Transcriber: Mary Morsman Reviewer: Claire Ghyselen
Thank you. Thank you.
Have a look at this lot.
And please be honest with yourselves,
when I ask you this question,
what do you feel?
Do you feel sadness?
Do you feel anger?
Or do you feel fear?
What are your immediate judgements of these men?
Do you judge them to be thugs,
criminals,
or losers?
Some of you might have already guessed where I'm going with this,
but you see the particularly obnoxious one in the middle,
the one with the blue jeans and the white trainers.
Well, that’s me.
Back then, I was pretty horrible.
Today, I’m an author.
I'm 14 years sober from alcohol and drugs.
And I’m the founder of a nonprofit organization called the CIP Project.
CIP stands for Change Is Possible.
And we help people who have experienced childhood trauma,
who battled with their mental health or addiction,
and even ex military veterans with PTSD.
I'd like to think that today I'm not too bad a bloke.
I’d be willing to take a pretty big bet,
if you’d met me back then, or any time more than 14 years ago,
you lot wouldn’t like me much.
In fact, you probably would have reacted in one of two ways.
You would have been either frightened of me
or you would have wanted to have a go at me,
which on the face of it, that would have been fair enough.
Because in all honesty, underneath everything,
I didn’t like me much either.
I was horrible.
I was loud.
I was angry.
I was unpredictable.
My father was a heroin addict, and he left before I was one.
And my mother was an Irish immigrant from a gypsy family,
and she struggled with alcoholism.
I drank, I took drugs, I stole things.
In fact, I didn’t just steal the things,
I stole things whilst in the possession of firearms.
So if you’d live near me, you’d have been pretty relieved to hear
that at the age of 16, I was convicted and sent to a young offenders institution,
where I was locked up for 23 hours every single day.
It seems pretty clear cut, doesn’t it?
You’ve got a troubled kid from a broken home,
who’s a menace to society,
yeah, we’re better off locking him up, teach him a lesson.
Problem solved.
So I want to give you a little bit of context to my story.
When I was born, I wasn’t born an evil person, I’m pretty sure of that.
In fact, here's a photo of me when I was five.
Not too bad, eh?
Well, a few months after that photo was taken,
my uncle came to live with us.
And my uncle grew up in Ireland in a children’s home,
that was run by priests and nuns.
And they abused him physically and sexually every day of his life.
So guess what?
When he came to live with us in England, he did the same to me.
For about six months, which is a really long time when you’re five years old.
And it had a significant effect on my outlook on the world.
The next photo I’m going to show you was taken shortly after my uncle had left.
I didn't just look traumatized.
I developed a miserable and negative view of the world.
I thought to myself:
“After all, if this is how the people you live with are going to treat you,
what’s the world outside going to be like?”
I judged this world to be an unfriendly place.
And I was terrified that other adults would do the same to me.
So I behaved terribly to keep adults at arm’s length.
Because, if I could keep an adult at arm’s length that equaled safety to me.
And I surrounded myself with other young people
who behaved in a similar way to myself.
Here they are again.
I’m unsure
how many of the people in my community had experienced the same abuse I did,
but I know many of us grew up in poverty.
Many of us grew up in broken homes.
And, in one way or another, we all felt unsafe.
And we found this strange sense of safety when we were together.
I hope you’re starting to think a little bit differently about us already.
Growing up, we developed a shield to protect us from the outside world.
And over the years, we grew into that shield,
so much so that we started to believe that this is who we really are,
nothing can hurt us.
We also developed a mask.
And the mask was a very useful tool,
because it helped us hide our true emotions.
We fought fear with bravado and we did bad things,
things that I’m not proud of today.
But I look back and I see a group of young men trying to survive
in what we deemed was a hostile world.
Some years later, I stumbled across a quote by a man called Albert Einstein.
In an interview, Albert Einstein was asked,
What is the most important question that you can ask?
Einstein replied:
“The most important question you can ask is,
is this universe a friendly place or not?”
And he elaborated on that.
He said: “Because if we decide that the universe is a friendly place,
we will use all our resources to build bridges of understanding
with the outside world.
