The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Justice on Trial: Why Punishment Doesn’t Heal | Chris Daw KC & Dr Marianne Trent

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Barrister and author Chris Daw KC joins Dr Marianne Trent to discuss why punishment does not reduce crime and how trauma, inequality, childhood adversity and addiction drive people into the justice system. We explore the limitations of “getting tough on crime”, the impact of criminalising children, and what countries like Luxembourg and Switzerland can teach us about more effective, trauma-informed and compassionate approaches to justice. The conversation covers youth offending, drug policy, harm reduction, rehabilitation, and the long-term effects of shame and early environment on behaviour. This episode is particularly useful for aspiring psychologists, clinicians working in forensic or community settings, and anyone interested in understanding how justice systems can reduce reoffending and improve public safety. #criminaljustice #traumainformed #aspiringpsychologistHighlights00:00 - Welcome and introduction to barrister and author Chris Daw KC01:40 - Why punishment fails to reduce crime and what really drives offending03:20 - The justice system’s obsession with incarceration and its hidden costs06:00 - Chris reflects on childhood, missed education, and forks in the road08:45 - The impact of early environment and parental support on life chances10:30 - A real-life story showing how deprivation fuels future outcomes12:30 - Intergenerational inequality and the illusion of fairness in society16:00 - Why “getting tough on crime” misunderstands human behaviour18:00 - What justice should really aim for: fewer victims, safer communities20:30 - The addiction to punishment and how politics fuels it23:00 - Law as a social construction – and why our approach is outdated26:00 - What Luxembourg’s youth justice model gets right30:00 - Why children’s brains aren’t ready for adult accountability34:00 - The role of shame and trauma in youth offending36:30 - Should all drugs be legalised? Exploring global examples40:00 - Lessons from Switzerland’s heroin-assisted treatment programme45:30 - Why prohibition fuels addiction and crime53:00 - What legalisation could look like in a regulated, licensed system59:00 - Understanding the role of a barrister and what “KC” means01:02:00 - Final reflections: compassion as the only path to justice that healsLinks: 📚 📲 Chris Daw KC’s website: https://www.chrisdawkc.com Chris' Book, Justice on Trial: https://amzn.to/4pb2RoP🫶 To support me by donating to help cover my costs for the free resources I provide click here: https://the-aspiring-psychologist.captivate.fm/support📚 To check out The Clinical Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3jOplx0 📖 To check out The Aspiring Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3CP2N97 💡 To check out or join the aspiring psychologist membership for just £30 per month head to: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/membership-interested🖥️ Check out my brand new short courses for aspiring psychologists and mental health professionals here: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/short-courses✍️ Get your Supervision...

My name's Yana and I'm a trainee psychological well-being practitioner. I read the clinical psychologist collective book. I found it really interesting about all the different stories and how people got to become a clinical psychologist. It just amazed me how many different routes there are to get there and there's no perfect way to become one. And this kind of filled me of confidence that, no, I'm not doing it wrong and put less pressure on myself. So if you're feeling a bit uneasy about becoming a clinical psychologist, I'd definitely recommend this just to put yourself at ease and everything will be okay.

But trust me, you will not put the book down once you start. from someone who's committed a crime and real story isn't about evil but about trauma. Today's guest King's Council barrister Chris Dorr has spent decades inside courtrooms and prisons and what he's learned will completely change how you think about crime, punishment and justice. Together we're exploring the uncomfortable truth that our justice system often punishes pain instead of healing it. and why we keep getting that wrong. Hope you find it super useful. If you do, please like and subscribe for more.

Hi, welcome along to the aspiring psychologist podcast. I'm Dr. Marianne, a qualified clinical psychologist, and I'm joined here today by Chris Dore Casey. Hi, Chris, welcome along. Hi, good morning. Thank you so much for being here. I followed you like a little LinkedIn creep for probably over five years now.

And I'm so pleased that you've agreed to come on the podcast because I honestly think everybody should know about you and about your work and your incredible book, Justice, on trial. So thank you for being here. Not at all. I'm very excited. And also my daughter is an aspiring psychologist, so I think I'm in the right place. Oh, perfect. Well, I didn't know that.

But yeah, do shove her our way. So we will go on to think a little bit about what a case even is, but maybe that's not our strongest opener. Could you tell us a little bit about perhaps why justice is a bit broken, Chris? Yeah, I mean, it's because we are obsessed with the idea that you can punish your way out of criminality. And so we have this kind of ever increasing a sort of ratchet effect when it comes to abuse of incarceration and imprisonment, which the Americans have taken to the ultimate degree almost, of having two and a half million people in their prisons around the US.

I mean, we're at sort of approaching 100,000. So even sort of pro rata, we're still not there yet. But the prison population has doubled in my career of 30 years as a criminal lawyer from sort of mid-40thous 90 and then heading towards 100,000. So it's really that simple. We genuinely as a society, whether we believe it or not, or whether politicians just dissuade us enough that it's a good idea at election time. But we genuinely believe that if you keep on punishing and increasing the amount of time you sentence people to in prison and the long time they spend in prison,

that that's going to magically transform our society into a lower crime society and somehow or other it's going to put people off committing crime. And, you know, anyone who knows anything about human psychology and particularly the psychology of those who are who get themselves caught up in the justice system, in particular when there is young teenagers, that kind of age, will know that, you know, simply punishing people, relentlessly punishing them more and more, isn't going to solve anything because the vast majority of the people who are going into prisons have deep-rooted traumas, deep-rooted histories of abuse, you know, in their childhoods or witnessing terrible things happening or, you know, major psychiatric conditions or addictions and so forth. So it's pretty obvious, it seems to me, it's a matter of common sense, that you can't imprison your way out of psychological and psychiatric trauma because you know you're just going to make it worse and

therefore the people who are put through that come out and on the whole are even more broken than when they went in and sadly even less likely to be able to engage lawfully in society and productively in society so we just keep making the same mistake we keep making it in in ever greater proportions in the sense that sentences get longer and longer and longer and you know it isn't achieving anything except wasting a lot of money and perhaps even more sadly, wasting a lot of human life. Yeah, I absolutely believe. I agree with everything you're saying.

