Category: Justice

love, anger and betrayal

9/7/2025

1096 words, 5-minute read

I’m on the London Underground. Reading a book. I look up to check the station. Clapham South. Dammit. I’ve missed my stop. I close the book - source of my distraction, engrossing doesn’t cut it - and cross platforms to head back upstream.

The book in question is ‘Love, Anger and Betrayal’, the latest from environmental campaigner Jonathon Porritt. Jonathon has been in the game a long time (he joined the Green Party in 1974 and has since covered every possible base in the environmental movement - and invented a few more besides), so what he says, matters.

In ‘Love, Anger and Betrayal’ he turns his attention to 26 young Just Stop Oil (JSO) campaigners, all of whom have been arrested for peaceful direct action and some of whom are in prison. In truth these 26 are Jonathon’s co-authors as each of them is given space to detail their involvement in JSO, their motivation, inspiration, relationship with nature, and hopes for the future. They also reflect in their own words on the chapter themes: climate science, taking direct action, confronting the law, the emotional burden of arrest and imprisonment etc.

It’s impossible and invidious to generalise about these extraordinary young people, but four things stand out for me. First, their selflessness; there is not an iota of self-aggrandisement on display here. Second, their surprise that not everyone sees things the way they do, when it’s so obvious that not changing course will lead us to perdition. Third, the equanimity with which they accept their punishment, not because the sentences are fair but because they believe they’re doing the right thing at the right time, and in that sense they’re where they have to be.

Fourth, the road travelled. Each and every one of these protestors has started near the bottom of the commitment escalator and ridden it to the top. From there they survey an uncertain future, both theirs and the planet’s, making sacrifices along the way (though they may not see them like that) that few of us would be willing to make. At some point in that uncertain future these young activists, vilified on all sides (including by those on the same side) will be recognised for the courageous, right-minded people they are.

These 26 campaigners are just a handful of those, young and old, who have fallen victim to the government’s determination to drive direct action from the streets of the UK. Successive governments - both Conservative and Labour - have passed legislation that makes it increasingly difficult to take action (even making a Zoom call) without being threatened with arrest. (Jonathon himself has fallen foul of legislation that makes supporting the currently proscribed group Palestine Action a criminal offence).

Historical comparisons are hard to avoid. Some of the activists, and Jonathon himself, cite the Suffragettes as a source of inspiration, and it’s a measure of the government’s duplicitous insincerity that the erstwhile Home Secretary Yvette Cooper can sickeningly dress up in Suffragette colours and then pass legislation proscribing Palestine Action which uses the same tactics as those that got Cooper the vote.

The environmental movement has a very broad front and practically every tactic has been used to try to turn round the juggernaut that is leading us to environmental and social disaster. Just Stop Oil, like Extinction Rebellion, is at the radical end of the spectrum (though does anyone remember monkeywrenching?)

I think it’s fair to say that Jonathon has spent most of his political life on the moderate flank: the Green Party, Director of Friends of the Earth, founder member of the sustainable development charity Forum for the Future. In the light of this, one of the most poignant passages in the book is this one:

‘There may well be a climate majority out there, just waiting for the right moment to show how much they care, to demonstrate how determined they are to see their elected representatives get a grip on this crisis. But I’ve spent more than fifty years trying to reach out to that majority of citizens, if only to mobilise a bigger minority of them, and I have no illusions left - about both my failure and theirs. If we continue to rely on the same old business-as-usual theory of change, the inevitable result will be that such a majority will be mobilised only when it is already too late to make any significant difference.’

And it’s for this reason that he ‘is deeply disappointed by all those mainstream climate campaigners and environmentalists who never spoke up in support of Just Stop Oil’. It’s said that we get more conservative with age. Jonathon seems to have taken the wrong potion. A combination of lived experience and over a year spent with these extraordinary young people looks to have placed him firmly on the radical flank.

In the context of UK environmental politics this is an important moment, because concerted calls for a ‘moderate flank’ are being made by significant figures in the environmental movement, aimed precisely at the ‘climate majority’ that Jonathon has spent 50 years trying and failing to reach. Can it be ‘both … and’ rather than ‘either … or’? Maybe, but time spent working on the moderate flank is time you can’t spend anywhere else.

