Free Trainers

To be honest I'm not at all convinced this would work but it might.

In a conversation with a police officer a couple of years ago, I expressed my surprise that the transferable skills used to commit crimes could not be redirected more easily. According to him, teenagers are often recruited into lives of crime by being offered items they value which leads to a sense of obligation to the people who did so, ultimately leaving them no option but to derive an income by criminal activity. I have to confess I have serious doubts about how important this factor is and suspect it's more to do with things like marginalisation depriving them of opportunities and a sense of hopelessness and being trapped in deprive circumstances, and there's plenty of white collar crime which doesn't happen this way. Both my father and I have spent time in the cells and neither of us would say it was we who were in the wrong.

Even so, this *might* make some difference:

Either subsidise publicly or encourage sportswear manufacturers to provide large numbers of the trainers considered swankiest to young people in urban areas with the highest youth crime rates. It doesn't have to be trainers - could be, say, video game consoles, but something which research has shown is a particularly strong object of desire for the group in question. Avoid something so specialised that it acquires the aura of police-mandated and therefore being uncool.

Those who would wish to take them further in their criminal careers would then be prevented from using bait because they've already got them.

Incidentally, after the police let me out they let me keep the plimsols. I wondered if it was a tracking thing but I'm not particularly paranoid and actually I thought it was quite nice of them.

I am entirely happy to be inundated with criticism and accusations of naivete here because I myself don't have a lot of faith in this idea, but who knows?