And I think there's so many parallels, isn't there? There's getting tough as a parent and there's getting tough as a school and dishing out punishments and dishing out, you know, all these detentions. And they just don't mean anything, you know? It happens so often. I've seen it happening in my own family. There's members of kids in my family, teenagers who have had real troubles at school. And they just keep getting excluded and sent home.

and hold off and you know it just doesn't well I'm not sure what the point of it is you see I mean I think the reason I kind of came to writing and particular writing justice on trial was because I was I kind of fed up with just just doing the same thing it was like a hamster in a wheel at work every day going to court case court doing a case and the process kind of run the system so so you just do it because that's the system and then the problem for me is that I started to say to myself, well, we keep doing it, but it's actually making it worse, not better. So I took a blank sheet of paper, traveled all over the world, looked at the way that prison works in other countries, looked at way that other sort of criminal justice policies operate, and decided

to, you know, write a book that just with a blank sheet of paper said, this is what you could actually do to make things better, reduce crime, make society safer, and save us billions of pounds a year, which all of which seemed like very good ideas to me, none of which are being adopted in any significant way by any government, certainly not in the UK and certainly not in the US. Well, I think it should be and, you know, I still think we need to keep beating that drum because I think it's a really inspiring, really interesting book. And I think another parallel that's really interesting is you speak about being a very similar age to someone who kind of is really on the wrong tracks and is in all kinds of strife. And you're almost

curious, before we met, we were speaking about the fact that we actually grew up, you know, a few miles away from each other. And Milton Keynes is not known for its, you know, its success rates perhaps for young people. But you've done, you know, people that are watching on YouTube will be able to see your marvellous garden and hear the birds. People who are listening might be like, what is what is all that birds? Is he recording in an aviary? But, you know, you've done well for yourself. But you perhaps could have had a different path yourself yeah I mean it's it's an interesting one because you know my life kind of took a fork in the road when I was 16 and it and it could have taken a completely different fork in the road because I'd largely been the sort of a school refusor if you like that but not in the not in the same I mean I just bumped off a lot and no and back in the 80s nobody really checked whether you were at school or not certainly not where I went to school I'm sure they did a lot of schools but not at mine

and so being absent nobody really cared i mean the schools were so um overcrowded there were so many kids in the classes the academic attainment was so low that it was kind of like the expectations were just on the floor which meant that you know if you if you'd even read a book that was quite impressive you know um and so so compared to the education that my kids have for example it was completely um it was completely sort of non-existent from a form in a formal sense but i think because of my personality type which is quite independent and and and and actually has always been an addictive and obsessive reader. And that was the key.

So the fact that I read independently from a very young age, my mum taught me to read the two, three years of age, even before nursery. And that to me, I think, is what kind of allowed me later to kind of embark on education and for the first time to see the value of education. But that was only because of a set of circumstances that took me to a really good six-form college when I was 16.

Whereas had I either stayed in Milton Keynes where I grew up Or had I, you know, I actually left home to go and sell donuts in the south of France on the beach at the age of 16. Had that been a big success and your listeners may be surprised to know that it wasn't, but had it been a big success, who knows, I could be the donut king of Nice or something like that instead. And I think everybody has these forks in the road and mine just happened to take you to a good sixth form college. And we live there with a gardener, back then, but it took me to a good sixth form college. And it took me to, ultimately, to Manchester University, which was a great law school, great university and, of course, an incredible city to live in.

And I ended up spending almost 20 years living and working in Manchester. And that, to me, was the best thing that could have happened to me. Yeah. And, you know, I think you clearly had family that it was safe to come back to and a safe, stable base. And, you know, you were taught to read. And, you know, that wasn't ridiculed. You know, that was seen as actually a good thing for Chris to be doing. And a lot of the young people that I work with, for example, in a youth prison,

if on the day that you are born or discharged from hospital, your parents leave you in a car seat on the steps of the firehouse and go off and do a drugs run, like your chances to succeed are dramatically reduced, right? Well, I can tell you a direct story that kind of illustrates that point. from my school life in Milton Keynes because what happened there was a young boy I won't give his name but there's a boy who's very young boy same age as me who's in my class and he always had sort of like clothes that looked like they'd been I don't know they didn't fit him and and and he always like looked at very sort of struthy and a bit unkempt and so forth and he got quite badly bullied and I and I would and I would sort of chat to him and sort of befriend him a little bit and one day I got called into the office at school and um um and asked to come come in and Kevin sorry i shouldn't give his name anyway doesn't matter i'll give his second name um kevin was in there um and he had all his hair had sort of been chopped off and what happened was kevin had taken some books home from the library and his dad had battered him because he said why are you wasting

your effing time with books you know you want to do something more useful with you life and he cut all his hair off as a punishment for bringing books home so i mean if you think about that i mean i was very lucky as you say my mom was a big reader and still is um and she was obsessed with sort of reading in particular was it was I think was her kind of escape from an education that hadn't been particularly successful and and so she was a sort of self-taught in many ways and and that that it was only that pure good fortune to have parents who who were both encouraging and supportive but also who were hands off enough to let me sort of make mistakes find things out for myself learn things that I wanted to learn and weren't too

obsessed with what I was doing at school as being the most important thing they could see that there's value in reading for its own sake and it's It almost doesn't matter what you read, so long as you read something and you expand your thinking, your mind. So very, very lucky, in contrast to Paul Kevin, who suffered a completely different fate and was physically abused simply for bringing books home from school. And that tells you why some people in our society have good fortune and others don't, regardless of money or anything else. It's all to do with that home environment and whether there's a broad kind of support for the child's development and welfare and education. If there is, as I was lucky enough,

was the case for me, then, you know, the potential, even in an area or in a school that's an underperforming school, the potential's still there. But if you don't have any of that, and in fact, if you have positive pushback against that, your life chances really are going to be very, very long. Yeah, poor Kevin. That is like, honestly, that's like Mr. Wormwood from Matilda, isn't it? Like, that's Roald Dahl's most horrendous creation, but that's come to real life. I was thinking the other day, like my kids don't realize how lucky they are. I've got two of them, but they don't realize how lucky they are, that they don't need to be at school wondering what mood mummy or daddy is going to be in when they get home or wondering whether

mummy's going to be sober. I actually don't drink at all anymore. And that's not because it's been problematic. It's just to think I'm just, I just don't need it. But, you know, they don't, they don't need to be thinking, oh, is she quit for now or is she quit for good? You know, am I going to have to go home and pick, you know, mop up her vomit or, you know, How can you be able to learn and to focus on that if you've got all of that in your mind? And these are some of the people that you end up working within the justice system because they're having to be, you know, they've been parentified or they're just having to, I don't know, go out and steal things to even have food to put on the table for their families.

