Letter re Article in the Mail on Sunday

Dear Ms Levin,

Re: Article in Mail on Sunday Review, 16 May 2010

I was astounded and deeply disturbed at several comments that you made in your article for the Mail on Sunday.

As Vice Chair of the 'watchdog' body, charged with satisfying yourselves "as to the state of the prison premises, the administration of the prison and the treatment of the prisoners", it is a pre-requisite that you have a grasp of the prison rules.

As these legal requirements are at the heart of ensuring that prisoners are not treated indecently, I fail to see how you can fulfil your statutory function when you are so clearly - and now publicly - bereft of understanding their provisions.

How can you possibly ensure that prisoners are being treated within the Rules when you don't know the Rules? This is all the more worrying given that the prisoners you are meant to be safeguarding reside in a prison with a shocking history of staff abuse and brutality.

You quote the Human Rights Act as being responsible for several aspects of prison life that you find objectionable. It is unfortunate that each of your claims is completely wrong.

You claimed that, "Due to the misguided Human Rights Act, prisoners have a right to take whatever unlawful drugs they choose."

This is a complete misunderstanding of the court's judgement and one which is common amongst prison staff. A British court found that forcing prisoners to go cold turkey without offering the palliative care that is always offered to patients in the community caused these prisoners unnecessary suffering. It did not, in any way, give prisoners any right to take illegal drugs. That you have persuaded yourself of the truth of this canard, so popular with the Daily Mail, is revealing.

Part of your duties include supervising the proper treatment of prisoners held in the Segregation Unit (punishment block). At any one moment, there will be prisoners being held there as a punishment for taking illegal drugs. Are your inspections of the Seg so cursory that you fail to notice this? Did you never wonder why, if prisoners are entitled to take illegal drugs, they were then being punished for doing so? This is extremely worrying, as the Seg was the rotten centre of the brutality previously inflicted by prison staff. As your inspections of the Seg are seemingly so shallow, how are we to be reassured that this brutality has ended? As a 'watchdog', you appear to be deaf and blind as well as toothless.

You also assert that, "as a result of the Human Rights Act, prisoners can no longer be searched internally". Prison staff have never had the power to conduct internal searches. This has no connection with the Human Rights Act and even the most cursory reading of that Act would inform you of this. It has only ever been the case, under common law, that in life threatening emergencies then a Doctor may conduct an internal search, if necessary with the assistance of prison staff. As one of the people charged by the Secretary of State to ensure that prisoners are not ill treated, that you are ignorant of the circumstances when a prisoner may be physically restrained by staff and have their orifices probed by force is quite shocking. In a prison with a history of staff brutality, it should be obvious that you should pay particular attention to any use of force by staff.

You then go on to claim that, "human rights means they have the right to decide if they want to lie in bed and do nothing all day". On the contrary, the Human Rights Act specifically exempts prisoners from the prohibition on slavery and the Prison Rules allow that we can be forced to work for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, with no pay.

That most prisoners are left locked in their cells every day has nothing whatever to do with the Human Rights Act. It has everything to do with the inability of the Prison Service to supply sufficient opportunities to work. It has been thus for at least two generations and that you are unaware of this basic penological fact is something that I find quite unsettling.

In unquestioningly accepting the Prison Service propaganda on mobile phones, I can't help but wonder what else you are willing to accept on faith when told to you by prison staff. As a 'watchdog', displaying such a trait is deeply disturbing.

You repeat the lie that mobile phones are inextricably linked to drug smuggling and witness intimidation. That a tiny minority of prisoners abuse phones in this way does not detract from the truth - that overwhelmingly, prisoners use mobile phones for the simple purpose of maintaining family relationships. You should be aware that supplying a handful of payphone landlines for the use of several hundred prisoners, coupled with charging men 7 times the usual payphone rate, makes the use of illicit mobile phones almost obvious. That you are all too willing to accept the propaganda issued by prison staff on this issue inevitably raises questions as to your willingness or ability to fulfil your official remit.

That you then claim that prisoners can simply hand these phones to staff and avoid punishment is absurd. Any prisoner caught with a phone is subject to disciplinary charges, if not criminal ones. Again, that as one of the people charged with monitoring the process of punishment and discipline, your ignorance of this reality is alarming.

Your complete ignorance of the Human Rights Act and the Prison Rules aside, what I found to be most disturbing in your article was your attitude to prisoners and their circumstance.

On a Christmas Day, you felt you had the right to pass a moral judgement on a prisoner who was missing his children. You were not troubled by a scintilla of compassion, not a single moment of understanding or humanity. If not for the prisoner, then for his children.

This attitude reached it's apogee with your comment that, "They complain endlessly about the treatment they receive when they have only themselves to blame."
I cannot over-emphasise my disgust with this statement. Prisoners are responsible for their crime, and only their crime. That society chooses to place them in prison is societies choice and its responsibility.

Once in prison, the treatment meted out to prisoners is in the hands of prison staff. Prisoners are rendered, as you recognise, largely impotent. In Wormwood Scrubs, this treatment has included staff meting out mock executions, bloody beatings and rape.

