Thursday, March 28, 2013

Writer's Block

Ben has writer's block!

It happens sometimes, but there should be a blog post appearing over Easter.  Ed.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

PM

Tune into BBC Radio 4 to hear Ben on the radio!

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Victims and Debate


In the debate at Nottingham University over the proposition that Life should mean Life there was one regrettable absentee – the victims’ representative. Moya Griffiths was bamboozled by time and traffic and I’m not sure if the debate wasn’t the better for it.

This may sound harsh, but I believe that we advance public policy more through the exchange of ideas than we do through the visceral exposition of high emotion. In the interests of fairness, though, here is Moya’s interview with the university Impact magazine. My commentary follows….

IMPACT MAGAZINE Thursday 28th February 2013
 Moya Griffiths – Proposition and mother of a murder victim

Could you explain your argument briefly?
I represent a lot of people who have lost a loved one. We believe that if you are prepared to take a life then you can fully anticipate losing your liberty. Our campaign is ‘life for a life’. The victims do not get a fair crack of the whip as far as justice is concerned. It’s been proven over and over and over again. Now quite often a life sentence is dictated by ten years depending on the severity, but talking from my own personal experience, ten years is average. That is not a life sentence. We feel that when people are imprisoned even when they do come out after ten years, quite often they will re-offend. The statistics are there to back this up.

Do you think offenders can be too young to know what they’re are doing?
No. A child of seven will know the difference between right and wrong. I’m not saying that there can’t be extenuating circumstances; every case has to be judged on its own merits. For a normal 13 or 14 year old to kill or murder, I’m sorry no. You can quote cases, such as James Bulger; the two convicted killers knew exactly what they were doing, young as they were.

Is there room for redemption?
The proof is there, I’m not taking anything away from what Ben has achieved but the difference is years ago the sentencing was a lot harder, more penalised than what it is today. If it were to happen again, he wouldn’t necessarily go through that process, as he wouldn’t be behind bars for that period of time.

Should ‘life for a life’ extend to the death penalty?
We will never ever have capital punishment back in this country. If you ask any mother or father who have lost a child, initially the reaction would be, ‘Yes’ to capital punishment. But it’s not realistic. I, and others like me, believe in life for a life in prison.

Do you think the same sentence should apply to those who commit crimes of compassion and those who murder with malicious intent?
If it is a crime of compassion then I think it should be viewed quite differently. It’s not someone going out who thinks life is worthless or cheap. Life is cheap to a lot of people - it’s meaningless to them. Those are the people who need to be put imprison and made to stay there.

My Commentary….
“Our campaign is ‘life for a life’”… Is an excellent slogan, and one I appreciate is deeply attractive due to its simplicity. But therein lays its weakness - depriving someone else of their life, or a meaningful existence, does nothing to repair the harm originally done. What it does do is repeat that harm onto the criminal's family. The very pain victims’ decry is then the one they advocate spreading.
”The victims do not get a fair crack of the whip as far as justice is concerned. It’s been proven over and over and over again.” I am never quite sure what such assertions actuially mean. Does the criminal justice system pay enough attention to victims? Possibly not, although the situation in the legal process has changed significantly in recent years and not always to the betterment of Justice. Of course, it is a fundamental tenet of our system that it is the State that takes centre stage as being the one offended against, the victim being only the vehicle of the offence. To do otherwise would be to substitute personal and arbitrary vengeance for Justice.

“Now quite often a life sentence is dictated by ten years depending on the severity, but talking from my own personal experience, ten years is average. That is not a life sentence.” Ten years is not only not a life sentence, it’s not even related to reality. Of released Lifers, the average served is 16 years. Of those still inside….well, my own journey through the system may give an indication. The starting point for sentencing in murder cases is 16 years and then varied according to mitigating or exaccerbating circumstances. What Moya believes is just plain wrong.

 “We feel that when people are imprisoned even when they do come out after ten years, quite often they will re-offend. The statistics are there to back this up.”  Leaving aside the “ten years” error, this is again entirely wrong. Second homicides are committed at a rate of 1 or 2 %, a figure that’s been constant for decades.  Serious reoffending comes to maybe 5%. By any measure too much, but equally by no measure is this “quite often”.

“Is there room for redemption?” “The proof is there, I’m not taking anything away from what Ben has achieved but the difference is years ago the sentencing was a lot harder, more penalised than what it is  today. If it were to happen again, he wouldn’t necessarily go through that process, as he wouldn’t be behind bars for that period of time.”

Utterly and completely wrong. The tariff for murder has been leaping ever higher over the past decade or so. What may once have been an unimaginable and rare tariff – say 30 years – is now frequent. For clarifications sake, under the present schema I would still have received a tariff around 10 years: starting at 16 years, then reduced due to my age. And the implication that I was somehow redeemed due to my sentence is quite, quite wrong.