Like it just isn't fair, is it? It's not, it's not, we're not all starting from the same point in life. No, I mean, and has it ever been any different? I mean, since time began, you know, we've had vast inequalities of wealth, vast inequalities in access to education, vast inequalities in access to health, healthcare and safety. You know, it's very easy, isn't it, for us in what, the fourth or fifth richest country in the world, to get, you know, to kind of come up with these ideas of how awful it is. And it is awful for many young people in our country. But if you take a global perspective, and you kind of look out a little bit more from our little island and you realize the, conditions in which people live in other countries and we're seeing what's happening uh you know in the middle east and and of course you know extraordinary um problems in africa and and and all sorts of other places all over the world where you know the levels of kind of inequality poverty and and cruelty towards large sections of the population are so extraordinary it's to be unimaginable and you know i i guess in the end because you can't solve all the problems you just

to have to use whatever sort of skill set you have, whatever knowledge you have, to try to make a difference in some way to something. Because if everyone did that, if everyone did a little bit of something to try and make a little bit of difference, then of course the cumulative effect will be extraordinary. The difficulty is that most people, understandably in many cases, live entirely in their own bubble and totally self-focused on what their own needs are and their own wants, particularly in wealthy countries. And, you know, in the end, if selfishness is the guiding principle behind most people's lives and most people's sort of outlook, then you're going to end up with a selfish and very unequal world and a deeply unfair world. So to answer your question,

yes, it's unfair, but it is inevitable. There's going to be some level of unfairness. The question is what, as an individual, what are you going to do about? Yeah, absolutely. It's reminding me of kind of part of our conversation earlier, but also in your book, you speak about the number of incarcerated people in each country actually on paper becomes to be, if you equated it to the number of people in a city, that actually incarceration city is kind of massive and some of the biggest cities in the world. Yeah, well, it was the US in particular that I was talking about. So if you take that US prison population of give or take two and a half million, it certainly was that at the time that I wrote the book, then that would have been the fifth largest city in the

United States. I think Houston was thought was was was fourth and you have New York, LA and Chicago and then Houston and then prison and two and a half million people in prison is a quite extraordinary number just to get your head around that number. I mean that that is that is far bigger than Birmingham far bigger than Manchester. You know this is that's an extraordinary number of people and you know they do live effectively in the albeit some of them are in New York and some of them in California, but effectively, they all live pretty much in the same basic ecosystem of, you know, just relentless rolling door, incarceration, being constantly on some sort of court supervision which they can then break and then get sent back to prison and then go

again for longer and longer. You know, it is a quite extraordinary thing to have created a world in which two and a half million people in the richest country in the world are incarcerated. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. Yeah, it really is. And clearly getting tough on crime doesn't work there either. Well, because they're not getting tough on crime. If you're getting tough on something, say if you want to get tough on cancer, you don't beat the patient with a stick.

What you do to get tough on cancer is you find the cleverest medications, the cleverest therapies and the cleverest treatments, and you relentlessly apply logic, good practice, pragmatism and expertise to curing the cancer. You don't simply say, well, this person's got cancer, we're going to hit them until the cancer's gone and that's effectively metaphorically what we do with people are with our criminal justice system we take people with a serious and significant trauma coming from childhood or coming through their young lives who then you know don't

engage properly with education do end up often in the hands of either gangs or other sort of criminal enterprises or sometimes you know assisting in crime in some way and then they get themselves arrested often in their teens and they get themselves in front of a youth thought some of them go to a young offenders institution and essentially from that point onwards you may as well tattoo criminal on their forehead because their life chances are about as high as if you were to wander around looking like that and as a society you know every time there's an election you know we have you know the government you know the parties can are arguing about which one's going to lock people up for the longest we're going to give even longer sentences we're going to get tougher but that's

the problem the terminology of toughness has become completely distorted because for me being tough means using your brain power and your energy to aggressively try and solve a problem, that's toughness. Toughness is not hitting the most vulnerable people time and time again with long prison sentences at vast public expense, only to make the fundamental problem that you're trying to address even worse than it was before you did it. And at its most simplest, it comes down to it does it not? Which is, what's the point of criminal justice? Why do we have a criminal justice system? Now, lots of people, their initial answer would be, to punish people who break the law.

That would be their answer, okay? The problem with that analysis is, if you do that, what happens next when you punish the people who broke the law? If you punish them in the most aggressive and, you know, they talk about rude, take away their televisions, their base stations, don't let them have all this, make them solitary confinement 24 hours, make it horrible. The consequence of that is that they're going to commit a lot more crimes

for a lot longer and a lot worse crime. But if you're happy with that, you stick with that plan, of just constantly making your sentences longer and your prison conditions harder. For me, you know, the point of the criminal justice system should be to reduce the amount of crime we have, to reduce the number of victims, particularly of physical crimes like sexual violence and physical violence and domestic violence, etc. And to make society as a whole a safer place and a better place. Now, if you set those as your milestones of success, then you would do nothing that we're currently doing in our criminalism. justices and you would completely rip up the rule book and you start again and you would do the

sorts of things that I wrote about injustice on trial. Yeah and one of your ideas injustice on trial was you know allow people to continue to do their jobs you know and then maybe go home to prison in the evening but still be able to contribute or just be I don't know just still be able to contribute to their families and you know so much of that then helps their self-esteem and And what we know about even very rudimentary measures of childhood adversity, such as the A-scale, you know, has one of your parents ever been in prison? And if we're saying yes to that, we're already giving this potentially unborn baby, you know, at least one point on their own adverse childhood experience rating, which will be with them for life. And yeah, I think it's so hard to

get a job once you've been through the justice system and turned out the other side. And it was really interesting learning a bit more about Jamie Oliver's 15 program recently. I think until until very recently I thought it was just a TV thing, whereas actually he bankrolled a lot of that himself. You know, it's very, very expensive. But it's changed people's lives. And it's the same with the organisation, Change Please, you know, really trying to do something different to teach people skills and to have people be mentored by people to show them a different way. And I think why aren't we doing more of this? Well, we're not doing it for the simple reason

that we are addicted to the use of punishments as the only weapon against any form of behaviour that transgresses social norms. So, you know, we, we, you know, and it's incredibly easy. If you think about it from a psychological point of view, the messaging around getting tough in inverted commas and cracking down in inverted commas once again.

And all of these things, we're going to have a crackdown on, you know, whatever it might be, you know, street drug dealing. just drug dealing generally um uh all these kind of things we're going to have crackdown it sound great it sounds great on tv and it sounds great on you know and big rallies and political speeches and so forth it's and people love it because we we as a species we do we are can be quite basic and we do have some extraordinary basic instinct such as revenge and punishment they're very visceral and they're very kind of um you know they're easy to relate to it needs to get

carried away with the problem is that they are part of our very you know you and your or listeners will be much more aware of the thing. But it's part of that very ancient kind of brain, as opposed to the brain that has the intellectual capacity to use creativity and compassion and pragmatism to solve problems as opposed to simply react with big sticks, you know, as if we're sort of cavemen and the only solution to any sort of incursion onto our land

is to go and attack and burn down the other village. And that's the kind of mentality that still drives our criminal justices. And it doesn't drive all of our society. There are bits of it, particularly in the scientific community. and medical research and so forth where people are very much focused on doing good and using using human ingenuity to solve problem but in criminal justice we are stuck with a you know as i described in the book i you know i went back to myan civilizations from you know 10 000 years ago and and all of the civilization since you know almost every single society or civilization

you've had over the last several thousand years has in terms of its The climate has always had fundamentally an approach which is aggressive, which is punitive, and which in my opinion is damaging to social cohesion, society and safety, public safety. But we do these things, partly because actually politicians really love to leverage those messaging at election times. And, you know, a very large number of people, you know, respond positively to them. Yeah, I mean, when we really boil it down, law is a complete social construction, right? It's a way of stopping people rioting in the streets and trying to get the masses to behave themselves.

