Stubborn or Innocent?

The popular imagination has it that swathes of prisoners insist on their innocence. Not for the first time, the popular imagination is wrong.

There are innocent people in prison, enough to make those informed or caring enough to worry about our judicial system. But it isn't a majority disease.

Whenever someone tells me that they are innocent, I tend to let it wash over me. Maybe they are, maybe they're not, and either way their daily life is the same.

But rather arbitrarily, I take the view that anyone who is still protesting their innocence after ten years is either genuine or crazy.

By the ten year mark we all know that protesting innocence is a guarantee to a long, long stay in prison. It is long enough for those who initially claimed innocence as a trial ploy to come to terms with their guilt and admit it.

So if a man tells me, ten years in, he is innocent then I am likely to believe him. For what that's worth.

That said, though, there are isolated cases where a man's denial of the crime is a huge personal, emotional investment. He may have persuaded his family, his partner, his children, that he is innocent and that the trial verdict was perverse.

They stick with him, supporting him emotionally and financially, struggling to keep their lives normal whilst campaigning on his behalf.

These people, these guilty people, find themselves dug into a hole from which they cannot escape. To do so would be to risk destroying the whole edifice they have created around themselves. It would be to risk losing their family.

There are times when being genuinely guilty, like myself, is a small comfort.

The IPP Injustce

A simple tweak of the law by a desperate government has managed to more than double the number of Lifers in under ten years. Remarkable.

It was once the case that in order to receive a Life sentence you had to do something pretty horrible. Murder, obviously, got you a mandatory life sentence. Then there were discretionary life sentences, dished out for lesser crimes but where Life was a sentencing option. It had to be the case that to receive a discretionary life sentence, there had to be firm evidence that you were either unstable or on an escalating path of violence. Receiving such a sentence was a Very Big Deal.

But the government, faced with some popular panic whose specifics I forget (there are so many), diluted the meaning of the sentence whilst simultaneously broadening its scope.

These sentences are "not really" life sentences, only open-ended ones. The terminology is different but the reality is exactly the same. These are Indefinite Sentences for Public Protection - IPP.

You don't have to do anything particularly serious to receive such a sentence, which is why there are over five and a half thousand people serving one, and the number rises each week.

The pettiness of some offences which have attracted these sentences is revealed by the tariff portion of these sentences. The tariff, minimum term, equates with the fixed sentence they would have received before IPPs were invented. The average tariff for IPP's is a mere 18 months; there are those who have had a tariff of one day.

These sentences are a travesty on several levels. Their purpose is fundamentally objectionable. IPP are intended to hold people in prison on an assumption that they pose a future danger to society, hence their open ended nature. When it comes to depriving people of their liberty and inflicting upon them and their families the degradations that flow from imprisonment, I firmly hold that it should be no more than a punishment for the crime already committed.

Detaining people on the basis of what they may possibly do in the future is wholly unjust. It can be dressed up with whatever politico-legal sleight of hand available, but it remains the fact that punishing people for what they may possibly do in future is a repellent act.

Added to these principled objections are practical ones. IPP's can only be released if they can show that they have "addressed their offending behaviour". This is done by completing "offending behaviour courses" and then parading these achievements before the Parole Board.

Alas, the side effect of knee jerk policy making is to speak first, try and make it work later. With IPP's, this means that there are insufficient places on these courses for them to complete them before the end of their tariff. If your tariff is 18 months and the waiting list for the course is 2 years, there is no chance for you to demonstrate before the PB that you are fit for release.

Way over 2,000 of those serving IPP's are over their tariff and the Ministry accepts that this is not necessarily the fault of the prisoners. So bizarre and wicked is this situation, that the High Court ruled last year that, in effect, the sentence has become so arbitrary as to become unlawful.

The higher courts plugged this political problem on the well known legal doctrine of "tough shit". And so these men remain in prison. A similar situation applies to those who are due Parole hearings, their only avenue of release. The PB is so overstretched that people are not getting their hearing as prescribed by law, some serving years extra just waiting for the hearing.

The courts have ruled that this is a terrible situation but, alas, there is no one in particular to blame. And so they have now blocked IPP's from launching legal challenges to demand their right to a parole hearing. It's no one’s fault, so we are back to "tough shit".

Actually, we know whose fault it is. It is the governments fault. They invented IPP sentences and talked tough on sentencing. The judiciary responded and used IPP sentences with some vigour. The government, quick to throw people in prison, neglected to provide the resources for these prisoners to undertake their offending behaviour courses, and failed to fund the Parole Board for this doubling of their workload.

