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Amber heard vs johnny depp

6/11/2022

483 words: 4-minute read

Earlier this month a jury in a Virginia court found in favour of Johnny Depp in his defamation suit against his ex-wife and fellow actor Amber Heard. This was Part Two of their battle over defamation and libel - in Part One Depp lost his November 2020 libel case against the Sun newspaper in the UK.

Reaction to the Virginia verdict has mostly focused on two issues: first, the potential disaster it represents for women who want to call out domestic violence in the public arena, particularly the courts, and second, the effect that televising the trial might have had on its outcome. Sometimes the two are elided as in Moira Donegan’s pointing out that screenshots of Heard’s weeping face were turned into a meme, her crying became a TikTok trend, and lip-sync re-enactments of her testimony went viral.

There is no doubt that misogyny and TV voyeurism are a toxic combination and it’s clear that, in any process involving these two features, women will do badly. In this sense the Virginia trial ran absolutely true to form.

But in focusing on misogyny and the televising of trials there’s a deeper problem that goes missing. Here’s a counterfactual question. Imagine a world in which there is no misogyny and no televising of trials: would we be guaranteed fairer outcomes in the judicial process?

The answer? Probably not. The most profound systemic issue here is neither misogyny nor television, it’s the adversarial judicial system that invites and even encourages the poisonous anatagonism that was the hallmark of the Heard-Depp trial. The mistake is to think that hostility is specific to this trial and is largely absent in all the others. Less obviously, but equally detrimentally, it is present in every single one of them.

This is because an adversarial system invites strategising and deceit, poor listening, and a lack of respect and concern - all of which were fully on display in Heard-Depp, and magnified by misogyny. What’s needed is a deliberative system in which participants:

treat each other with mutual respect and equal concern
listen to one another
speak truthfully, and in which,
there is no use of force, strategising or deceit, and no sign of partisanship, self-interest or ideology

Pipe dream? Perhaps, but no more than a world rid of misogyny. The difference is that, in a deliberative judicial system, misogyny would have a vanishingly small influence on proceedings, while in a world rid of misogyny but in other respects left the same, the judicial system will continue to turn out strategised, deceitful, disrespectful - and therefore fundamentally unfair - outcomes, for both women and men.

Tarana Burke, founder of #MeToo, gets it right: “The ‘me too’ movement isn’t dead, this system is dead. This is the same legal system that y’all have been relying on for justice and accountability for decades to no avail. When you get the verdict you want, ‘the movement works’ – when you don’t, it’s dead”.

Ukraine - land for peace?

5/24/2022

538 words: 4-minute read

The war in Ukraine has been going on for just over three months and there’s no end in sight. Frustrated by Ukrainian resistance, Russia is focusing its efforts on the east and south of the country and it seems to be employing tactics used in Syria, laying waste to whatever gets in the way. The enormous civilian suffering is plain to see, and the collateral damage is spreading further and wider in the form of hikes in energy prices and world food shortages (especially for the poor). Somalia and Benin source 100% of imported wheat from Russia and Ukraine, Egypt 82%, Sudan and Lebanon 75%, and Libya 50%. As Tom Stevenson writes in the London Review of Books, 'The longer the war continues, the greater the certainty of hunger'.

In addition the geopolitical stakes have risen enormously with Sweden and Finland applying to join NATO after decades of neutrality. So the downsides of the conflict are obvious: clear and increasing local, regional and global instability. You’d have thought that everyone would be trying their hardest to end the war.

Against this backdrop the decision by western countries to supply Ukraine with ever-increasing amounts of weaponry at ever-increasing levels of sophistication is hard to understand, because this does nothing but prolong the war and the suffering and instability that goes with it. The defence is that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and nations should be free to determine their own fate rather than have it determined by force of arms. Of course, but with sovereignty comes responsibility, and we should be asking what the responsible course of action is at this juncture. How should sovereign Ukraine act, now?