But it's, yeah, it is just a social construction. And, you know, different places over the countries around the world interpret it, slightly different to have their own laws. But I don't know, it's when you get all introspective and, you know, yeah, like just thinking about this, it's bonkers, right? like there has to be a way of, I guess, getting us to all stop killing each other. Well, you say that. You would hope so, wouldn't you, accept that, you know, the history of the human species is not exactly, which has been occupied by peaceful, you know, kind motives most

of the time. And indeed, some reason, you know, because resources are finite and there's been a need over human history for people to battle for limited resource. And of course, that's the case, evolution has brought, you know, battle over resource is very much fundamental to the evolution of all species. So there's nothing fundamentally kind of wrong with that. The difficulty is because we've evolved to the point where we have this very, very high levels of intelligence compared to other animals and compared to, you know, other, our sort of ancestor species beforehand, you've still got the basic bits of the brain, but we've bolted on these clever bits on the top over a very short period of time because, you know, it is only really

in the sort of history of life on earth you know the the modern human with our intellectual capability that you know it represents like just a tiny minute fraction of the entire history of life on earth and and life on the planet and and so we just haven't you know we we haven't caught up with ourselves that's my opinion we have we haven't we haven't caught up with the fact that you know if you live in an in a world of ever increasing numbers of people but you also have the technology to feed all those people, actually, and we do. We do have the technology to do it. The problem is that you still have people who are mostly drawn to arguments over emotion and culture and history and identity and the sorts of things that, you know,

really are quite powerful and have been important, you know, incredibly important for our evolution, you know, the idea of community, albeit, of course, it would have been small communities up until relatively recent, up until the last 300 years, you know, communities were really quite small and now we suddenly have this huge world where everybody can speak to everybody all the time where you can travel anywhere all the time where there are bombs that can can bomb you from almost anywhere and we just haven't we haven't as a species in my opinion like you know used our talents to improve the planet we've you we have improved the planet in some ways but ultimately overall we have done more harm than good and and unless we grapple with that as a

reality either as an you know an environmental reality or as a social reality we're never going to, we're never going to make forward progress in my opinion. Amazing. Thank you. That was really interesting. I know you spoke in the book about a particular country that says that anyone under the age of 18 cannot be, you know, culpable for anything illegal, which is kind of quite radical, certainly from a UK justice perspective, because you talk us through that, Chris. Yeah, so it's Luxembourg, a small country which within its constitution, its constitutional framework says that no child under 18 shall ever be convicted of a crime. So what they've done is they've aligned the age of majority where you can vote and you're a full sort of adult and participant in society. They've aligned that age with the age of criminal responsibility, which in the UK is a complete mismatch because the age of criminal responsibility is only 10 years of age.

Whereas, of course, the age of the majority is the same as Luxembourg, 18. And so you have this, you know, in Luxembourg, what they've done is that, of course, occasionally, and it is very occasionally, children commit acts of real violence and real harm. And it's incredibly rare. I think, you know, if you watch the media coverage in the UK, you think that children are out killing each other all the time. It's a very, very, very small number, in fact. And the only reason why there's so much media coverage of when a child kills someone or what have you is because it's so rare. You know, if it wasn't rare, you know, it wouldn't make the news so much. So what they've done in Luxembourg, they said, okay, when those very rare events happen and a child is genuinely dangerous, may have harmed someone and maybe a danger, what we do is we focus the resources of the state on the child welfare, and of course, public protection is important.

So the way that they do it is that they have, you know, they have to have secure environments for those children, those small number of children who are genuinely dangerous. And those secure environments are schools and their entire ethos and their entire purpose is to educate. the child and to address any psychological harms or other welfare issues that the child has had so that when they become adults they in the vast majority of cases go out into society and never commit a crime ever again and that's the statistical reality of that system whereas our system is to criminalise children as young as 10 11 12 years of age imprison them sometimes at the age of 13 or 14 15 in young offenders institutions which are just prisons and we put in 14 15 year old kids in prison. Now that to me in a nutshell tells you why our system is so broken

because I've been into young append institutions many many times. I know you have and and you know those places are soul destroying when you think that there are children being housed in cells with bars and all of the other trappings of a prison it to me that's a form of madness and not only madness but cruelty because the end result is you you double down on the damage that that young person has had in their early life and you absolutely guarantee that that young person is likely to commit violent and other crimes again in later life in part in an understandable direct reaction to the trauma that they've been facing and have faced including at the hands of the state and and that's why in my view and i wrote about it in the book

children you know i have lots of children and and they i do not believe for example that my 11-year-old son is capable of the kinds of level of kind of depravity or what have you, or any 11-year-old, in fact, that he's required to say in a court of law that you're guilty of murder and you should be sent to prison for years and years and years. Anyone who ever spent any time with any young children knows that they are so far from that level of insight and development and even capacity for that level of cruelty. They may do cruel acts. They may do things that are violent, But they have no real processing power when it comes to what's going on there or why they're doing it. And the vast majority of the time, it is a direct result of someone doing something terrible to them, usually an adult.

And so, in my opinion, if you decriminalise children, as they do in Luxembourg on their welfare, as a constitutional principle, then what you will have coming out the other side into adulthood will, in the great majority of cases, not be those people who make up the adult prison population in our current system. At the moment, all that our youth justice system does is feed the adult criminal justice system. It doesn't reduce crime. It doesn't make our country a safer place. So it fails by my fundamental measures of success in criminal justice. Yeah. And also what I know as a psychologist is that our human brains aren't actually fully matured until we've got our full frontal lobe capacity, which is around 25. I was much less of a dick at 25 than I was at 18. You know, I used to think it was probably a good idea to get my friends to put me in a shopping trolley and wheel me down the hill when I was 18.