What other options are there? Years ago a university colleague of mine pointed me towards the insurance industry. After all, he said, who thinks more about the future than them? Since then, insurance has come up over and over again as a weak spot in capitalism’s armoury, as the costs of insuring against future environmental disasters rise inexorably. (Most recently for me in John Vaillant’s magnificent and shocking ‘Fire Weather’).

Jonathon imagines a worst-ever hurricane season in Florida causing state-based insurance company bankruptcies, followed by a cascade of bankruptcies up the chain to the World Bank itself. ‘That’s the only way,’ he writes, ‘as I see it right now, in which today’s suicidal capitalist system turns out, against all the odds, and at absolutely the last possible moment, to be capable of rescuing itself from itself’. That’s quite a journey from Jonathon’s 2007 ‘Capitalism as if the World Matters’!

So perhaps, in the end, the Death Machine will chew itself up from the inside. Meanwhile, courageous young people, given voice here by Jonathon, are dragged through the Machine’s ‘justice system’, a system in which judges ludicrously demand that protestors show remorse before they pass sentence. ‘How could I be morally compelled to take action one week’, asks Indigo Rumbelow, ‘and then be filled with regret for acting the next?’

Carceral tit-for-tat

8/23/2024

1356 words: 8-minute read

Prisons are in the news.

More precisely prison sentences are in the news, owing to a perceived disparity between the sentences given to environmental protestors of various stripes and those handed down to participants in the recent race riots across the UK, sparked by the fatal stabbing of three young girls at a dance class in Southport UK on 29th July.

As for the environmental activists, in October 2022 two Stop Oil activists shut down the QE2 Bridge by occupying it, suspended in hammocks. They were sentenced to three years and two years seven months in prison respectively - shocking enough at the time. Then earlier in July this year five Stop Oil protestors were given sentences of four and five years for co-ordinating direct action on the M25, the ring-road that orbits London. These were by some distance the longest sentences handed down for non-violent protest in recent times. More and more activists are awaiting sentencing and there is every likelihood that these long - and unusual - sentences will be repeated in the weeks and months to come.

The race riots began on 30th July in Southport and spread to various towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland. By the 9th August around 600 people had been arrested, with more than 446 charged by 20th August. All this in a context in which the prison estate (as it is quaintly called) is bursting at the seams, where suicides and cases of extreme violence rose by 25% in the year 2022-23 and self-harm in women’s prisons is at an all-time high.

The recently elected Labour government said that 500 extra prison places would be made available to cope with the anticipated influx of rioters found guilty of a range of offences.

As of the 20th August over 150 rioters have been sentenced, with most of them going to jail. The average sentence is two years - roughly half as long as those meted out to Stop Oil and other climate change protestors.

This disparity between the jail time given to environmental protestors and to rioters has led to irate charges of double standards from those supporting the protestors. ‘When civil disobedience is punished more severely than racist rioting, something has gone badly wrong’, wrote George Monbiot. ‘Spot on’, said Caroline Lucas. Peter Tatchell tweeted, ‘Violent racist rioters who tried to burn refugees alive get shorter jail sentences (2-3 years) than peaceful @JustStop_Oil protesters (4-5 years). That’s the real 'two-tier injustice' in UK today. SHAME!’ Private Eye and Rory Stewart weighed in in the same vein.

Sometimes supporters of the climate change protestors refer to specific sentences and argue that they are ‘disproportionate, unjust and a waste of resources’, as recently-elected Green MP Carla Denyer has done in the case of her constituent Gaie Delap, a 77-year-old woman sentenced to 20 months in jail for a Stop Oil action.

What's missing in this carceral tit-for-tat is any discussion as to how long the jail terms should be for either group, and absolutely nothing about whether they are appropriate at all. It’s not clear what the left wants: the same high tariffs for the rioters as for the environmental protestors, or a reduction for the latter so as to bring them in line with the former? In the absence of clarification the overwhelming impression is that they’d like to see the rioters receiving the same 4-5 year sentences as the climate change protestors.