The answer is: land for peace. Long touted as a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the principle needs to be dusted off and applied to the Ukraine war. It is absolutely clear that the war will not end by one or the other of the combatants achieving total victory, so compromise is in any case inevitable. Far more will be lost than gained by putting off what is going to happen anyway - more dead and wounded, more senseless destruction, more starvation, more energy poverty. All of this could be avoided by a responsible exercise of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

I hold not the smallest candle for Vladimir Putin, but well before the Ukraine conflict the West really should have paid closer attention to Russia’s concerns regarding its southern flank. It should have been made quite clear that the exercise of Ukrainian sovereignty did not include it joining NATO. Had it done so, the conflict would likely have been avoided. However, we are where we are: Putin’s plan has blown up in his face, thousands on both sides have been killed and wounded and we are all experiencing the collateral damage caused by the conflict - the poor and vulnerable, as ever, more than anyone. And the west must take its fair share of the blame - especially leftwing cosmopolitans who have somehow misplaced their objections to overweaning conceptions of national sovereignty, and are backing to the hilt Ukraine’s conception of what it means.

So let’s focus on stopping the war rather than punishing Russia - down to the last Ukrainian. Every extra weapon given to Ukraine delays the peace talks that will inevitably take place. Every day of delay is a day of more suffering and destruction. And the only people truly rubbing their hands with glee are Western arms manufacturers.

Que vaut la vie sans libertÉ?

2/14/2022

‘Que vaut la vie sans liberté?’ reads the placard. It wouldn’t be out of place in the hands of a revolutionary leftist in 1968 Paris, but it’s Nice 2022, and it’s the right not the left that’s flying the freedom banner.

During the pandemic the left has made the huge mistake of ceding the language of freedom to the right. Rather than offer aternatives to policies that systematically favoured the stay-at-home middle class, granted powers to the police that would have been the envy of the dictatorships the left used to oppose, and prevented us from accompanying family members as they drew their last breath, the left went along with it all.

As a result the word ‘libertarian’ has been completely appropriated by small-state liberals. At one time the left would have fought to recover the word for its own emancipatory project, the bedrock principle of which is that freedom is impossible without the security that can only be provided by the community acting in other-regarding concert. Nothing could be further from the fantasies of the libertarian right, which make a bonfire of the ties that bind people together in mutual aid.

What’s life without liberty? is a question the left has forgotten to ask. It needs to do so, quick, before the freedom train runs away for good.

What is to be done?

2/4/2022

935 words - 5 minute read

Politically, economically, socially and ecologically, the status quo is a disaster.

In times gone by the left would be demanding radical change and the overthrow of a corrupt and moribund system that thrives on inequality, doubles down on surveillance and corrals and infantalises entire populations in the name of a spurious ‘security’ that kills us in our tens of thousands and calls it a success.

But the left - the experimental, bold, emancipatory left - is hardly to be seen.

Unaccountably and indefensibly, it’s the right that flies the banner of rebellion. Of course their rebellion is disorganised, reactionary, short-sighted, founded on rumour or worse, and ends up strengthening the very forces it claims to oppose. But the lesson the left could draw is that they’re confrontational, disruptive, and visibly angry.

When the left does get onto the streets - Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, the Sarah Everard vigil - it brings down the predictable wrath of the repressive state apparatus but fails to draw the appropriate conclusion: that progress through passive resistance is, right now, an illusion. As someone said recently, it’s all blah blah blah.

So the left has made the huge mistake of ceding the practice of revolt to the right. Stunned by the advances of the right in the culture wars, and allowing it complete control of the language that used to drive emancipatory politics - the language of freedom - the left’s feeble response has been to defend the status quo for all its worth.

In this sense the pandemic has been a disaster for the emancipatory left. Rather than oppose policies that systematically favoured the stay-at-home middle class, granted powers to the police that would have been the envy of the dictatorships the left used to oppose, and prevented us from accompanying family members as they drew their last breath, the left went along with it all. Sometimes, indeed, it asked for more of all these things.

This vacated a huge tract of political territory called ‘freedom’, and the right marched in. So it’s the right that’s in the streets, the right that attracts disadvantaged and disillusioned young people desperate for change, the right that is scandalous, subversive and countercultural.

Tragically, the word ‘libertarian’ has now been completely appropriated by small-state liberals, and even leftist commentators automatically elide libertarianism with right-wing politics. At one time the left would have fought tooth-and-nail to recover the word for its own emancipatory project, the bedrock principle of which is that freedom is impossible without the security that can only be provided by the community acting in other-regarding concert. Nothing could be further from the fantasies of the libertarian right, which make a bonfire of the ties that bind people together in mutual aid.