I was not doing that when I was 25, Chris. So the idea that you would hold someone accountable for their actions at 10 or 12, like it's just, yeah, it's broken. It doesn't make sense. Well, it doesn't make sense from just just common sense. Never mind, never mind the sort of the, you know, the psychological appreciation of development and how human development takes a long time. and particularly for young men, that development process does run right into the mid-20s and even into the, in beyond. And so if you, once you begin to understand that, then you start to play the man instead

of the ball, so to speak, you actually say, okay, who are we dealing with? Who are doing these things and why are they doing them? Particularly when you're applying that kind of framework to children under 18, then the almost inevitable response of anyone who's compassionate and rational is we need to focus on the the original trauma, so the psychological kind of trauma that underlies much of this behaviour, but we also need to think about the practical reality of what's going to hopefully change the course of some of that behaviour and that one thing that is guaranteed to make it worse is sending them to a child prison. And so stop doing that. It's as simple as that. Yeah, I'm often asked

in the media to talk, to try and help people understand difficult positions when there has been high-profile cases. And of course, there's a great public interest in that because it's been so widely reported in the media. Do you know, in Luxembourg, if there is a high-profile or very serious things happened with a child, is that still reported in the media or not at all? No, because they have anonymity. I mean, we, of course, have anonymity here to a degree, but often the judge will waive that because the case is particularly shocking. And they say, okay, well, we can disclose who these 14 and 15-year-olds are and their names could be told to everybody. create a lifetime of needing to keep them, give them new identities and all the other stuff

that goes with that. No, they don't. They are completely prevented from any form of reporting of anything that involves a child. And as a safe, their constitutional position is that the default position is no child can ever be guilty of a crime. And all children are entitled to have the focus of the state, their welfare and their well-being. And of course, they have to add on the protection of the public for that tiny number, if you take a child, instead of punishing them because they were running drugs for a gang and they were only 11 or 12,

they got caught with some gear or whatever it was, he stops to say, okay, this is a criminal justice intervention, we now need to arrest them, we now need to process them through a police station, and you say to yourself, what on earth is a 12 year old doing running around with bags of crap? So why is that happening?

And you intervene then for their welfare, not to punish them for whatever it is that they've been doing, but you ask yourselves, how did they get there, How do we take them out of that and make sure that they can get into a life where their basic needs are taking care of, where they can get some sort of education where their psychological and other well-being factors can be addressed? And when you start looking at it from the completely other end of the telescope from criminal justice, the outcomes that you get are quite extraordinary and so much more successful than our system and infinitely more successful than what is undoubtedly the most broken system in the world of the US.

Yeah, and I think we also need to think about the impact of shame, you know, when the whole world is talking about you because they've read it in the newspaper, and we're already dealing with people that have probably had a very high shame experience in their life. It's really damaging, really damaging to our brains. Yeah, I think one of the things that really shocked me was when I was filming for the BBC a few years back, we filmed at a young offender's institution up in Scotland. And I spoke to the governor. I interviewed the governor for the programme. And she'd been in the prison service for many, many years. And she was the governor of the largest young offender's institution in Scotland. I think it had 1,200 young people in custody there. So a very big sort of place. And she said, look, these young people I have in here,

and they used to call them young, they didn't call them inmates. They at least tried to use sort of language that was a slightly more kind of reasonable, I suppose, in my view. But she said, look, I have young people in here who have witnessed by the age of 14 or 15 when they come in here. they've witnessed five unnatural deaths in front of them. So people dying of an overdose or violence or whatever it might be. But can you imagine that five by the age of 14 or 15? I mean, most of us have never experienced anything like that. If you live to a thousand, we'd never see an unnatural death right in front of us.

And yet these young people had experienced that utter, like the trauma that is unimaginable of seeing one of your parents die of an overdose or go to prison, as you say. Or sometimes both. You know, she said there's many people in here, both parents are in prison. And the kids in prison too. And he's just like, well, hold on. Like at some point, are you going to say to yourself, they're not blaming these kids for stuff that's completely out of their hands?

And also, which is generational. So their parents who have been through the same dysfunctional criminal justice system, which has left them unemployable, which has left them in the vaulting crime or other forms of illegal behavior of some sort. And, you know, it is so obvious that everything, thing trickles down to summit. Good things trickle down generations and bad things trickle down generations and you just have to stop to it and put you know you know it sounds sort of really cheesy but you have to put your arms around children as a society if you don't as a

society put your arms around the most damage of vulnerable children then what's the point of a society what in what way is it a society if you treat with cruelty those children who have suffered the most and that's exactly what we're doing and I think it's just horrendous but I see no sign whatsoever at all of anything positive in terms of public policy to address it. No, no one's talking about it, are they? Like, and I think we should be, which is another reason why I wanted you on this podcast. Another really interesting thing to talk about just before we finish is the idea, should we not just legalise all drugs? You know, you put that in your book. And, you know, on paper, you're like, well, no, of course not. Since the book was published, I think

New York has made cannabis legal, am I right in saying that? Oh, not just New York. I mean, half the states of the US. Okay. Scotland has opened up consumption rooms, and I know in the book you speak about, actually some countries have gone beyond that and actually do issue medical grade heroin, for example. Could you talk to us a little bit about all that, please? Yeah, I will. So drugs is, the reason drugs play such a big part in my book, of my thinking about criminal justice is because it plays such a big part in the criminal justice

system. So drug crimes and drug offences represent a direct drug crimes like drug dealing and drug possession and trafficking, etc. represent a big, big chunk of criminal justice. And that's sort of across a wide range of different types of situations, obviously from sort of low level, street level dealers up to vast international importations of tons of drugs at a time. But so that's sort of one chunk of criminal justice and the other chunk of criminal justice, of course, is all of those people who are addicted who have to pay for the drugs at vast expense. And I think what most people probably don't realize is that drugs are really cheap. If you were to go to Afghanistan, you could buy a kilo of heroin for a couple of grand. By the time it's being transported through six different stages of logistics to get to a user in the UK, that's saying kilo of heroin is 100 grand.

it's got up 50-fold in value and it's got up 50-fold in value not because heroin's expensive to make because if it was it wouldn't cost two grams for a kilo of pure heroin in Afghanistan but because it's very expensive to transport in an illegal way and so the consequences that your drug users are in Chicago or London or Birmingham or wherever in a sort of in the countries where that have a high use rates of all of these drugs the the wealthier countries the cost on the street of a to a user is hundreds of pounds or week now who Who's got hundreds of pounds a week? Well, nobody, not the sort of people that tend to become addicted to crack or heroin or spice.

And so how do those people afford hundreds of pounds a week? The answer is they have to commit crime to get it. And so you have a system where you create an artificial market for drugs that aren't really that expensive and aren't worth very much. And suddenly they are because of their addictive qualities and their addictive properties and because of the huge kind of attrition rate through the supply chain of police intervention, etc. You end up with a situation where you could ask yourself this, is there anything wrong with drugs? And the answer is no, of course there isn't. And in fact, the evidence is, you know,

I wrote about in the book, is that drugs and psychotropic substances, natural psychotropic substances, were a huge part of human evolution. They led to big advances because we co-evolved with these psychotropic substances. And the reason we co-evolved with them, because they help those leaps of imagination, these leaps of kind of science and these leaps of human ingenuity, which took us to another stage of our own evolution. And so drugs have always played a part in human evolution. When you have a sort of an entire industry, which is focused entirely on getting people

addicted to drugs for profit, then you end up with the situation we have, which is the drugs themselves can often be unsafe to take because no one really knows what's in them. They could be chopped together with all sorts. They could either be too weak, too strong. We could have, you know, adulterants, all sorts of poisons, et cetera, et cetera.