But, if we decide that this universe is an unfriendly place,
we will use those same resources to build bigger walls,
to create a sense of safety.”
And I suspect that everyone in my gang, including myself,
had made a decision at a very young age,
that this world is an unfriendly place,
and we were simply using all of our resources to create a sense of safety.
Now, unfortunately, society decided in all its wisdom
to ignore the words of Albert Einstein,
and decided to lock us up instead.
Most of the young people from my community spent time in prison.
And we spent time 23 hours a day and cells just like this one.
A lot of people get locked up every year here in the UK.
There's about 85,000 in total.
And in 2019, an independent inquiry
described the scale of alleged abuse in these institutions as shockingly high.
So we have politicians who win votes by saying things like:
“I’m going to get tough on crime.
I’m going to get tough on the causes of crime.”
Which ultimately ends up meaning
you’re going to get tough with people like us.
And I hate to be controversial, but,
when you consider what leads most people into the prison system,
and then what actually happens to them once they're inside the prison system,
it’s one of the most worst thought out policies in history.
You know, I’m half proud to be an expert on prison life,
having tested it myself a few times as a teenager.
But ever since I founded my organization, I run intensive workshops in prisons.
And one of the things I noticed was that
nearly every person I met had experienced some form of childhood trauma,
whether it was just growing up in poverty, or neglect or some form of abuse.
And I think it’s more than coincidence
that all of our prison populations seem to have this in common.
If you’ve grown up in an underprivileged background
and experienced childhood trauma,
the odds are you’re going to end up in prison at some point in your life.
And the problem with that is
one of the byproducts of childhood trauma is anger.
And when you lock angry people up together,
you can give them decent meals,
you can give them access to a gym, you can even give them qualifications,
but none of that gets to the root of their problems.
Nor does locking them up for 23 hours every day.
Or, in the age of Coronavirus, it was actually longer,
we lock them up for 23 and a half hours a day,
they weren’t allowed any visitors from the outside.
You’re only allowed out of your cell for 30 minutes to have a shower
and then come back.
You have to punish crime.
I’m not suggesting we don’t.
I believe that bad behavior needs to have a consequence.
But we also have to help people rehabilitate
and get them to understand why they act this way.
Otherwise, we’re simply treating a structural flaw with a lick of paint.
Because I believe that
a traumatized, angry person will always revert to violence,
unless a source of that trauma is healed.
And I can vouch for this myself.
I experienced pretty much every form of torture before I went to prison
and when I was in prison.
And each one made me worse, more threatened,
more desperate to protect myself.
And the only peace I could find is when I used alcohol and drugs.
Until one day at the age of 18, I looked forward to the rest of my life,
and I couldn’t see any hope.
And that’s when I decided I would kill myself.
The first thing I remember was hanging from the bars in my prison cell
with my bedsheet wrapped around my neck.
And the next thing I remember was laying on the floor,
being resuscitated by two prison officers,
who at the time we were incredibly sympathetic,
once they’d established that I was breathing again,
they carried me by my wrists and my ankles and tossed me into a padded cell.
And this is where this moment of realization came to me,
as I laid there on the floor in the fetal position of this padded cell.
I found myself asking for help from someone, somewhere,
maybe a higher power, perhaps.
I said: “Please help me.
If you help me, I promise I’ll do better with my life.
I’ll go further than that, I’ll even come back to places like this
and help others with theirs.”
It’s a commitment I’ve taken seriously ever since that day.
Looking back in hindsight, it was a lot easier said than done.
You know, I left prison with no qualifications, no CV.
I had no preparation on how to handle the difficult questions thrown at me
during a job interview.
Every day, I’d go out applying for jobs and everyone said no.
The constant rejection was really hard.
But you know what was even harder?
It was returning to my community,
where everyone was selling drugs and committing crime and making money,
and what I saw was an easy way.
And I came really close to giving up.
And then finally someone saw enough in me
or at least was desperate enough to offer me a job.
And strangely enough, it was right here in Kingston.
Kingston Council was looking for a litter picker to go around
and pick up other people's litter.
And here I was at the age of 19, at real crossroads in my life.
I found myself asking the question to myself:
“Michael, how badly do you want to change?”
