Demeaning the Meaning of "Life"

As the most serious sentence available to the State, the Life sentence should carry some weight. It should, at least, be a signal that the crime committed is one of such repugnance to society that only the heaviest sentence will suffice.

And yet... a Life sentence is mandatory for murder. It can be -and often is - argued that murder is the most serious offence and so should properly attract the most serious sentence. Well, yes and no.

Not all murders are the same. There is the wife who kills her husband after years of being degraded. There is the householder who hits a burglar one too hard as he tries to flee. There is the parent who, with the best intention, ends the suffering of a severely disabled child.

There is the drunken bloke who has a scrap outside the pub, his victim falling to hit his head. There are the jealous people who, tormented by their perceptions of their spouse, lose all control.

There are also the child killers who stalk, kidnap, rape and kill. The serial killers who repeatedly inflict horror. There are the terrorists who place bombs on buses and trains and kill dozens.

All of these fall under the heading of "murder" and all, on the face of it, receive the sentence of Life. I argue that this demeans the very idea of a Life sentence, devalues it in the popular imagination and, in part, fosters a feeling that "sentences ought to be tougher".

In the popular imagination, Life sentences can mean a mere handful of years. To this day, it is widely believed that Lifers are released around 9 years. This hasn't been the case for decades.

The confusion and misperception lies in the "tariff". This is the minimum term the Court sets when issuing a Life sentence and leads to misleading headlines. Where the tabloids scream that some deviant 'only' received say, 5 years it takes careful reading to discern that the sentence was actually Life. The 5 years is the minimum; the convict may actually serve 10, 20, 40 years.

As things stand, bog-standard domestic murderers may receive a tariff of 16 years. Kill with a knife and you are up to 20 or 25. Terrorists attract tariffs of 40 or more years. Serial killers will never be released.

This is all perfectly clear to Lifers; tariff is everything and differentiates between the different types of murderer. Tariffs have only been around for the best part of 30 years and so that there remains such widespread public ignorance only highlights the malevolent, lazy and plain incompetent role of the media in failing to educate.

The question that has troubled some for many years - the House of Lords perpetually returns to the subject - is whether Life should be the mandatory sentence for murder?

If 'murder' covers such a broad range of crimes, from the bad to the truly horrific, then shouldn't the headline sentence also reflect this range? Would this not clarify the popular understanding?

A mercy killing might receive, say, 10 years. Domestic murders 15, murders in the course of a robbery 25... and so on (these numbers are merely illustrative of scale). Reserve the Life sentence for those whose crime may merit confinement for the whole of their lives and nothing less.

There are those who argue that "life should mean life" and under the present scope of "murder" then the mercy-killer would bear the same punishment as the deliberate mass murderer. This would be a great injustice, extending the number of those who have a whole-life tariff from 30 people to several thousand.

The Life sentence is a mess. Legally tortuous, broad in its application and misunderstood by many. Rather than slowly grinding out minor changes and clarifications, would it not be better to abandon it and begin again?

Savage Children

When our conception of children and childhood is challenged it is treated as an affront against ourselves. The result is an outpouring of atavistic hatred directed against the offending child, we re-conceive them as other than "children" and use this conceptual trick to permit ourselves to call for the infliction of heinous punishments. Arguably, a part of the pains we wish to inflict upon miscreant children is not a due measure of punishment for their crime, it is also an expression of our anger and distaste that they dared challenge our rosy view of children. We want to hurt them for not living up to our expectations.

Children who commit serious crimes against others present us with a special case. Not only do they challenge our expectations of childhood, they also present a challenge to society and the criminal justice system  -  Just what do we do with such criminal children?

It is common for the first, broad, reaction to be one of refusing to see such criminals as children at all. The level of responsibility that we expect of them, and the punishments expected to be levelled against them, are all distinctly "adult". No leniency is allowed, there is little recognition of the plasticity of children's minds and personalities, a resolute refusal to accept that children are not fully developed and fully responsible human beings.