And they are increasingly getting their wish: David Wilkinson, John Honey and Stephen Love were jailed for six years, four years and 40 months respectively for their part in the riots in Hull.

(To be fair there is the odd isolated voice on the left singing a different tune: ‘Gonna be that guy because no one else on the left will do it: We SHOULDN'T be jailing nasty racist far right morons for shitty Tweets, even serious incitement. We SHOULD be prosecuting them, fining them, giving them big community sentences, but prison is fucking madness’).

‘The justice system claims to be blind’, writes Monbiot, but there’s a case to be made that in its call for penitentiary revenge it’s the left that’s blind to the deficiencies - not to say depravities - of the prison system to which it wants to commit rioters.

Leaving aside the question of intent - there is evidence that some people just got ‘caught up’ in the riots - organisations such as the Howard League have been saying for years that ‘Prison won’t work unless we, as a society, are prepared to have a serious conversation about punishment and what it is meant to achieve’. There’s no sign of this conversation from either the right or the left in the current race-to-the-bottom for jail time equivalence.

Here are some facts, all drawn from the Prison Reform Trust’s latest (February 2024) report:

England/Wales and Scotland have the highest imprisonment rates in Western Europe
The prison population has risen by 93% in the last 30 years—it is predicted to rise by around 17,000 people by 2026
Almost all offences now receive a much longer custodial sentence than they used to
Self-inflicted deaths are nearly four times more likely in men in prison than men in the general population
Self-harm by women in prison hit a record high of 20,248 incidents last year
The prison system as a whole has been overcrowded in every year since 1994
In 2022–23, basic screening suggested that nearly a third of arriving prisoners (31%) had a neurodivergent need
Prison is rarely a necessary, appropriate or proportionate response to women who offend … [but] … on 30 September 2023 there were 3,570 women in prison in England and Wales — a 12% increase on last year
More than 17,500 children were estimated to be separated from their mother by imprisonment in 2020
An estimated 320,000 children had a parent in prison in 2020
More than a third of women (36%) and two in five (42%) men reported being in their cell for more than 22 hours a day during the week

This is the system into which Judge Hehir has cast Just Stop Oil protestors - and into which supporters of the Just Stop Oil protestors would like to send participants in the recent riots.

To what end? If the aim is to reduce reoffending, forget prison. As the Prison Reform Trust says, ‘current evidence does not suggest that increasing the length of immediate prison sentences is an effective way to reduce reoffending’. After a prison sentence (even a suspended one) insurance, credit, a job and - most importantly - housing are very hard to get and sometimes refused outright. Ex-prisoners are condemned to a life defined by obstacles and by stigma - pretty much inescapably so in the internet-connected global village we inhabit. The stocks are always out on Google's global village green.

The consequences of a prison sentence lead to marginalisation: precisely the condition likely to drive the rioters into the arms of the very political forces the left (including environmental protestors and their supporters) oppose.

The question as to which side is the victim of ‘two-tier policing’ has dominated debate. More vital still to those of us on the left, but definitely much less recognised, is our two-tier response to these events. At the same time as Carla Denyer rightly condemned the sentence handed down to 77-year-old Gaie Delap for her Stop Oil action, she could have censured the conviction of the 13-year-old girl (awaiting sentence in September) for violent disorder following unrest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers during the riots. That girl’s life chances have been irrevocably damaged by her conviction - just like those of the young Stop Oil activists so absurdly incarcerated or on remand waiting to be sentenced.

Let’s leave the last word to someone who know what she’s talking about, sociologist Jenny Thatcher, raised in poverty and who spent her childhood visiting her father in Pentonville prison: ‘I don’t think making “an example” out of children by sending them to prison for stealing a Greggs sausage roll will do anything to tackle racism & division in British society’.

Amen to that.

Crushing dissent

3/3/2024

Jonathon Porritt, UK sustainability campaigner and a key figure in the country’s environmental movement for decades, has written a powerful blog decrying the crushing of environmental dissent in recent months.