I’m so proud of my 19 year old self for being brave enough
and humble enough to accept the job.
Because I can honestly say that for the first time in my life,
while picking up litter in Kingston,
that’s where I started to witness acts of kindness on a regular basis.
Not from the kids in my estate who would often wait at the bus stop for me
just to make fun of me, on my way to work in my council uniform.
But actually from you guys, the people of Kingston.
You help me reconnect with something I’d lost touch with over the years:
kindness.
It was a small things that got me a first,
I’d see parents walking their children to school,
and the parents were happy, and sober, and well-dressed.
This may sound normal for you,
but it wasn’t always the case in the community I grew up in.
I’d see joggers out running
and they’d stop and pick up someone else’s litter,
and then run and put it in the bin.
I couldn’t believe these things.
But the thing that got me the most was, sometimes, on my break,
I’d sit in Kingston Station,
and there used to be homeless people, I think there still are today.
And I see young professionals who are in a rush to get the train,
but they’d always stop and give the homeless people
coffee, food and even money.
And this is where the strangest things started happening within me.
As I was witnessing these acts of kindness by random strangers,
the world suddenly started to seem a bit more friendly.
And as the world seemed a bit more friendly,
I felt a bit more comfortable
and confident to reach out and ask others for help.
So just as Einstein predicted
that when we view this world as a friendly place,
we build bridges of understanding with the outside world.
This was literally happening to me at the age of 19,
and I didn’t even know it.
But don’t just take my word for this, or Albert Einstein’s.
Let me introduce you to someone else who didn’t come up much in conversation
when I was a teenager: Mahatma Gandhi.
Gandhi once quoted that: “The greatness of a nation can be measured
by how it treats its weakest members.”
And my take on this is really simple.
If you could imagine,
we had the opportunity to start society all over again,
with a completely blank canvas,
would we decide that the best way we can help the children who suffer the most,
I’m talking about the children who are beaten, abandoned, neglected and abused,
would we decide that the best way we can help them
is remove them from the environment where they’re suffering the most,
and put them into another environment where they can suffer some more?
Let’s take another look at these prison statistics,
because this is where it gets quite interesting.
Only 0.09% of the UK’s population are in prison.
Yet once they’re released, 75% of them will re-offend within a decade.
And it’s no surprise
now that we understand how traumatized and broken these people are.
But if you could imagine this from a business perspective,
imagine you owned a business that failed 75% of the time.
You'd probably go broke within a month.
And all this highlights for me is that our approach to this problem doesn’t work.
It’s morally, pragmatically and commercially flawed.
And I suspect in years to come,
we’ll look back at this time in our history,
we’ll reflect on how we treat the most traumatized
and underprivileged members of our society,
and we’ll be completely ashamed of ourselves.
Sometimes to fix an issue as complex as this one,
you really need to step away from the politics,
away from the headlines, and away from the status quo.
I look at things quite differently.
So let's use my own life as an example.
The catalyst to create a better world for me wasn’t about me being tougher,
or the system being tougher on me,
it was actually kindness.
As I witnessed random acts of kindness, my view of the world changed.
And as my view of the world changed,
I changed.
Now I know how soft this must sound,
coming from someone like me with a back story like my own.
But I want you all to hear
that I spent a large portion of my life trying to be tough,
only to realize how pointless and dangerous it is.
I’ve volunteered in schools, colleges and prisons for the past 14 years.
And over that time, kindness has taken on a new meaning for me.
Kindness is recognizing other people's trauma.
For example, if you were to meet someone like myself who was loud and angry,
just take a moment,
look behind this act of aggression,
and what you likely see is a childhood that’s filled with trauma.
Just recognizing that in another person is an act of kindness.
Kindness is about being charitable.
Kindness is about giving up your time.
Not for money, or fame, or likes on social media.
Just to make this world a better place.
Could you imagine a world with more kindness?
We would see a slow and gradual decline
in most of the things us human beings struggle with the most.
[Sigh]
So my invitation for all of you,
when you leave here,
be kind to one another.
Be kind to our planet.
Kindness is the most effective way
to create a better world.
Thank you.
[Applause]