just a mattress on the floor and a blanket. I was given medication to sedate me throughout my incarceration.

“Actually, I was never convicted of any crime but those months I spent in jail on remand I regard as wasted time. I could have been treated for my problems there instead of just being sedated then put back on the streets.

“G eventually found his way, on his own, into rehab. In his early 40s, clean five years and now working for the NHS as a mental health support worker, he frequently encounters people with undiagnosed mental illness and consequent drug use, as well as drug users who are living with induced mental illness. Either way, they’ve generally, like G, had some horrible experiences in jail.

It will come as no surprise to G or the many thousands like him, that a huge new report into mental health and the criminal justice system has found a dog’s dinner of piecemeal policies, failure to diagnose, intervene or support at any stage and a flaunting of human rights which shames us all.

Unfortunately Lord Bradley’s report offers few solutions. The recommendations tend to demand more studies, reviews or reports, more awareness programmes for already overworked service providers like the police, more leaning on the unmonitored, un evaluated and usually unprofessional third sector. Despite the time and money spent on this report, it only proposes building further on our existing chaos.

Here are my own proposals. I can offer them at a fraction of the time and money the Bradley report cost because, unlike anyone involved in that report, I have first-hand experience of the ugly interface of mental illness and criminal justice .

1. Tear up the existing hotchpotch of ill thought-out provision and start again. Build a new policy from the ground up by talking to people like G and me with experience of mental ill-health inside the criminal justice system. The answers to the problem lie in the cells and on the wards but Lord Bradley has done no more than nod towards service users. He should have listened to their anguish and witnessed their anger, and, yes, shared it.

That would have led to change. By consulting people far away from the point of delivery, he has simply shared their delusions and re-enforced their failing systems.

2. There’s a big review of drugs in prisons going on right now: work together for a new system, recognising that mental health and drug abuse are often interlinked. At the moment, as Lord Bradley points out, dual diagnosis means offenders are generally treated for neither problem.

3. Accept that the key is early intervention. I defy you to find a service user who is or has been mentally ill who claims that all the signs were not evident in childhood. Children leave their troubled families to go to schools, churches, clubs and classes and that’s where we need awareness training. I’m not talking about well-meaning volunteers. I’m talking about a teacher who is trained to spot certain indicators. And an available professional who can deal directly with the child when a teacher is concerned.

4. Forget systems and think individuals. Just as Lord Bradley preferred data to people, most service providers find it easier to hide behind a computer than interact with the misery on the front line. But in drug courts something strange has been noted: when an offender progresses through the system under the care of only one judge, he has significantly less chance of re-offending. Continuity of care, where service users actually develop personal relationships with one service provider, is the human face of the system. Before we condemn them as offenders, let’s remember that the mentally-ill are vulnerable humans and patients first.

In his latest Guardian column, published today, Mark explains how it’s personal communication that offers the best way for youth and social workers to make a real difference in the lives of youngsters branded by society as ‘offenders’:

“At a conference recently, I learned that the people who are supposed to be “managing” our offenders now spend up to 80% of their time in front of a computer. Too much passion and enthusiasm ends up channelled into an office, not with the people who need human contact.”

Read the full article at www.guardian.co.uk.

Mark’s latest article for The Guardian was published in April and can be read online atwww.guardian.co.uk. In this piece, Mark talks about the very real need for the authorities to actively engage with young people in order to help them start solving their problems, and how a small amount of money spent on intervention and support at the right time could help save millions in social costs throughout the life of a troubled teen.

In two accompanying pieces, some of the teenagers that Mark introduced to Government officials at a Downing Street meeting share their impressions of the visit and young people from Birmingham describe their own harsh life experiences.