Maybe the left has given ground on freedom so it can double down it on its own unique calling card: equality? But no. Once again the pandemic has caught the left with its pants down. In the past two years the ten richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes while 160 million extra people have been plunged into poverty - defined as living on less the $5.5 a day. The left’s reaction? To flood change.org and 38degrees with toothless demands while, in a two-fingered simulacrum, the 100 richest people in the world ask to pay more taxes.

The right is everywhere the left should be. But instead of fighting for these spaces and recapturing the language of disruption and rebellion for itself, the left is static, sclerotic, like rabbits in the headlights of an onrushing car, frozen into immobility by its incapacity to think creatively about either the present or the future. Antonio Gramsci distinguished between a war of manoeuvre (physically overwhelming the state’s coercive apparatus) and a war of position (fighting it on the terrain of culture). Give the overwhelming physical power of the state he recommended a war of position. The left has taken him at his word and the result has been downward spiral of navel-gazing while the capitalist state leads us towards a disaster of species-destroying proportions.

If the emancipatory left stood for anything it was for universal liberation. But in its determination to champion special interests the left has completely lost sight of the universalist demands against which to hold the status quo to account. An example: better treatment for women in prison? Of course! But a univeralising emancipatory left would have one question and one recommendation.

The question: what does ‘better’ mean? It can't be ‘treat them like male prisoners’ because conditions in UK prisons are appalling. If it’s ‘treat them differently because they are women’ this is also music to the ears of defenders of the status quo, because it leaves 95% (the percentage occupied by men) of what is quaintly and absurdly called the prison ‘estate’ completely intact. Some universal standard for 'better' is needed, and it can't be deduced from the condition or experience of any one group, collective or protected category.

The left-libertarian recommendation: reduce the prison population by at least half (prison numbers in England and Wales have increased by 84% since 1990, from 44,975 to just under 83,000). And then turn the rest into schools (50% of the prison population is functionally illiterate).

Tactically inept and strategically naive, that’s where the left is right now, with every single move captured, appropriated and defanged by the very forces it’s trying to oppose.

So where now?

Maybe here.

And here.

political cross-dressing

9/21/2021

530 words: 4-minute read

Leftist progressive environmentalist George Monbiot is shocked that there are antivaxxers among his acquaintances. Something ‘weird’ is going on, he says, whereby the curiosity, scepticism and suspicion typical of people on the left has driven those selfsame people to adopt rightwing versions of this language, so much so that ‘some have succumbed to a far-right conspiracy ideation, up to and including Q-anon’.

He’s right, that’s weird.

He goes on, ‘The far-right seized and repurposed the language of leftwing revolt: rebel against the elite, take back control etc … Some people on the left, hearing stuff that sounded familiar, seem to have fallen for it’.

Right again.

There’s more: ‘The necessary and justifiable revolt against corporate and oligarchic power has morphed in some cases into an extreme individualism’.

Monbiot is right about that too.

‘It doesn't help that we've suffered decades of betrayal by formerly left-ish political parties, that fell into line with neoliberal capitalism’, he writes, ‘This left many people both profoundly confused and susceptible to the liberationist claims of the far right’.

Absolutely.

He concludes: ‘Left and right political parties have swapped their language. Now the right talks about liberation and revolt. And the left talks about security and stability’.

Acute. Brilliant. A perfect summary of the confused and confusing state of ideological play in liberal-capitalist countries like the UK today.

What’s missing, though, is the recognition that the left has contributed to this state of affairs by allowing the right to arrogate to itself the language of freedom and liberation in the two key events of the past few years: Brexit and Covid.

By the time Covid turned up the Brexit battle was over, but the left hadn’t learned its lesson. Instead of debating, designing and exemplifying a left-libertarian approach to Covid it went full throttle for an ironclad lockdown, leaving the door marked ‘freedom and liberation’ wide open for the swivel-eyed right of assorted denialists and anti-vaxxers to walk right through.

And some on the left, as Monbiot recognises and bemoans, have followed them.

But the answer is not to accuse these leftists of ‘falling for’ false idols, of ‘succumbing’ to conspiracy, or of some fatal ‘confusion’ that can only be put right by attending to the high priests of correct leftist thinking.

The answer is to focus unerringly on that sweet spot where freedom AND security are located.