You are Vice Chair of the body charged with ensuring that prisoners are not ill-treated and yet you not only berate prisoners for complaining about their treatment, you blame prisoners themselves for that treatment.

Having read your comments, what prisoner could have sufficient confidence to approach you with any complaint? Equally importantly, any prison staff reading your comments will feel confident in their ability to mislead you, knowing that your supervision of the punishment block is perfunctory and that your knowledge of the Rules is merely illusory.

As a 'watchdog', you have revealed yourself to be judgemental, ill informed and incompetent. As a 'watchdog' in a prison with a history of staff brutality, I can only suggest these qualities mean that you are positively dangerous.

You have revealed an ignorance of the Prison Rules and the Human Rights Act, and in doing so portrayed an incorrect version of prison life. At best, this is reckless, and cannot but undermine your position. I can only suggest that you resign.

As a matter of courtesy I inform you that copies of this letter will be lodged with the Secretary of State, at whose pleasure you continue in office; with the Chair of the IMB at Wormwood Scrubs;and published on my Blog, prisonerben.blogspot.com. It will also be offered to Inside Time for publication.

Yours sincerely,
Ben Gunn

Life Should Mean Life

As slogans go, hearing this one being thrown into any debate is my lodestone for singling out the half-wit. It is a perpetual favourite for some of the more hate-obsessed victim’s campaign groups and the first refuge of Daily Mail readers (and writers).

I'd like to unpack this seemingly simple slogan and see if its conceptual legs are capable of carrying any weight.

The Life sentence has never meant, literally, imprisonment for life. Never. And now that life sentences are handed out like confetti, if we made "Life mean life" then we would be imprisoning a very wide spectrum of people indeed.

There are nearly 10,000 people serving indeterminate sentences at present. Less than 3,000 of those are convicted of murder. Should people sentenced for rape, armed robbery, wounding, actual bodily harm (a bloody nose) and the fifty other offences where Life is now the penalty actually spend the rest of their lives in prison?

I suggest that, if this situation is considered by the Life Mean Life brigade, then they will begin to hum and haw and generally retreat from their position.

I think they will retreat to the situation where they are actually only advocating literal Life for those convicted of murder.

Myths in the Making

I was going to entitle this piece "Oh, you LIAR!" but that just
becomes obvious as you read further...

Richard Littlejohn is one of the many commentators that the Daily Mail keeps under the stairs, ready to be wheeled out whenever some splenic verbosity is required. He has recently been doing a series, a large spread that could be entitled, "Woe is us, we are all going to the dogs, the End is Nigh, etc etc". You know the type, standard Daily Mail fare.

And it wouldn't occupy my attention accept for the fact that Littlejohn decided to dive into an exploration of human rights. This is complicated political and legal territory and Littlejohn did his research. Alas for scholarship, his research limited itself to reading his own newspaper...

And so he reiterates some blatant lies that the Mail peddled. Isn't it touching that a Mail columnist - in the full knowledge of the tripe he himself writes - actually believes that the rest of the paper is solid gold fact?

One such lie, a myth in the making, is that hundreds of prisoners were awarded compensation after being refused heroin. It speaks to the sanity of Mail readers that they could ever think this could be true, but there you are. The case in question was actually about de-toxing from heroin. In the community, detox via the NHS is supported with a regimen of drugs which lessen the pains of the process. But in prisons, this support was absent, forcing the detoxers to suffer. The compensation came about because of this inexplicable disparity in treatment, which led to their being caused unnecessary suffering. Feel free to object to that, as you please, but it had bugger all to do with being refused heroin.

His whole diatribe is littered with these lies, rehashed from 'news' reports printed in the Mail. I could list a dozen others, patiently disassembling them for our joint amusement. But that would be to over-egg the pudding. You get the point - the Daily Mail prints lies like they are going out of fashion and Richard Littlejohn is either a lazy, incompetent journalist or a barefaced liar. Nothing you didn't know...

Moral Journalism

Call me naive, but I think it is un-contentious to suggest that the popular media helps to shape social attitudes and beliefs. The broadcast and print media may be the sole source of information for many people.

Is there, then, a moral responsibility for journalists to offer well researched, truthful information? This isn't to deny the opportunity of political or personal bias; only that mixed in with the spin there should be nuggets of actual fact.

The Daily Mail in particular is notorious for abandoning any connection with reality, allowing their writers to ascend in flights of bilious rhetoric that barely contain the merest whiff of an actual fact. Rather than inform the public debate, they deform and debase it. Peter Hitchens comes to mind as a chief culprit of this 'journalism', a perpetual wordsmith who soothes the middle classes with a patina of authority on things penal. If people are willing to pay them, and if others are willing to buy their views, why should I care? I care, as should you, because so many people assume that such luminaries have a genuine knowledge of what they speak, and this helps to broadly shape opinions. That is very dangerous, leading to an inflamed populace demanding policy changes based upon lies and distortions.

The best illustration of media stupidity flowed from a certain tabloid’s campaign to 'out' sex offenders, leading to marches and attacks on innocent people. To pretend that newspaper managers are so stupid as to not foresee this is an insult. No social good was achieved, only social harm.

To return to the beginning, then: Should journalists have a moral responsibility for the social effects of what they write?