So forceful is this rejection of their status of "child" that we unashamedly shrug off the modern obsession that is "protect the .children". While millions of adults have to undergo vetting to assess their potential to harm children, as a collective we fervently wish that the State inflict brutal treatment upon child criminals. This is a social schizophrenia worthy of Orwell's worst nightmares.

Children have always, on occasion, committed horrible crimes. The names of Bell, Thompson and Venables are firmly lodged in the popular culture. That we are affronted by child criminals is a lesson in our obsession to insist that children are inherently innocent and unblemished. The child criminal should hardly be punished for our modern insistence on characterising children in this way.

It is fortunate that the custodians of criminal justice, the mechanics who create and operate the machinery of punishment, have thwarted the popular will in these matters. Judges do give lesser sentences in recognition that children are not to be held as responsible as adults, and I hope they continue to do so despite populist outrage.

Once incarcerated, the question of how such children should be treated is central to our view of ourselves as a society. It seems that whilst we are against parental beatings of obnoxious kids, we are all in favour of inflicting the worst that the penal system can offer. We are a very mixed-up bunch.

Regardless of the mob - and the more vocal tabloids - the terms of confinement for serious child criminals has taken a fixed course for decades. This was largely a reaction to the shambolic regime inflicted upon Mary Bell, whose case forced government to consider the problems posed by such child criminals. The premise of their treatment is that they are children, distinct entities from adults, and that society should make an effort to reclaim them.

As a murderous child I experienced the regime that still stands in a handful of high security units dotted across the country. Yes, there are enough children who commit very serious crimes to require several such units. The cases which are lodged in the public psyche are merely the ones that the media bring to the fore; the others merit a paragraph or two in some local free-sheet, unheard of.

On my section of a special unit there were three Lifers; Two of us had killed, one was a serial rapist. There were four such sections in this special unit. Along with us were children who had committed lesser crimes and children who had committed no crime. The latter were those in local authority care who were so unmanageable that only very secure conditions could contain them. The youngest of us was eight years old; the oldest, seventeen

The physical conditions were precisely those that cause discomfort to some observers - very good. These units are, in effect, high security children's homes. They are not prisons, with all the physical degradations that entails. Soft furnishings, TV's, carpets, our own clothes, and so on. All of the features that allow some to characterise these units as being holiday camps do indeed exist.

Alongside these amenable conditions are the less amenable features of high security. Monitoring is constant. Whether I was in bed, on the toilet or in the bath, I was physically observed every ten minutes. Most of the day is spent under the direct observation of staff, whose ratio to children approached one-to-one. Hence the high cost of such units.

Education is a central focus of daily life. This is both a matter of legal requirements but also as a tool to foster pro-social attitudes and to encourage personal change. Without education, how do we explore the wider world and appreciate our place within it?

The physical conditions are the least important, no matter how they are a point of fixation for commentators. The essential value of these units is in their purpose, the effect they have on their charges.

Adolescence is a key period for the formation of the adult individual. This is a given. And I found that the unit allowed me the opportunity to engage with others in a facsimile of adolescence in the free world. In every aspect of my personality and social functioning I was forced to question and challenge myself, to explore how I perceived myself and others.

This period in life is when we form a central part of our personality and perceive our role in the world. With the right challenge and the proper encouragement, these units provide the environment for dangerous adolescents to develop into stable and socially useful young adults.

Some will find this offensive. Some will argue that the emphasis should be wholly upon punishment, even if the children in question are only ten years old. This is a base response and to act upon it would not only degrade our society and ourselves, but is to destroy the children.

Child criminals, particularly those who commit very serious crimes, pose a question. They challenge us to decide whether we focus on their punishment, which means writing them off as potential citizens for ever; or whether we believe that these children can be reclaimed, to become decent adults.

To date, the evidence suggests that these children can be reclaimed and that they can go on to lead successful lives that contribute to the general good. To abandon this approach merely to satisfy a temporary spasm of popular outrage would be a judgement on our criminal justice system and our society that we would regret long after the names of the children involved were forgotten.