Be Lucky

I've been a member of a small discussion forum for many years. We are a very strange idiosyncratic bunch of mostly mature academics who meet monthly to chew over absolutely any topic known to man. Being non-academic, I've never quite understood how I came to be recruited in the first place nor how I've stayed the course, but I think part of my role is to inject either a bit of healthy scepticism or humour at the appropriate time. Anyway the topic this month was 'coincidences and fate'.

As is quite usual we were straying well off the main thread after an hour or so and found ourselves discussing the notion of 'luck'. I remarked that probation clients were invariably unlucky in my experience. They never seemed to be lucky in anything including education, housing, health, relationships or employment. But even as I was speaking I realised that of course it really boils down to the accident of birth. In an ideal world one has to choose ones parents carefully. I'm pretty sure all the research supports the notion that being born in a disadvantaged environment means you are most unlikely to be lucky in life. 

All this came flooding back to me when a week later in the pub someone raised a recent news story about three young men in their early twenties who had been arrested and charged with the murder of another. The question posed was 'what could have led to a situation like that?'  Here are four young people whose lives have seemingly been comprehensively ruined - one is dead and the other three possibly destined to spend many of their best years degenerating behind bars - but why?

I have no personal knowledge of this case and yet I feel I could make a stab at writing their Post Life Sentence reports without ever having met them. Of course this is extremely sad. They will have come from a small post industrialised town suffering significant second and third generation unemployment. They will never have worked and probably know very few who have. They will have 'left' school at 13 or 14 and will be used to spending much of their late waking hours hanging around aimlessly, smoking dope and drinking crap but cheap lager with each other. Their geographical horizons will be as narrow as it's possible to imagine, indeed their trip to Crown Court for trial may be the first time they will have travelled any considerable distance at all. But this will be nothing compared to their limited emotional, intellectual and spiritual horizons.

Of course none of this in any way excuses their behaviour in allegedly organising an assault leading to someones death over what will invariably turn out to have been a fairly trivial matter.  But for me it does serve yet again to act as a graphic reminder as to the huge disparity in peoples lives and experiences and how basically unfair that is. This is exactly why I thought agencies like the probation service were set up in the first place - to try and make a difference.