In the Covid case, this would have been to point out that a properly funded NHS and social care system, staffed by properly rewarded professionals (all this representing SECURITY), would have allowed family members to be present as their relatives passed away instead of dying lonely and isolated (representing FREEDOM). The left were all too ready to allow elderly people in care homes to be kept in segregated solitude for months on end - ‘collateral damage’ to be stoically accepted for the sake of an unwavering commitment to an uncompromising lockdown.

So yes, it’s weird that some of George Monbiot’s freedom-loving acquaintances have turned to the right. But this was never going to help.

memory and justice

9/20/2021

257 words: 2-minute read

In a recent interview in El País Semanal, Trinity College Dublin professor and psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane claimed that ‘to some extent all our memories are false’. This is quite a declaration - but one which in the day-to-day most of us recognise to contain a grain of truth. We remember things wrongly and sometimes we don’t remember them at all. At the very least, our memories are selective and subjective and this is enough to sow seeds of doubt when it comes to remembering the past.

Most of the time this doesn’t matter too much since in the normal run of things nothing much hangs on whether we’ve remembered events correctly or not. It’s mostly a matter of minor disputes and inconveniences.

But sometimes it matters a lot, such as in court cases, where the life chances of accusers and defendants can turn on whether events are remembered correctly or not. At this point O’Keane’s claim that ‘to some extent all our memories are false’ becomes severely problematic. She’s not saying that some of our memories are false some of the time but that they are all false all of the time, to some extent.

To some extent? To what extent, exactly? How are we supposed to calibrate her claim in the context of criminal justice where memory plays such a crucial role? Here is another recent article, in which Bob Dylan is accused of sexually abusing a 12-year-old in 1965. What would Professor O’Keane say if she was called to the witness stand by the defence?

un pedazo de cielo (a patch of sky)

5/16/2021

505 words; 4-minute read

When you’re lucky enough to be able to buy a house, a flat or an apartment there are a few things you’re encouraged think about. Is it structurally sound? What’s the roof like? Plumbing and electrics OK? What’s the area like? And the neighbours? And make sure you go back a few times so you get a feel for the property under different conditions.

What nobody thinks about is the night sky you’re going to have a view of. However many times you revisit a property you’re probably not going to check it out at night-time. If you’ve got a house with a garden or you’re some way up a high rise the odds are you’ll have a fair bit of night sky to look up at and you'll most likely take the view for granted. But if not, then the first time you think about the stars and planets above your flat will be the night after you’ve handed over your money and moved in.

So I’ve struck lucky. It’s mid-May so I can only talk about the stars we’ve got above us in our patch of sky at about 10 in the evening at this time of year. But it could be less interesting. A lot less interesting.

Right overhead is Ursa Major, the Great Bear, with its four stars in a rough rectangle, and three more curving away eastwards. The light pollution of the city stops me from seeing the naked eye double star - Mizar and Alcor - in the middle of the pan handle, but I know it’s there and that’s good enough for me.

Follow the curve and there’s Arcturus, the fourth brightest star in the night sky, a red giant in the last stages of its life. It’s 36.7 light years away which means that the light from it striking our patio last night set off in late 1984 when in the UK the miners’ strike was being broken and British Telecom was privatised. In Spain, Felipe González was in his second year as Prime Minister and Neanderthal bones nearly half a million years old were found in a cave at Atapuerca.

On the other side of our patch of sky, to the west, are the Heavenly Twins (Gemini), Castor and Pollux, and across to the right and a little way down there’s Capella, the sixth brightest star in the sky, 42.9 light years away, and one of the strongest X-ray sources in our galaxy.

And right now there’s an extra treat on view because Mars is visible just below Gemini, an unmistakeable red counterpoint to Arcturus.

All in all not a bad haul for what’s in effect just a sliver of sky above us. If or when we come to sell this apartment I’ll be sure to include the May night sky among its unlikely attractions.

where is the libertarian left?

4/5/2021

479 words; 4-minute read

It’s become a commonplace that Covid has amplified features and fissures in society that we always knew existed but never quite acknowledged.

For instance there’s the importance of people who keep things going without us realising: shop workers, parcel deliverers, lorry drivers. If reward is a function of indispensability, we now know that these people are poorly rewarded. (Though the UK government’s 1% pay rise for nurses shows that recognition by no means leads directly to justice).

