And then Jayne became caught up in the toils of the welfare

And then Jayne became caught up in the toils of the welfare state. There was a delay over the assessment that should have been done before her release, and without that assessment no funding could come through Jayne, too, was heading for No Fixed Abode. Cusick went to Salters, spoke to staff there and sifted through mounds of paperwork A visit to York was arranged for Jayne. Then, just before Christmas, with days to go before Jayne’s time at Salters was up, the probation service contacted Cusick – they could find nowhere else for Jayne to go. They wrote to the Department of Health saying, “Any chance of a successful rehabilitation for Jayne will need a high level of support and therefore funding. Requests for Jayne have been negatively received due to lack of resources and prioritisation.” But Jayne was not deemed psychiatrically ill and therefore was not the responsibility of the Department of Health. But then, at the end of last year, her prescribed time there drew to a close, and no subsequent placement had been found for her.Staff at Salters were concerned that Jayne would end up back on the streets.

The courts sent her to Salters, a secure unit in Peterborough where at last Jayne found the care and therapy she needed. When she was 15, Jayne was found “wandering down the main street of my mum’s village carrying a carving knife”. The following year she attacked her father and step-mother’s house, smashing their windows with stones from a rockery and attacking her father with a knife. (“He always said that rockery was a bad idea,” says Jayne.) She has also been in trouble for shoplifting, breaking a care worker’s wrist, stabbing a policeman in the finger, and setting her B & B bed on fire.

Jayne has a history of violence that would lead many to write her off, but to Cusick she is a damaged kid who needs help. “He’d end up spending his life in a psychiatric hospital.”And then there is Jayne Shaw, a pale 18-year-old who discharged herself from a local psychiatric hospital two-and-a-half months ago and has been staying at Cusick’s own home in Filey, too frightened to leave her. Cusick fears that if she accepted the new registration the local authority has offered to the Coach House, Jason wouldn’t qualify for care there, in which case it would only be a matter of time before he was convicted again. But his learning disability means that he is easily led, and in the past he has got into bad company.

“Because of the criminal offence I did, I have nowhere to go. I had aggressive behaviour and very bad temper and a mild learning disability.”"He was a thug when he came to me four years ago,” says Cusick, “full of bravado, the big hard man.” Cusick worked hard with Jason and has encouraged him to take a work placement locally. If he wasn’t in the Coach House, he says, he’d be on the streets. Diagnosed by the probation services as borderline educationally subnormal with behavioural difficulties, Jason is withdrawn, his voice barely rising above a whisper. As it is, his funding has been cut off anyway (because the Coach House is unregistered).Jason, the other client who was moved from Wentworth Road to the Coach House last August, is a 22-year-old whose movements are so self-effacing as to suggest that he wants to airbrush himself out of others’ perceptions.