‘First they came for Just Stop Oil’, he writes, ‘then they came for radical environmentalists; then they came for members of the National Trust, the RSPB, and WWF. But there was no one left to speak for them’. This is a conscious echo of Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s 1946 confessional ‘First they came for the communists …’ warning against the dangers of a creeping authoritarianism of which we only become aware once it’s too late to do anything about it.

Porritt continues: ‘I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m astonished at the lack of concern/interest on the part of “mainstream environmentalists” as we slide inexorably into a police state. The right to peaceful protest is still a basic human right. But you sure as hell wouldn’t know that here in the UK.’

He’s right of course, and I would only argue/add that environmentalists have been asleep at the wheel for rather longer than he says.

First off, and most proximately, the seeds of the legislation for crushing dissent were sown during the pandemic and we went along all too readily with the extreme measures taken then. Of course they were justified by the fact that it was an emergency and the occasional 'beyond the pale' action by the police was excused by the fact that the legislation was new, complex, and sometimes difficult to interpret. The key element here, though, is the word 'emergency' and its use in justifying extreme measures. Carl Schmitt famously wrote that 'sovereign is he who decides on the exception'. The exception in 2020 was Coronavirus, and the exception now is JustStopOil, republicans, or anyone with a bicycle lock. One way of looking at this is that in 2020 the government tested our resolve to resist overweaning power and found us wanting.

We are reaping now the whirlwind we sowed then.

This is a difficult argument to make because the only people resisting these measures at the time were swivel-eyed right-wing libertarians. Somehow, the right have managed to arrogate to themselves the word 'libertarian' as if it belongs wholly and completely to them. There is of course a noble left-wing libertarian tradition which we've allowed to wither to the point where the right fly the flag of freedom and liberty (the irony!!) while any progressive measure carries with it a health warning regarding cancellation, censoriousness and prohibition. I read the following exchange in a recent interview Naomi Klein, and I have some sympathy for what she says:

Q. It seems that some young people sees the extreme right as exciting, while the left is boring and prudish. Like someone who enjoys a cutting Ricky Gervais routine more than politically correct jokes.

A. It is true, and it is dangerous. It has to do with the censorious passion of the left, its policing of speech and the casual cruelty it displays when someone steps out of line. We could talk about cancel culture, if it weren’t such a loaded concept. To me, there’s no doubt that there is bullying, which tends to push anyone who steps out of line. I’m not the only person on the left who is concerned about this. These young people may find the left stifling, a place where a mistake can make your friends turn against you, and they may believe that on the right, it’s possible to disagree, even if that’s not true. There is policing on both sides of the mirror, but I think the right takes better advantage of that strategy to rally people to its cause. I wish the left thought more about how to increase our ranks instead of how to purge them.

So: we’ve forgotten how to be libertarians. One nail in the coffin of left-wing libertarianism was our rather supine reaction to the Government arrogating enormous punitive powers to itself during the pandemic, and this hampers our position regarding the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and its spin-offs. The Act is justified by the government by saying that we (environmentalists) are the new ‘emergency’.

Bonkers of course, but effective.

The second point is that the UK has long been a ‘police state’ (Porritt’s completely correct term) but environmentalists have only just noticed it because they’ve only recently been systematically subject to its effects. (I say ‘systematically’ because they’ve often been on the receiving end in relatively isolated cases - witness the 1985 ‘Battle of the Beanfield’).

There are presently around 87,000 people in prison in the UK, and it has long held the dubious record of the highest rate of incarceration in Western Europe. The poor, the non-white, the drug-dependent and the functionally illiterate are massively over-represented in the prison population. This most likely explains mainstream environmentalists’ ‘lack of concern/interest’ - as Porritt so rightly puts it - about policing and its consequences, given that few environmentalists fall into any of these categories. The excessive punishments recently meted out to environmentalists, and which have brought the criminal justice system to environmentalists’ attention, have been part and parcel of the system since forever.

The Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences (thank you David Blunkett) and Joint Enterprise Laws are just two egregious examples of the injustices and massive sentences systematically meted out to offenders, and which typically disproportionately affect non-white and poor populations. Martin Tawton’s ten years in prison for stealing a mobile phone is just one of many IPP sentences to set alongside enviromentalists Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland’s absurdly long prison sentences. These sentences are on a continuum and should be criticised together rather than separately. (While we’re on it, Trowland’s comments that ‘It was quite easy to be happy in prison … I don’t think it’s very scary’ - were unbelievably tone deaf and guaranteed to widen the gap between environmentalists and people like Tawton).

In sum, criticism of the laws and policing of environmental dissent must be accompanied by critique of the criminal justice system per se.

So Jonathon Porritt’s blog might have begun with: ‘First they came for the poor, the drug-dependent, the illiterate and the non-white, then they came for Just Stop Oil …. etc’. We don’t want to be seen as ‘special pleading’ for put-upon environmentalists; our quite proper anger at the sentences handed down to or contemplated for activists must be accompanied by solidarity with all the other hitherto hidden, silent and silenced victims of the criminal justice system.

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”.

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?

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.

shamima begum

2/27/2021

744 words; 6-minute read

Yesterday, 26th February, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that 21-year-old Shamima Begum would not be allowed to return to Britain from Syria to fight to have her UK citizenship restored.

In 2019 the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid took away her citizenship on the grounds that she was a threat to national security, a stance reaffirmed yesterday by the current Home Secretary, Priti Patel. Patel said, ‘The government will always take the strongest possible action to protect our national security and our priority remains maintaining the safety and security of our citizens’.

Begum fled the UK for Syria at the age of 15 to join Isis. She married a Dutch Isis fighter (as far as we know being held in a different camp) and she has had three children all of whom have died. She was captured by Syrian Kurds in 2019 and is now in the Al-Hol detention camp, along with around 11,000 other foreign nationals and their dependants.

In a June 2019 visit to the camp, Human Rights Watch found ‘overflowing latrines, sewage trickling into tattered tents, and residents drinking wash water from tanks containing worms. Young children with skin rashes, emaciated limbs, and swollen bellies sifted through mounds of stinking garbage under a scorching sun or lay limp on tent floors, their bodies dusted with dirt and flies. Children are dying from acute diarrhea and flu-like infections, aid groups and camp managers said’. In January this year there were twelve murders in the camp.

Begum’s case for returning to the UK to have her plea heard in person was based on the claim that is impossible for her to fight her case from a detention camp where she can’t have proper contact with her legal team.

In refusing to allow her to return the Supreme Court reiterated the belief that she is a threat to national security, and that no court could overrule the Home Secretary’s judgement in that regard.

Reaction to this decision has been predictably polarised. On the one hand there are those who say that no punishment is harsh enough for Begum given her association with Isis.

On the other are those who argue it’s ridiculous to regard a 21 year-old woman in a detention camp as a threat to national security; that she was underage when she left the UK and was likely groomed into doing so; and that in any case it’s illegal to leave someone effectively stateless by taking away their citizenship. (There is some dispute as to whether she has access to Bangladeshi citizenship or not).

Whatever arguments there may be over points of law, one thing is absolutely clear: yesterday’s decision condemns a young woman who has lost three children to unlimited detention in a camp in the conditions described above.

In other words the Supreme Court has in effect sided with those who reckon there’s no punishment harsh enough for Begum.

Who are the people - the actual, individual people - who are able to sleep at night knowing that this is what they’ve done? There are lots of them in the ‘justice’ factory, starting with Sajid Javid and Priti Patel, from whom we should expect absolutely nothing except heartless cruelty (they have form).

But what about Robert Reed, President of the Supreme Court, who got to read out the verdict? Watch him do so and marvel at the equanimity he displays as he bangs one nail after another into the life chances of a damaged young woman. It’s stunning, really, the way he manages to blot out the latrines, the murders, the sewage, the worm-infested water, the skin rashes, the emaciation, the garbage, dirt and flies. It’s hard not to marvel at the capacity he displays to obliterate even the tiniest vestige of compassion.