Then there’s the dispute over the role of experts, and attempts by populist leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to sideline them in favour of quack remedies or downright Covid denialism.

We always knew that wages are awarded in inverse proportion to a person’s usefulness to society and that populism is dangerous, but it took the glare of Covid to make these things unavoidably obvious.

But there’s another fissure that was barely visible pre-Covid yet which has come to define much of the reaction to the pandemic: the gulf between libertarians and authoritarians. Unfortunately, and with potentially disastrous post-Covid consequences, the libertarian position has been entirely dominated by the right, leaving the left defenceless as the capitalist state arrogates more and more power to itself under cover of Covid darkness.

Over the past twelve months it’s been something of a surprise to see how readily people on the political left have lined up behind disciplinary policies and practices that in normal times they’d have fought tooth and nail. Whether it’s increased police powers, enhanced surveillance, Covid passports or the criminalising of information, leftists have either waved through repressive measures or raised the stakes by suggesting how helpful even more repression would be. Voices on the left calling out these measures have been few and far between.

Most disturbing of all is the shock horror these same people display when a bill comes before parliament increasing police powers and curbing the right to protest. What, one wonders, did they expect? Politically literate leftists shouldn’t have to read Carl Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben on states of exception to know that regimes will always take advantage of emergency to intensify their authority.

It’s taken Covid to bring both the outright and the naive disciplinarian left out of the woodwork, and as the Covid crisis draws to a close it may be too late to put the authoritarian genie back in the bottle. It wouldn't be too bad if ceding a libertarian approach to Covid to the right had just left it in the hands of crazed denialists prepared to go to the wall for the right not to wear a mask. But actually it's made possible the government's truly scary Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021, waved through in the wake of the softening up offered by Covid 'necessities'.

In sum there is huge gap where the left should have been designing, advocating and enacting a progressive libertarian approach to Covid, and the authoritarian capitalist state is gleefully sailing straight into it.

Deliberative democracy and criminal justice

4/3/2021

649 words; 5-minute read

There are all sorts of types of decision-making in democracy and one is called ‘deliberative democracy’. It’s called that because it puts deliberation rather than counting votes at its heart. In deliberative democracy it’s the process rather than the outcome that counts. And the process is designed to reflect the belief that the best decisions are ones arrived at by discussion between free and equal people. Anything else is just a variation on coercion.

Here are some of the basic rules for good deliberation:

Participants should treat each other with mutual respect and equal concern
They should listen to one another
They should speak truthfully
There should be no use of force, strategising or deceit, and no sign of partisanship, self-interest or ideology

By the same token, decisions reached by strategising and deceit, and characterised by poor listening and a lack of respect and concern, will be bad ones.

Deliberative democracy might be accused of being massively impractical, or at the very least difficult to put into practice. But this doesn’t undermine its attractiveness as a regulative ideal, or something we should strive to approximate to when it comes to good decision-making. We might reasonably expect every institution charged with making good decisions to get as close to these ideals as possible.

But there’s one arena of decision-making - one which has the profoundest consequences for roughly 1.5 million UK citizens every year - where the principles of decision-making are the exact opposite of the ones above.

That arena is the English criminal justice system.

From arrest to sentence, the criminal justice system is defined by self-interest, strategising, deceit, lack of respect, dissembling, and a systematic failure to listen.

Self-interest is on display by everyone throughout. Take the police force, for instance. Its job is to secure convictions (definitely not justice), and police officers would be crazy to do anything that undermined that objective (what would we think of a police force that never secured convictions?). Police strategising is common (if they can interview without a lawyer present they’ll do so), as is deceit (evidence that might be useful to the defence is regularly withheld).

None of this means that police officers are behaving inappropriately. Far from it. They’re doing no more than what a non-deliberative approach to justice enjoins them to do: maximising the advantages they have to ensure they get as many convictions as possible.

Likewise, strategising is not only present in the courtroom, it is essential to how it works. Prosecution and defence plan and plot their way through to their desired outcome with little regard for what should actually count - truth and justice (understood as getting what one deserves).

This month, after one of the UK's biggest ever miscarriages of justice, 39 Post Office workers had their convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting quashed. It was revealed that one of the innocent accused was advised by his barrister to plead guilty to avoid a longer prison sentence. In fact this is standard practice in UK criminal justice (you get a third off your sentence if you plead guilty to whatever you've been charged with) - a practice which outside that system it is known as bribery. The maximum custodial sentence for bribery that can be imposed by the very court system that regularly uses it is ten years.

