Pigeon tastes good, says Jamie. Timbale of salmon is very tasty too; the crab
bisque has been cooking for five hours, and still needs to be sieved. His
job is to put together a list of high-end starters, following the orders
pegged in front of him, and it is with great pride that he shows me round
the kitchen where he works. “That’s the pass where chef stands, this is a
bain marie.”
Six months ago Jamie was doing a three-year stretch for burglary on R wing at
Rochester prison — more familiar with porridge than pigeon. Now, at 20, he
is a trainee chef in a West End restaurant where two courses will set you
back more than £30 and a bottle of wine as much again. “It’s confidence,” he
says. “I feel more independent now. I’ve got my own wage, I can buy my own
things. If it had been left to me, I wouldn’t be here.”
Three quarters of young men released from prison are reconvicted within two
years, and they are at their most vulnerable when they leave prison with
their £47 release grant and no prospect of a job. That Jamie, shy, nervous
and excited about his potential career, shows no signs of returning to crime
is testament to the success of a scheme based in an unassuming location a
few miles away.
The Skylight café on Commercial Street in the East End of London is one of
those rare cool and friendly places where the food is freshly made,
seasonal, reasonably priced, and tastes as good as it looks. Each day it
serves a meat main course, a vegetarian option, a soup — I can recommend the
sweetcorn chowder — and a host of salads, sandwiches and home-made pastries.
It is also the hub of a charitable enterprise that was set up by Alice Dawnay
and Slaney Wright. Through this, they provide newly released male prisoners
aged 18 to 24 with unpaid work as trainees in the café, and support them
with a mentor who will push, prod, encourage, cajole and reason with them
for as long as it takes them to become stable, get a job and keep it.
The aim is simple — to change the outlook of young prisoners so that they can
build a new life. The reality of making this happen is endlessly complex and
so riddled with backward moves that to anyone who didn’t have their patience
and calm good humour it could seem too frustrating to be feasible.
To the credit of Dawnay and Wright, 18 months after they started their
charity, Switchback, the reconviction rate for the 31 young men who have
been involved in the scheme is more than three times lower than average. One
is now working at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage. Others, like
Jamie, are working in less famous but still reputable kitchens. Of the five
trainees who have returned to custody, three have returned to the programme.
Gervais, from Walthamstow, is one of them and he is now back at the café
serving beef lasagne and pesto pasta. He is adept at saying the right
things, but doesn’t always follow up his promises — though in recent weeks
his hard work has been rewarded with stints in sole charge of the Skylight
kitchen. But it is a placement at Roast in Borough Market that has enthused
him most: “I had to try everything we were serving — chicken livers,
scallops. You cook lobster for eight minutes until you hear them whistle and
pop: that’s the air coming out of the shell. I want to become a chef, work
in a really nice restaurant.”
What’s the most important thing about holding down a job? “You have to be
reliable. Do what they ask you, be on time.” This is Dawnay’s most
frequently delivered message. “I know you listen, but you have to put it
into practice,” she reminds Gervais.
Referrals to Switchback come from prisons and involve young men who are
working in their kitchens or serveries. Dawnay, 29, is their mentor and
meets them regularly in the months before release to help them to set goals
for their future. Their traineeship at Skylight begins the day after they
are freed.
Most, like Dan from Highbury, who is 20, have been convicted of drug offences
and struggle to adjust to the demands of their work and its unpaid status.
“Alice was bugging me, ‘Listen, it’s a new life’. I was going, yeah, but I
was embarrassed at the idea of working for free. From a drug dealer’s
perspective you don’t want to do that. They talk about climbing a mountain
and at the top everything’s all better than going through the jungle, and I
thought that was a bit wet, but I realised it’s true. Not everything is
perfect at the start.”
It’s already clear that the trainees who stand the best chance of having a
stable future are those who throw away their sim cards — and their old
associates — upon release. The café’s chef, Lloyd Hayes, 26, ensures that
they work to professional standards and, as a graduate of Jamie Oliver’s
Fifteen restaurant, is a role model to whom the trainees can relate.
“Getting good training saved my life,” says Lloyd. “I would probably have been
in prison or dead without it, and I’ve seen how friends who got out of
prison stop growing up. They don’t realise what it’s like to go to work,
that you’ve got to be patient, sometimes they have trouble with discipline.
I’m a bit anal about getting the trainees into a professional frame of mind
and most of them are willing to learn.”
The numbers of young men involved in the scheme are low because supporting
them is an intense, time-consuming and bespoke process. One trainee who has
now been in work for more than five months was previously addicted to crack
cocaine, Dawnay says. “Weed was a really dangerous thing for him and he got
drugs posted through his letter box by people who were trying to get him
back on to crack. We had a time in the evening when he texted me saying he
wasn’t sure whether he’d been able to resist or not. But he’s now
independent, renting a flat, managing at the restaurant. Having his mentor
there at 2am meant that he could rely on that when he couldn’t rely on
anything else.”
Wright, 32, is the fundraising and project manager. “A lot of mistakes had to
be made to get to the point where he now knows how to handle a relationship
with an employer,” she says. “The focus is on getting them into a job, but
all the time we’re trying to make sure the other stuff is stable enough for
them to keep the job when they get it.”
As a measurement of success it is easy to cite the former trainees who are
working at prestigious restautants. Equally significant is the trainee who
reached a low point and phoned Dawnay instead of rolling a joint, they
suggest. “I think it’s a success every time someone walks in here in the
morning,” she says.
Switchback is based at the Crisis Skylight Café, 66 Commercial Street,
London E1 6LT; switchback.org.uk
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