So we have all of that. So if you get rid of all that noise and Switzerland did exactly that, and I wrote about it in the book. So what they did in Switzerland? They had hundreds of people lying around in railway stations with needles sticking out of their arm and parks and playgrounds. And there was a heroin epidemic in the 80s in Switzerland. Now, what do you do there?

Okay, what we do in the West or what we do in the UK or in America, is we just increase the sentences for drug dealing. And we get bigger and bigger sentences. to the point that people now in the UK are getting sentences of 30 years for drug trafficking. And in the US, people are getting life without parole, strikes as supplying cannabis. And they have to be in prison for 60 years for that. So what they've done in Switzerland was they said, OK, let's look at it a slightly different way. What is what is the real problem with all this heroin?

And the real problem is it's the people on the streets with the needles that connect their arm, people overdosing and dying on the streets of Geneva and Zurich, etc. That's the problem. The problem isn't heroin as a substance. the problem is people are dying. So how do you avoid the death and how do you avoid the gangland supply chains and the and the turf wars, etc? And the answer is the government gives the heroin way for free. And so, and okay, well, we can't do that. Surely that's wrong, people say. But why is it wrong? So, so I visited the heroin assisted treatment programs in, in Geneva. And what they do, they literally, people who have a heroin addiction can go to the heroin assisted treatment program

and they will be given a bespoke dosage of pharmaceutical grade heroin which they can take under supervised conditions with nurses available if someone does overdose or something goes wrong they have medical assistance immediately to hand the majority of those people don't commit any crimes and it costs the state a tiny fraction of what it costs us in the UK to deal with people with heroin addiction because those people have been criminalised and a part of the whole you know industry of criminal justice the arrests and the high profile trials and the going to prison for for a long time, all of that stuff. But what they've done quietly in Switzerland, not a country renowned for its radical left-wing policies by any mean. What they've quietly done in Switzerland is almost eradicated overdose on the streets of Geneva, in particular, which is the city that I visited.

So they went from having hundreds of overdoses a year, so almost zero deaths by overdose a year. And then they also got rid of almost all of the drug-related crime, that street crimes, that's dealing, or burned, burglaries and robberies and stuff that's used to buy drugs. And it's almost all gone. And that, to me, tells you that it's not just about legalisation,

because legalisation on its own doesn't work because you still have drug gangs supplying everything. And that doesn't really work because those gangs are still going to be violent. They're still going to compete for turf and they're still going to do all the other sort of the things that damage our society. But if as a society, you decide to license drug supply so that people can get adults, of course, can get drugs, but they know what's in them. just as they know what's in a bottle of whiskey, or I'm not suggesting that alcohol is a great

thing. It does very big harms. But the fact is that nobody is taking a can of beer and it's eight times stronger than they think it is. And they drop debt because they had so much alcohol in one go and they didn't know what was in the can. At least in a legalized and licensed system, people know what they're taking. And so the biggest tragedy is that I've ever come across in my sort of research with a book were the deaths of young people, particularly underage children, them from taking drugs that they had no idea what they were taking and it turned out that they were taking something so strong it would have killed you know 10 horses never mind a 15 year old girl which is one of the stories I wrote about in the book you know where we had a young

girl whose mother had cautioned her about drugs and how you know they can they can put stuff in them they can like they can use adulterance so she'd said to her friends we need to get the like we need to make sure because if it's pure that like then we're going to be okay problem is they did they got 92% pure MDMA and she died within a couple of hours because it was so strong in a legal license market that would never happen because even if young people got hold of drugs they'd at least know what they were they'd at least know because they come in a packet and they tell you what's in them just as when young people get hold of beer or wine or vodka or whatever they know what they're taking and that to me is critical as is removing the entire criminal

infrastructure the whole drug networks the gangs the supply chains you get rid of all of that because you can go to a license dispensary and get ecstasy or cannabis or cocaine or heroin for that matter, although that would be through a sort of medical-assisted program. If you remove all of the criminal infrastructure around it, you end up with a situation where most of the harms of drugs, which are, you know, a long-term addiction, lack of access to healthcare, lack of access to resource, et cetera, and then ultimately revolving door of criminality, most of that goes away and you end up with a relatively small number of long-term addicts who are serviced by the state at relatively low cost and who can live a law-abiding life for most of the

people who go to those clinics in switzerland they go to college or they go to work and they just say i was in the waiting room they don't look like drug addicts look like in england they look like the rest of us it's just that they have a psychological long-term physical psychological addiction to mostly heroin and if they get enough heroin they're fine and and then they can live their life and some of them most of in fact over a time people come off those drugs naturally although that's not the point that they're not being told you have to come off drugs they're being told you can have the drugs but you know there's access to if you if you don't want to take them anymore this we're going to support you through that but if you want to take them for the rest of

life we'll support you through that too because ultimately you're not doing anyone any harm you know you may be harming yourself but you're not harming anyone else if we're giving you a maintenance dose of heroin to make sure you can function without him to commit crimes or go to dealers on the streets or any of that stuff and you end up as i say with a much much safer city not only for the users safer for them which to me is important might not be to most people but safer for everybody else because so many of those layers of criminality have gone so when you when you see what actually works to reduce the harms of drugs you realize that the biggest harms come from prohibition itself as they found out in the US of course a hundred years ago when

they when they experimented with prohibition of alcohol catastrophic mistake led to a huge explode crime which to this day the infrastructure of organized crime established a hundred years ago during prohibition still there it's supplying heroin and it's supplying it's supplying meth and it's supplying all the other drugs so what they're doing in the states is tinkering with legalization of cannabis that's the that's the that's the That's the lowest level that you could possibly do. And for me, it's far more important to licence and legalise those drugs that cause the most direct harm, which is heroin crack and in the US mess.

It's so, so interesting. I love that this podcast will be landing on people earlier in their career as well that might still have that drive and that curiosity and the ability to kind of maybe take some of this stuff forwards one day as well. working with addicts is really important and you know that that that community is one of the least served by psychological resource and and much of that resource which is there in in respect of addiction is all focused on abstinence and trying to get people off drugs in inverted comms if you bake that your mission you're going to fail because that because many many people will

remain addicted whether it's alcohol or to drugs which are prohibited because they are they're wired that way and it can be incurable but what even if you can't cure the addiction you can cure the harms of the addiction not just for them but for the you but for the rest of us and if any of your sort of future or young psychologists are looking for a career you could do much worse than a career in addiction and i think you said in the book that actually even in prison people will go into prison with no drug problems but because of the drug testing regimes because heroin apparently lasts less time in the system, they might well switch to heroin and come out as heroin addicts.

