The Sunday Ishmael: 24/05/2026

 

It costs £63,000 per year, per child, to attend this establishment. That cost includes board and lodging and  tuition. You have to buy your own clothes. There is a strict dress code.  To attend you must be male and aged between 13 and 18.  The cost of attending falls on the parent of the child unless a scholarship or bursary is made available. Without such, and most children are not in receipt of those benefits, a  family needs to earn £143,386 per year to send one child there and still retain sufficient income for the necessities of life. The median average salary in Britain is £37,430.

It costs £72,198 per year, per child, to attend this establishment. That cost includes board and lodging and tuition. You do not have to buy your own clothes, which are provided. There is a strict dress code for visitors. You will not be allowed to visit your child unless you adhere to the following guidance:

modest dress only, no work clothes (including uniforms and trousers with multiple pockets), no sports shirts or football shirts, no jumpers or shirts with hoods, no mobile phones, no offensive logos, no sunglasses or headscarves unless worn for religious reasons, no ripped jeans, no vest tops, no short skirts or dresses, they must be knee length.

To attend this establishment you must be male and aged between 15 and 18.  The cost of attending falls on the State. The boroughs supplying the largest numbers of young offenders to this institution e.g. Hounslow, Ealing, Brent, Croydon, Lambeth, Southwark, Newham, are in the bottom 10–20% for income. Because the majority of boys come from these areas, the best evidence‑based inference of household income  is likely to fall in the region of £18,000–£24,000 per year.

Eton, the first establishment, rigorously excludes the academically challenged and, upon leaving Eton, 80 to 90% go straight into Higher Education. Feltham, the second, and more expensive establishment, has a reoffending rate of 70% within a year of release.

Two institutions 20 miles apart. Two utterly different social worlds.

Measure	Feltham Boys	Eton Boys
Household income:	£18k–£24k	£200k+ typical
Neighbourhood deprivation:	Bottom 10%	Top 1–5%
Reoffending rate:	70%	negligible
University entry:	<5%	80–90%
Likelihood of custody:	extremely high	effectively zero

Two groups of boys, 20 miles apart, living in entirely different countries in terms of opportunity, risk, and outcomes. How very British.

Now, are Eton boys essentially more law abiding than the boys who end up in Feltham? Given what we know about the maturation of the brain, that's unlikely. A teenage boy is emotionally immature, neurologically impulsive, driven by peers, unable to link actions to consequences, shaped by pornography and lacking empathy and boundaries. A boy doesn't finish growing his brain until he's in his twenties. So what is going on with the Eton boys that keeps them out of Feltham?

Er- could that be class bias?

Middle‑class boys have better legal representation, parents who advocate, write letters, hire experts, schools that excuse behaviour as “out of character”, judges who do not want to disturb their career trajectory into university, more likely to get community sentences, rehabilitation, sealed records. Whereas working‑class boys have less effective advocacy - the overworked legal aid solicitor, schools that have already excluded them, histories of generational police contact, the stigma of their postcode, judges who see a “pattern” rather than a “mistake” and are more likely to get custody, even when the offence is similar. And, this is a seriously significant factor, middle class boys are more likely to have two parents in the home, whereas Feltham lads are more likely to have been raised by a single parent.

A Utopian solution might be to empty out Eton and replace its customers with the Feltham children. It would be cheaper for the state and if the fabled Eton education lived up to the promise on its website that: " we proudly offer a unique and outstanding education with endless opportunities. Growing up in our boarding community develops personal growth and lifelong friendships in the safety of our wrap-around pastoral care, while nurturing the value of leadership and service", then the saving in human misery to the countless victims of Feltham's graduates reoffending, would add to the jollity of the nation. Wouldn't work, of course, because by the time a child is sentenced to a Young Offender institution, he is already beyond redemption. Even at Eton. Although it would be nice to see them try, instead of wasting all that outstanding education and pastoral care on the already deeply-privileged.
You see, Feltham doesn't rehabilitate anybody. It contains the bodies of the imprisoned, whilst doing worse than nothing for their minds, souls and spirits. It is a horror show of violence and drug addiction. It takes dangerous children and turns them into dangerous men. There are reasons for this. YOIs are not therapeutic environments, staff turnover is high, boys are moved frequently, sentences are often too short for engagement in meaningful change work, the environment is violent, chaotic, and traumatising, group work is unsafe and privacy and trust are impossible.
YOIs are the worst possible setting for treating sexual offending in adolescents. They cannot rehabilitate sexual offenders. They can only punish them. And punishment in and of itself increases risk.
All this was in Judge Nicholas Rowland's mind on Thursday when he sentenced three teenage boys, two aged 15 and one aged 14, convicted of raping two girls in separate attacks. They were nasty, nasty offences, made worse by having been carefully planned, the use of a knife and filming the rapes. The film showed the boys, who were 13, 14 and 14 at the time of the rapes, laughing and encouraging each other. The victims, their families, the public, media and pundits are all agreed that the sentencing was ridiculously lenient and only a prison sentence would meet the gravity of the offending. Reading the comments, you'd think the three boys, who have 10 rape convictions between them, had got away scot free. Far from it. The two older boys, now 15, were given three-year Youth Rehabilitation Orders - the longest standard term for a YRO - with 180 days of intensive surveillance and supervision. The youngest boy was given an 18-month YRO. All three boys were also made subject to a three-month curfew and given a restraining order for 10 years not to contact their victims.
That sentence is serious and stands the best chance of changing the life course that they have been pursuing. The Youth Justice Board and NSPCC are very clear that the most effective interventions for child sex offenders are community‑based, specialist programmes delivered by trained psychologists over many months with family involvement, stable education and trauma‑informed practice. Programmes that work on empathy, consent, boundaries, pornography, peer pressure, and distorted beliefs have very low reoffending rates — often under 10%. Contrast that with custody, with its 70% reoffending rate.
The current media-led outcry wants none of those pesky fact thingies. It wants punishment, and will only be satisfied by the reintroduction of 18th century punishments: birching, transportation, hanging. Even though those savage punishments didn't deter children from offending. Historical criminology shows that Victorian youth offending rates were extremely high, pickpocketing, burglary, violence, and sexual offences were common. So why didn't harsh punishments deter children? Because the drivers of youth crime were the same then as now: poverty, neglect, lack of education, trauma, unstable homes, exploitation by adults, peer pressure, lack of opportunity and the use of alcohol and drugs. Punishment didn't work then and doesn't work now. If the media frenzy results in the sentencing being recalled and a Young Offender Institution sentence substituted, then be sure that the custodial sentence will be shorter and will have the effect of making bad worse.
In the meantime, just as householders have had to install Ring doorbells and burglar alarms to protect themselves from burglary, teenage girls should take from this sorry tale that they should protect themselves from rape as far as they are able - don't meet three stranger gypsy lads in an isolated place because they've sent a nice text, for pity's sake. It shouldn't be like that. But it is. ..................................................................................................

They really do take their politics seriously in America, don't they? Another attempt on the President's life. Another assassin shot dead. Some people just don't deserve democracy.

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There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.