The phone call came on a Saturday morning, when I was away in the Lake District. One of the young ex-prisoners I mentor, as part of the Longford Trust’s programme to support them through university and back into the workplace, had been arrested. Tom – not his real name – has severe mental-health problems, which is why he had ended up in prison in the first place, but he had successfully been managing them, had got his degree and was taking the first steps into a career. Then his old problems came back to haunt him, as they do with mental illness. While out of control, he had damaged some property, the police had been called, and – because he wasn’t himself – this vulnerable, talented, fragile young man had resisted arrest, assaulting one of them. The re