I do honestly appreciate the raw anger, the bitterness and even hatred that can flow from being a victim of crime. For those private individuals I have all due sympathy and compassion. But I will never allow that to slide into supporting this raw vengeance from being turned into public policy, and one that merely increases the level of suffering in society.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Tweet Tweet

Russell Webster recently interviewed Ben on why he tweets:

Twitter is the local pub, the street corner, the groves of academe... @PrisonerBen on why he tweets:

Embracing the digital

Twitter. 140 meaningful characters. Daft idea….  Having fought a brutal battle to be allowed to blog from prison and watching the media develop, one of the few conscious decisions I made on release was to embrace the possibilities of digital communication with all the vigour of a randy Alsatian.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the blog, all sprang to life fairly quickly and with astonishingly little thought.
But the idea of compressing anything meaningful into 140 characters seemed utterly absurd.
All the more so given that my writing style can veer unexpectedly into the flowery and verbose. And yet it seemed a challenge worthy of rising to.
My first tweets were probably as timorous as I’ll ever get!
Although my tweeting presence has actually been two or three years - an account being fed links to my blog whilst I was inside. However, that had to end when the Ministry of Justice made it a disciplinary offence for prisoners to access social media, even second hand.

Twitter fosters debate

As with all of my public writing, my intrusion into tweeting is driven by my perpetual need to foster the debate around imprisonment and the sheer thoughtless stupidity in much around criminal justice.
Twitter is the local pub, the street corner, the groves of academe all wrapped up in a simple format.
It was an easy decision to plunge in and start splashing about.
Obviously, given my history this was a risky move.
My existence in any public medium can be a lightening rod for those with the strongest views around criminal justice.
And I have wandered into two ferocious twitter-wars, lasting days and becoming hideously personal. I don’t say this lightly – the humanity and support of my followers and onlookers during these exchanges cannot but foster hope that decency is in the ascendant on twitter.

Twitter encourages intrusion and exploration of others' conversations

Which is not to say this kindness is wholly repaid by my abrasive style.
It has to be said that if you say something silly about prison, I will try to lead you firmly by the nose to see that.
And I am blessed that so many are willing to engage on that basis.
A lump of ocasional idiocy and self mockery helps, I suspect.
Significant discussions take place with those who share some of my views and – more importantly – those who do not.
One of the central advantages of Twitter is that it encourages one to intrude and explore the conversations of others’, and it is a personal maxim that my effectiveness to prompt thought is directly related to the degree of opposition in viewpoint.
Ideally, I would only engage with Daily Mail readers!
I tweet regularly, at times obsessively.
You can always tell when I am at a loose end or struggling with the machinations of rail travel because my tweet rate rockets.
In the many long and lonely hours spent at Paddington Station, Twitter has kept me sane. And pointed me to a free toilet.
In these times, not only does my tweet frequency rise, so does the forensic ruthlessness of my responses to those commenting on my areas of interest. Which raises the only weakness, for me, of this incredible medium of communication. 140 characters is so little, we each have to adapt our style of writing. Alas, mine comes across as fairly  terse, even belligerent.

Twitter is an opportunity to challenge and change views

The benefits of Twitter far outweigh any personal slurs or plain silliness that can abound in any social herd.
The ability to leap across social and political boundaries, to leap professional hurdles, to reach audiences that had previously remained unperturbed…the only way to alter anyone’s view is to engage with them, on any level that works, and Twitter offers such amazing opportunities to do that.
There are, let’s not understate the matter, personal and professional opportunities.
In no other way can I interact with others in the criminal justice community to enrich both my personal existence and my professional opportunities.
Twitter.
To the novice, a baffling stream on short intertwined ideas.
But with only a little time and a few stumbles, it reveals itself to be one of the most fascinating and enriching ways to communicate throughout the human community.





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Monday, March 4, 2013

Tonight....

At 10pm tonight  will be taking part in a phone-in show on BBC Radio Birmingham sparked by the Ministry decision to ban smoking in prisons.

I believe that the broad theme will be along the lines of "is prison too soft". Of course, that's the wrong question.

We should ask, what is the intended purpose of prison? And then we can ask, does it do what we ask of it?

To ask "is prison too soft" is to assume far too much, and to overlook the fact that we really are very, very confused about what we expect from the use of prison.

Friday, March 1, 2013

New Abuse and Censorship Blog Policy

Regular readers will appreciate that I have always struggled to give space to even the maddest, most repulsive ideas. I don't like censorship.

When trolling threatened to get out of hand, I suggested corraling it into a particular thread. Such was the outrage that I reconsidered and the venom was allowed to flow. It amuses some, depresses others, but such is the nature of blogging.

However. Abusing me is one thing,but abusing and slandering those nearest and dearest to me is quite another. As of now, comments which are abusive in that way will be deleted. You are free to abuse me, as ever, although we all appreciate some wit and creativity along the way.

I may lose some readers for this change in policy. I will live with that. Protecting my loved ones is more important.