The Supreme Court’s decison was unanimous, which means that there are ten other people in the highest reaches of the system ready to renounce sympathy, mercy, kindness, grace in the name of … what? Ah yes, of course. Justice! Look at the smiles they take home with them while they condemn a vulnerable young woman, and by implication thousands of other women, men and children, to conditions they wouldn’t condone for their dogs.

Justice is supposed to be blind. How numbing to see that it’s heartless as well.

death row and rehabilitation

12/12/2020

(376 words; 3-minute read)

As Donald Trump ends his presidency with a round of legalised murders, ex-prisoner Adnan Khan tells of a show of solidarity, empathy and humanity that invites reflection from those of us on the outside who turn our backs on offenders, whatever they may have done.

Khan tells how 700 men live in the ‘Condemned Row’ units of San Quentin Prison, California. As they’re escorted round the prison, other inmates are forced to face the wall so as not to look at them. Khan wonders how they feel at this literal turning of backs, confirming the rejection they’ve already experienced from society at large.

‘But we would still find a way to attempt to acknowledge their humanity and offer some sort of solidarity when facing the wall’, says Khan. ‘We’d slightly turn our faces, peek, try to make eye contact and give them a nod. Sometimes the nod was just with our eyes. That subtle. And they’d nod back the same way. That was our only contact with them and our only form of communication … And that simple, subtle nod relayed a message of care, empathy and moral support and most importantly, each other’s worthiness of humanity’.

Who knows what risks Khan and his fellow inmates ran as they strove to give death row prisoners a moment’s respite from the relentless routine of rejection? Removal of privileges? Reduced chance of parole? Solitary confinement? Whatever, they reckoned it was worth it to return a smidgen of pride and self-worth to those whom a dehumanising system of ‘justice’ has permanently ostracised.

So what of those of us on the outside who can make Khan’s gestures of care, empathy and moral support to casualties of the criminal ‘justice’ system at absolutely no risk to ourselves? More particularly what of those of us who deliberately refuse to do so, even when handed the opportunity on a plate? Because it happens …

We could try taking a leaf out of Khan’s book, coming down off our high horses and doing a bit more of what we profess to do: care, empathise, and spread some love.

Windrush - 'sitting in limbo'

6/9/2020

(378 words - 3 minute read)

Last night the BBC showed the drama documentary, Sitting in Limbo, about the injustice and humiliation heaped on Anthony Bryan as a result of the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy towards immigrants.

Bryan was just one of at least 160 people (government figures) wrongfully detained or deported, and over 1000 claims for compensation have been lodged. As at 6th February only 3% of claims had been settled, which puts the hand-wringing of the current Home Office Minister, Priti Patel, into perspective.

Who was responsible for the hostile environment policy?

It’s easy to go after the Labour immigration minister who first invented the term, Liam Bryne, and it’s even easier to go after Theresa May who oversaw the deployment of ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’ vans.

But what Sitting in Limbo illustrated was the utter banality of evil. Without the collaboration of dozens of minor functionaries the policy would have fallen apart.

Bryan’s life was systematically dismantled by the immigration officers who arrested him (twice), the officials who booked him in to detention centres, the apparatchiks who demanded documentation from him that he’d already supplied, the jack-in-office who referred to his ‘alleged’ children’, and the driver of the van that took him 166 miles from London to the Verne detention centre on Portland, Dorset - among many, many others.

Any one of these people could have disrupted the hostile environment assembly line of shame and indignity by saying no, but none of them did. ‘I’m just doing my job’, said one officer asking Bryan for yet more proof of the 50 years he’d spent in the UK. ‘Yes,’ said Bryan, ‘a job that ruins people’s lives’.

Hannah Arendt coined the term ‘banality of evil’ after watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Some of the people who contributed to Nazi atrocities were evil, she said, but many weren’t. They were just humdrum cogs in a machine, 'following orders' - a defence against culpability rejected at the 1945-6 Nuremberg trials.

'A deportation order has been issued against you,' says one official as Bryan sits before him after months - years - battling to prove his right to remain. 'On your arrival in Jamaica you will receive the sum of £1000 to help you resettle'.

Was that official watching Sitting in Limbo last night? What was he thinking?

Notes from a cliff-edge