Surviving Incarceration
Vauxhall Centre for the Study of Crime
New research finds that children in care who are sentenced to custody develop a 'survivor mentality'.
Research conducted by the University of Bedfordshire’s Vauxhall Centre for the Study of Crime, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, estimates that children in care who come into contact with the justice system are seven times more likely to be imprisoned than their peers who are not in care.
The research found that pathways into, through and out of custody, can be understood in terms of strategies that disadvantaged and vulnerable children develop in order to survive hostile environments.
While all those sentenced to custody shared characteristics that included extremely troubled backgrounds, there were differences between children in care and those who were not.
The additional challenges encountered by the former group exacerbated the risk that they would become entangled in the youth justice system and, when sentenced to custody, would experience deprivation of liberty and resettlement as more disruptive.
These differences also impacted on identities in important ways. All children exhibited strategies for survival at each stage of their journey, but a focus on surviving tended to become an integral part of the identity of children in care.
The perceived need for these children to be self-reliant because of what they understood to be a lack of adequate support from adults, meant that they were also more likely than other children to develop, what we term, a ‘survivor mentality’ that made it harder for them to focus on future ambitions for positive achievement and to leave their offending behind them.