Finally, the consensual approach that characterises deliberative decision-making is completely absent in the criminal justice system, where the confrontational alternative is personified in the battles between prosecution and defence so beloved by TV dramas. And all of this in a mise-en-scène designed to emphasise inequality and hierarchy, and induce intimidation - the courtroom itself (raised platform for the judge, bowing and scraping, wigs and gowns).

The ‘Secret Barrister’, famed for supposedly lifting the lid on the failures of the criminal justice system, gets nowhere near the heart of the problem. Her or his claim that it’s all about a funding shortfall is a distraction from the real issue. Throwing more money at an abominable system would just make it better at being bad.

All in all, if someone was invited to come up with a process designed to produce unreliable, even obtuse, decisions, they’d be hard-pressed to come up with anything better than the English criminal justice system. We need to start again from the first principles of free and equal deliberation if we’re to have a criminal justice system worthy of the name.

decarceration, men and women

3/1/2021

742 words; 6-minute read

The UK government is planning on creating 500 more places for women in prison. In response, Sonia Sodha, chief leader writer at the Observer and a Guardian/Observer columnist, has written a powerful piece recommending the phasing out of women’s prisons altogether.

This is absolutely the right objective. The record regarding women and prisons is appalling: the number of women in UK prisons has doubled since 1993 (as if women are twice as bad as they were 27 years ago!); the use of community sentences has halved in a decade; 62% of women serve sentences of less than 6 months (up from 30% in 1993) causing massive disruption to their lives and those of their dependants. The government’s mindless response to this last point is to allow more children to sleep with their mothers in prison.

So yes, for a host of reasons women’s prisons should be done away with.

Interestingly, there is no suggestion in Sodha’s piece that men’s prisons should be done away with too. The reason why women’s prisons should be eliminated while men’s are retained is, she says, because ‘female offenders are very different from their male counterparts’.

How are they different?

First, says Sodha, men are ‘far more violent than women, and always have been’. This is absolutely true. ‘Prison sentences are most appropriate for dangerous and violent crime’, she continues. So because men commit the ‘vast majority’ of violent crime, men’s prisons must be retained.

But a 2019 report by the Prison Reform Trust shows that 69% of the 59,000 people sent to prison in 2018 had committed a non-violent offence. Some of these will have been women, but given that ‘only’ 5% of the people in prison in the UK are women, the vast majority of these non-violent offences will have been carried out by men.

So on Sodha’s criterion that prison should be reserved for violent criminals, two-thirds of men’s prisons should be closed down too.

A second reason she gives for why female offenders are different to their male counterparts is that ‘two-thirds of women in prison are survivors of domestic abuse’, and that while ‘not every female criminal is a victim … coercive abusive relationships can serve to draw women into crime’. This is also absolutely true and it’s a chilling reminder that behind many crimes lie stories of damaged lives.

But if a history of damage and disadvantage is a reason for an offender’s decarceration then perhaps this applies to histories other than those of abusive relationships too?

For example, 62% of people entering prison have a reading age of 11 or lower (four times greater than the general population). Similarly, a third of people (34%) assessed in prison in 2017–18 reported that they had a learning disability or difficulty. Low literacy leads to non/underemployment and a potential turn to crime for survival. And these statistics are themselves a reflection of profound structural disadvantage.

Just as not every female criminal is a victim, as Sodha says, not everyone with a low reading age or learning disability ends up in prison. But in both cases the chances of eventual imprisonment are increased. So once again, if a history of harm leads us to conclude that women’s prisons should be shut down, should not the same criterion be applied to men’s?

While Sodha is right about the specifics of the differences between female and male offenders (the former’s non-violent crimes are different to those of the latter, as is the nature of the harm they suffer that predisposes them to imprisonment), they share the key features that Sodha says should lead to the phase out - or at least a reduction in the number - of prisons: non-violent crime and a history of harm.

I very much hope that women’s prisons are phased out, or at the very least that the government’s plans to increase the number of places for women are abandoned, never to return.

And once that happens I look forward to Sodha turning her fire on incarceration in general, for there is more in the arguments that unite the genders against imprisonment than keeps them apart.

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