Clutching a single plastic bag, Karl Smith steps outside the prison gates. The sun is shining. The birds are chirping. He’d almost forgotten what fresh air felt like.
The dad was finally free having served a sentence for theft. But that freedom wouldn’t last long – he had nowhere to go.
Homeless and on the streets, Karl found himself back behind bars within just a matter of weeks for stealing food.
READ MORE: Join the FREE Manchester Evening News WhatsApp community
This seemingly endless cycle went on for decades until he finally decided to break the pattern and turn his life around for good.
“Forty years of my life vanished before my eyes,” the 59-year-old told the Manchester Evening News. “At the end of the day, it crumbled my whole life in front of me.”
Karl first found himself on the streets at the age of 14. Growing up with four siblings, his mum struggled to put food on the table and he was placed into the care system.
Karl hated the children’s home. Having suffered mental and physical abuse, he escaped through an open window one day and never looked back.
But with nowhere to call home, Karl had to sleep in parks and gardens and beg for food to survive.
He was just 16 the first time he wound up in prison for a year. “I was stealing food and items to sell,” he continued. “My whole mindset was being a thief – I wasn’t a very good one because I was always in jail.
“I’d just go into shops and pick up boxes and walk out with them. It went from that to burgling houses, burgling shops – it was everything that wasn’t nailed down in the end.”
On his release, Karl attempted to find work through several six-month employment schemes. But at the end of the programmes, he was never offered a job.
Karl once again found himself back behind bars at 18. Tragically, he would later be released as a drug addict.
“I got into drugs in prison,” Karl, who lives in Liverpool, continued. “I used to smoke weed but I ran out once.
“Some kid had heroin. I didn’t know what it was, I’d never even heard of it. He told me to have a go and because it was taking a few days for my weed to get sorted, I tried it. Within a few days, I was addicted.”
The next few decades of Karl’s life were a blur – seeing him sofa surf and take heroin in-between his constant stints in jail for stealing, begging and drug use, serving time in prisons across the country, including Manchester's Strangeways.
Across England and Wales, 3,194 prison leavers were released homeless between April 2020 and March 2021.
Prison leavers who are released homeless are more than 50 per cent more likely to reoffend within a year, according to Ministry of Justice data.
This is one statistic Karl knows well. “Arresting people for being homeless only made them stay homeless,” he added.
“I was a drain on everybody. You don’t think properly. There was no cure in jail, there’s plenty of drugs. The jails are full of them. Sadly, it’s a familiar story with everyone.”
Karl has also witnessed some horrors during his time in the prison system. Over the years, he’s seen people get stabbed or beaten with metal poles for trivial reasons.
"If you show a sign of weakness people will prey on you,” he said. “It’s a rumour mill in jail. You’re in the most charged atmosphere.
“People keep themselves to themselves and do their own thing, but it’s human nature to try and interact with people.”
While serving a long sentence in Durham for drug dealing, it took one remark from a prison worker to give Karl the wakeup call he’d needed for 40 years.
“He said, 'You’re one of those that keep me in a job,’” Karl continued. “I was one of those people who kept the system upright and going.
“I was 50 and it was a wakeup call for me. I asked [the staff] to leave me alone in my cell and let me do my own thing.”
Karl got clean from drugs and alcohol and kept out of trouble until the end of his sentence in 2016. Following his release, he lived in a homeless hostel and remained there for six months before being approached by a staff member from Crisis, a UK homeless charity.
The charity helped him find his own home and enrolled him at a local college so he could get his English and maths qualifications.
“When Crisis came to the hostel I was staying in, I was in such a mentally bad place that it took six months for me to talk with their support worker, but I was so sick of everything by then that I gradually opened up,” Karl said.
“They got me in touch with a mental health worker, then help with housing and benefits, even my English and maths.
“I was on a countdown to go back to jail or go back to the streets, but they started giving me the tools to help myself. If it wasn’t for Crisis, I wouldn’t have known about those services. They invested in me and got a human being at the end of it.”
READ NEXT:
- Boy, 9, diagnosed with unusual condition after complaining of tummy ache
- 'My twin girls have both been experiencing cancer symptoms for the last six years, but only one of them is sick'
- Cleaner scarred for life and 'suffering flashbacks' from what she found in Manchester flat
- 'I genuinely thought he was going to kill me - then I noticed the big window behind him'
- 'My dad had his £37k life savings wiped out by his own granddaughter - the betrayal has been incomprehensible'