This situation reflects a profound shift in sentencing philosophy that was overlooked by legislatures and society. Rather than being sent to prison for a fixed time as a punishment for the crime committed, many are now detained not only for the crime, but on the basis of what they may do in future.

It seems obvious to me that this is a wicked injustice, a shift in philosophy that should have received a wide debate. Even so, to implement this schema without funding the mechanisms to administer it, such the parole board, strips whatever legitimacy may have existed from this shameful enterprise.

Prison Staff and the Innocent

There are a lot of innocent people in prison. I don't mean technically innocent, or subject to some prosecutorial slipperyness. I refer to those who just didn't commit the crime they are convicted of.

We - as a society - pretend that these are rare anomalies, nothing much to worry about. And the broad mass of society has the luxury of being able to do this, and I hope that they don't find themselves on the wrong end of State power.

Prison staff, though, can find themselves in the awkward position of being unable to avert their eyes. How can a screw keep banging up a man he believes is innocent? The mental contortions that allow this are beyond me but I suspect it flows from a variation of "only following orders". I'm all for personal responsibility and principle, and doing something wrong just because another person tells me to is anathema. But that's me.

Whilst wing staff only have to square their conscience a couple of times a day, at bang up, the prison probation officers and psychologists are far more culpable. They spend years delving into our heads, examining every aspect of our lives and crimes in a (vain) attempt to render us safe.

So they, of all staff, are most familiar with the file, the case, and some miscarriages of justice are so blatant that the file screams “innocent^”. And yet these staff will, day after day, face the con and insist that he rehashes his crime and explain himself.

It makes me shudder, that some individuals can knowingly keep others behind bars in the face of all the evidence. But this is a reflection of institutional structures based on power; no one individual has to take responsibility for their actions, none have to face the reality of their decisions on those in their charge. Everyone in the structure can absolve themselves, pointing to some superior's order, some regulation, some other centre of decision making.

Prison can coarsen the soul and render us indifferent to the sufferings of others - and this applies to staff as well as prisoners. The important difference is, staff have power over
others.

Writing Reports

Life sentences generate vast quantities of paper. Reports, risk assessments, sentence planning, parole dossiers, history sheets, daily logs, transfer reports... It is a blizzard that we must navigate in order to progress towards release.

The most important set of paperwork are the staff reports which comprise the dossier considered by the Parole Board. These reports are supposed to be written by all the staff who know us -workplace, education, healthcare, psychology, wing staff, middle management, internal and external probation, chaplaincy, Uncle Tom Cobbley...

The idea itself is a good one. Each of these staff see us in different settings, for different purposes, and each brings their own particular expertise. We all have different aspects to our personality and we each present ourselves differently according to social context. A man who seems to be benefiting from exploring his offending history with psychologists, for instance, may be obnoxious and aggressive on the wing. He may be a lousy worker, but give of himself in educationally mentoring his peers.

If the reporting process works well, then the Parole Board should receive a rounded picture of each individual. The more complete this picture, then the better the assessment they can make as to what risk he may pose if released.

As an objective framework for assessment, this should be a pretty good one. How this translates into practice is crucial and it is at this point that the system collapses. This leads to people being released who then commit horrible crimes, or those who are perfectly safe being kept in detention. No system is perfect but the present one operates particularly badly.

Psychologists rule the prison roost, and have done for over a decade. When staff write parole reports, they tend to avoid making their own judgements based on their experience. Rather, they substitute that judgement for whatever psychology are recommending. All staff have fallen into this habit.

Whilst it could be argued that psychologists are the specialists and are more likely to be correct, this is not the point (and also not true). Psychologists only see a small part of us and it is for other staff to bring their particular experiences of us to the table. To merely defer,to psychologists is to render the reporting process skewed, incomplete, and far more likely to lead to bad decisions about release.

I take quite a strong line on this. If professionals are being paid for their opinions, it is weak and fraudulent for them to merely follow the views of others. Worse, this method of report writing leads to injustice. If psychologists see a prisoner in a particular light and others merely parrot them, then what may be an incomplete or incorrect assessment becomes the dominant and unchallenged paradigm.

This leaves the Parole Board in a very difficult position. They are presented with a fixed view, one collective opinion, about the prisoner in front of them. Do they accept it? Or reject it? In the absence of a range of views which explore the full range of a prisoner’s social, intellectual, psychological, emotional and spiritual outlook, then how can they make the right decision?

This is, for prisoners, a common complaint about the iniquities of the reporting process. For society, though, it is an equally important issue. People who are dangerous may be released and people who are not may remain locked up. This is about fundamental justice, and it sits in the hands of minor functionaries who have lost any sense of the importance of their job or the standards they should strive for.