The Yoc
an excerpt

The Yoc’s up in the mountains on the coast and it’s a year and a half old. I’m not a prison expert but everyone knows about it because it was all over the news when they first swung the gates open (and then banged them shut and locked them and put a padlock on them). It holds 300 people, youths we’re called, from twelve to eighteen. A lot of people go in for a couple of weeks just, for something like shoplifting or smashing something up. Or fighting, if the person you fight gets hammered and says it’s assault rather than just getting beat in a fight. The social worker said about half the people there at any time are there for a year or more. There’s about fifty who’ve been there since it opened.

Yoc means Young Offenders’ Centre and it’s got a proper name too, but it’s been the Yoc since it opened. There was a fanfare about it on the day and I remember watching it on the news, thinking about all the people our age who’d be locked up there and thinking Poor bastards.

Poor bastards us now. There was no-one else in the van with us and for a minute or two I amused myself with a nice fantasy about making ourselves some weapon, A-Team like, and then when they opened the door at the Yoc we could jump out at them and make good our thrilling escape. I looked over at Kite to tell him this and his face was the colour of cheese.