And that is not good. That was a scary policy. So when they introduced what's called MDT or mandatory drug testing in prisons some years ago, prior to that, cannabis had been fairly, and of course you could still smoke in prisons then. They banned smoking in prisons now altogether. But at that time, cannabis was fairly common in prisons, and the prisons kind of turned a bit of a blind eye.

it because mostly didn't do that much harm like mostly it stopped people being violent and people were more compliant if they had access to cannabis than if they didn't so it was kind of an i remember doing cases with very very violent clients back in the sort of 2000s like 20 something years ago and and they were talking about people who were like who would shoot your you in the head um in the course of a robbery like extraordinary violent people and one of these trials was a client was been tried who i wrote about in the book for for shooting five people with a with a with a with a handgun and an AK 47 you know so very violent individual and as they were as we were waiting for the verdict to come back I went down to

the high security cells at the courts and there was wads of cannabis smoke everywhere the whole the whole place and I said to the prison officers you know this is they having a party or something he said listen with this not let them smoke as much as they want because they don't cause us any trouble they're just sitting there and a laugh like like singing and you know like like which I know obviously I'm taking that to an extreme but but but that's what happened and that caused no problem so then they brought in mandatory drug testing thinking that's a good idea because we'll get people clean now but the problem is that cannabis stays in the system for sort of anything up to six weeks or so it's a very long kind of half life in in in in the blood and so so of course people

are oh dear i'm going to get i'm going to get a positive drug test so so but heroin only stays in the system for two or three days so suddenly we went from a system where everyone kind of had access to could smoke cannabis and it wasn't a big issue and the and the authorities turned the blind to a situation where heroin became a massive massive issue in our prisons and those people who went in couldn't get cannabis but they could get heroin so they start and so you absolutely have had thousands of people who have entered prison without a heroin habit and come out with a heroin habit and then a long-term heroin habit which cost society huge amounts in in collateral damage and collateral costs of crime and of course ultimately usually leads them back in

inside yet again so so madness in my opinion and you know drugs are just substances they don't have any moral quality they are simply chemical substances and it's how we choose to regulate the supply and the distribution of those substances which dictates how much harm they cause and we've chosen the worst possible route which is prohibition of almost everything including cannabis and and excluding only really alcohol as a sort of an intoxicant so we we prohibited almost every other form of intoxicant even those which are relatively mild in their effect so so we've done that and what have we done as a result we've also doubled down on the length of sentences so we've doubled the length of sentences for drug dealing at the same time and we've done all of that because because it gets tough

on drugs and drug dealers and you know the americans are now blowing up boats in the caribbean you know people without a trial because they're saying they're trafficking drugs is that going to save a life on the streets of Baltimore or Oakland? Of course not. It doesn't make any difference whatsoever. If it does make a difference, it makes the drug slightly more expensive, slightly more risky, and creates even more violence in the world of drugs and drug dealing. So we keep making these same stupid mistakes when actually we should be asking ourselves, as ever, and maybe it's just because of my personality type. But I'm always asking myself, how can we do it a bit better? What's the better way of doing it? Instead of what's the way that fits most with our preconceptions

and our prejudices. And when you're led by preconceptions and prejudice as a society, you end up pretty messed up. And that's, I'm afraid, in terms of drugs where we are right now. It's so, so interesting. And I think I'm kind of looking at this from a couple of different angles, really, the kind of psychologist angle where we know that when we're feeling a certain kind of way, we either want to bump ourselves up or we want to bump ourselves down. And that's where substances can be transformative for people that are really struggling with intense trauma or, you know, self-criticism or just, you know, intrusive visions. Like, you know, that's when substances can kind of come into their own. So if we can protect people from

experiencing those traumas to begin with, then that's ideal. But yeah, like if we were to legalise that, then the shame, the blame, the kind of problems are reduced. But I'm also thinking about this as a parent, Chris. So I've got two boys. I know you've got quite a few children. And if it isn't illegal, you've got six of them. If it isn't illegal, I guess my fear is, God, they'll be out doing heroin, like, you know, and there's nothing I can do, there's nothing the police can do. It doesn't work like that? It doesn't work like that, doesn't it?

Because first of all, of course, it would be illegal to supply drugs to under 18s, as it is to supply alcohol. But I accept that that doesn't stop under 18s getting hold of alcohol. But the reality is, if you had a legal supply chain, you would have different. different levels of control and access for different kinds of drugs. So for example, THC, or the main ingredient of Canada, is sort of THC vapes and THC edibles, et cetera, which are legal in many, many parts of the US now and some parts of Europe and other places.

You know, you have a lower level of control over access to that, then you would have over access to heroin, particularly pharmaceutical, injectable pharmaceutical heroin. And so you're not legal, so it's really important, I think, to understand, Legalization on its own isn't the answer. You have to have legalization, you have to have licensing of sale and supply,

and you have to have regulations. That regulation, of course, is about quality control, it's about ensuring that labeling is correct and ensuring that, you know, that dosages are measurable and are measured in a scientific way, just as you have to do with the supply of alcohol. Every single bottle of whiskey has to declare upon it

exactly what's in it, exactly how much alcohol is in it, and every alcohol product that you buy has the same thing. With drugs, you would do exactly the same thing. Of course, you would still have health warnings, et cetera. But if you had a system like this, would it mean that the 15, 16 year olds would experiment with heroin more? I don't think it would. I honestly don't. Because the reason why young people sometimes do get hooked on heroin is because they're introduced to it by dealers who have a motive to get them hooked on heroin and want another customer for an indefinite period. Once you remove the sort of the illegal supply chain and everything is applied for a licensed kind of system,

them and no one's pushing drugs, but they're available. So those who do want to, for example, regularly use cannabis in some way, shape, or form and not smoke it because the smoking, of course, is terribly damaging to the help, to the health, but, but if they're at relatively low harm ways for it to ingest cannabis and people want to do that, who are we as a society to say they can't? I mean, what, what, why, what, what, what, what, what right do we have to say that you can't if what you're doing isn't harming anyone else. And I think the reality is that most young people would go through.

through a cycle of experimentation in exactly the same way as most of them do with alcohol. But interestingly, nowadays, of course, we're seeing young people increasingly rejecting alcohol and using it much less than was the case 20, 30 years ago. So these things come and go in patterns and cycles, which aren't necessarily to do with the supply chain, but to do with the way that young people are kind of,

their culture is developing, including through social media, et cetera, and what popular isn't popular. But I don't, myself, I don't think for a moment, If you had a legal license and regulated, kids will be more at risk of trying heroin than they are now. I think they're much more at risk now. Because if they seek out cannabis, for example, they're going to be offered other drugs by the second dealer. Probably not always.

There are some people who just deal weed, I get that. But there are also those who very much use it as an opportunity to kind of try a bit of this, try a bit of that, try something else. And then you have a problem because all of that stuff is all mixed up. There's no real control as to what's in it or anything like that. I genuinely believe that in a licensed system, you would find that fewer young people would try the most dangerous drugs, maybe a slightly higher number would try cannabis in particular than try it now, but I'm not sure we'd make that a huge difference, because let's be honest, cannabis is available pretty freely anywhere in the UK.

