Karyn McCluskey plots the lives of people she knows, at seven yearly intervals, as they descend into drug addiction and crime
Published 20th Oct 2026, 06:00 BST
I wonder how many of you have watched 70 Up, the final instalment of the ITV series following a group of children from the age of seven, filmed every seven years. It’s based on the saying: “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.”
It made me think of some people I know, and what impact their lives would have had on the public if a camera crew turned up every seven years. For them, at seven, domestic abuse is a permanent backdrop: shouting, screaming, violence.
They’re often unable to wake their parent from a drug-induced haze. There’s no food at home, the bedding is filthy, and one of the men who comes and goes at night comes into their room too.
First-name terms with the police
At 14, they’re no longer in school. There are numerous partners at home, all violent, or using, or both. They’ve found a tribe of other young people just like them. Men are offering them money to courier drugs.
At 21, they’re taking drugs themselves. The police know them on first-name terms. They’ve been in and out of custody and have just done their first prison term. At 28, they look 48. They’ve had a child, now in state care, and prison feels like a second home.
At 35, they’re sofa-surfing. Shoplifting is the way they support their habit. The noise inside their head is only ever quietened by drugs. Everything is filthy, and some of their friends are already dead.
At 42… I’m not sure it would be shown. That episode would come with a trigger warning and air after the watershed.
The £5.8 billion cost of failing people
If it was a programme, it would be the arithmetic of neglect, and we could plot the exact moment each instalment went wrong. Every age a missed opportunity, more trauma ladled onto someone already carrying a burden so heavy it’s surprising they survived at all.
The 2019 Hard Edges Scotland report showed how homelessness, addiction and justice involvement collide in people’s lives. New analysis estimates the cost to public services and the wider economy is at least £5.8 billion a year.
You won’t find a single line in the Scottish Budget labelled ‘the cost of failing people’. Put that bill in one place and people would be horrified. They would demand we reduce it.
I love the 7 Up series because it unfolds gently, lives measured out in careful seven-year instalments. The problems in the lives that I’ve described accumulate, fast, and mostly out of sight. We professionals or spectators nod with knowing glances, understanding what the next instalment will look like.
Childhood is not a life sentence
But I’ve watched that script rewritten: lives that looked exactly like that at 21, until someone showed up, consistently, and by 35 I was watching a different person.
People thriving, not just surviving. Holding down work, keeping a family together. Rarely one dramatic rescue; usually just someone meeting them where they were and staying long enough to matter.
The point is not that childhood doesn’t matter. Of course it does. But it doesn’t have to become a life sentence. We should never get so good at predicting the next instalment that we forget we can help rewrite it.
Karyn McCluskey is Community Justice Scotland’s chief executive