I mean, you walk around London. I mean, it is almost like being in Amsterdam used to be, you know, 30 years ago. You know, the smell of cannabis is everywhere, and it's clearly extremely excess. Well, we know that, as a lawyer, I know that as a criminal lawyer, because one of the reasons is because of the invention of, you know, hydroponic systems and really, really efficient ways to grow cannabis. So we've moved our entire model from imported cannabis to homegrown cannabis, and we've largely moved on from physical cannabis being smoked into oils and bakes and other kinds of ways of consuming. So it we've moved, even in the illegal market, we've moved away from the most dangerous form of consumption, which is smoking. And we've moved towards other forms of consumption, such oils and liquids and edible, which are, you know, yes, they still have the psychological impact and the psychological effect, but they don't really damage your body particularly physically in the way that smoking does and did. So, so I, you know, in the end, let people make choices and also let young people, you know,

would I be petrified at the thought of my kids trying ecstasy in a club? I'd be more petrified now than I would be if I knew that what the ecstasy they were taking, was the dosage was appropriate for their height, their weight, their side, and wasn't going to, wasn't going to cause them to end up dead in a hospital. So I'd be much rather they tried something in those circumstances than, for example, in the case of alcohol, you know, tried so illegally made alcohol that had all sorts of stuff in it and who knows what. I'd much rather they were drinking something that I knew what was in it and they can make a mistake, they can make mistake. And some of them, you know, yes, a proportion of those who use drugs,

even in a license and legalized market, will have a problem with it, undoubtedly. But you also then have to ensure that you make accessible, you know, rehab and other forms of sort of therapeutic responses to real drug problems and psychosis in a way that at the moment we simply, we under-resource all of that provision. And many, many of those who have the worst forms of psychological and physical harms from drugs end up dead. And that to me is an utter tragedy and shows you once again why the system is so badly broken. Yeah, I think when I asked the question, I had forgotten about the licensable bit. I was still thinking about it being legal, but, you know, happening in an underpass.

And that is not what we're talking about. Not what I'm advocating. No, and you know, anyone who said, make it a free-for-all, let anybody deal any drugs they want. I think that's just been safe. That would be, even worse than what we have met. Okay, I totally agree. Just before we finish, in case people are like, I don't even know what a barrister is, I don't even know what a KEC is.

Could you give us a very brief overview about what that is, Chris? Of course. So in my case, I'm a barrister. I was called to the bar in 1993, and that means that you've become someone who's entitled to wear a wig and a gown and all the costume that people will have seen on TV and in movies and so forth. And my job is basically to go to court and act in criminal cases. And in my case, I defend people accused of serious crimes.

And I'm the one that does the trial. I'm the one that cross-examines the witnesses and makes the speeches to the jury and tries to persuade the jury to my side of the case, which in my case is defence. I've always done defence. I don't do prosecution cases. So I'm basically a criminal defence lawyer, a trial lawyer. And a KC is simply the most senior member of the profession of barrisers. And it stands for King's Council.

And it's an appointment which you can apply for. Any barrister after a certain period can apply to become a KC. if you're appointed, it means that essentially you are in the top 10% in terms of the profession in terms of quality standards and everything else. So KCs are essentially as a brand. We are the most senior and the most expert barristers or trial lawyers in my case in the country. And our job is, you know, as casees, we tend to only deal with extremely complex and serious cases. Or in my case, many of my cases are quite high profile cases, actually, for the celebrities or very wealthy people. You know, that's the world in which

operate and that's the world which pays for this big garden. And it is a beautiful garden. I think I've been hearing ladders and tractors and birds. Like, there's been a lot going on, but it is. The gardener decided to bring out his, to bring out his little tractors. It is absolutely beautiful. Chris, if people want to learn more about you, your work, your chambers. Where's the best place for them to do that? Well, the most place is crystalkc.com, which has got everything about me. It's got all of the different things I do, not just my legal work. It has a lot of details some of the cases I've been involved in, the high profile stuff. It has a lot of access to a lot of the writing I've done,

journalistic pieces that I've done. And it gives you access through to my YouTube channel, Crystal KC's YouTube, which has lots of mentoring stuff for young people, career stuff, as well as sort of policy and stuff like that. So on the whole, I would just say go to crystalkasey got.com and you can also follow me on X and LinkedIn. Amazing. I have loved our chat. It's been five years in the making, but it's been everything I needed it to be and more.

Thank you so much for your time. I will make sure everything is linked. And I would just like to say, if you found this interesting, please do buy, read, listen to Crystal Casey's book, which is called Justice on Trial because it's so interesting. Thank you so much for your time, Chris. You know, the talk has been fascinating and thank you for being so interested

and thank you for, you know, showing that Milton Keynes can have the odd success story. Yes, indeed it can. Thank you again for your time. Thank you so much to our incredible guest for today. If you have found this helpful, please do drop some support into the comments, like the video. And yeah, let me know what your take. home points are. If you're listening on Spotify, you can comment, you can ask questions, you can support the episode, you can tell us what you think, and if you're on Apple, please do

rate and review. It just, you know, it really connects with me as an idea, and I think being so trauma-informed myself as a clinician, it's hard not to see trauma everywhere. What do you think I would love to know. Have you read the book? Has this encouraged you to read the book? I love it on audible. I've listened twice, as I think I did say in episode as well. We've got a little special mini series on crime and justice. I think it's next week we've got an episode scheduled with a clinical psychologist working in justice systems and with another member of her team as well as we discuss what it's really like to be released from prison and what the rehab and release processes are like. So if you found this episode helpful, I think you will find the next

one really helpful too. If you are an aspiring psych and you love sessions like this, I think you'll really, really like the aspiring psychologist membership. Do check out the details in the show notes or in the description. And if you like helping people you work with to understand trauma and grief and depression and why it affects us in the way it does, please do check out the Our Tricky Brain Kit at www. Aspiring-psychologist.com. You can get an exclusive

YouTube discount, 10 pounds off, with the code YouTube 10. If you're looking to become a psychologist, then let this be your guide. With this podcast, that's your side. You'll be on your way to being qualified. I'm a Psychologist podcast with Dr. Mary and Trent. Hi, my name is Emily. I am a master's student studying clinical psychology at Southampton.

I bought the book of the Clinical Psychologist Collective to help myself prepare for my first round of doctorate applications, and I'm very. so glad I did. Seeing how others have reflected on their journeys has been so insightful and it's given me a lot to reflect about with my own journey and skills. It's also helped to put things into perspective and reminded me that if I don't get onto the doctorate this year, that's okay. I think the most unexpected pleasure of this book, however, was just how inspirational each and every person's journey was and using these stories as my morning motivation each day has been such a pleasure. I'm almost reluctant to come to the end.