Fellow Romans

The speech Starmer won't give.

The first duty of any government is the safety of its citizens. That requires an efficient, moral and reliable criminal justice system.

I stand here today because our criminal justice system is not achieving these aims. I have to explain to you what this difficult situation is, how we arrived at this point, and what we are compelled to do to address this situation.

The criminal justice system is in crisis. We have all seen the stories around prisons. But criminal justice is far more, it is an interlocked system encompassing the police, probation, courts and prisons. They rely on each other, and a weak point in that chain can damage the whole system.

The police have all but abandoned dealing with crimes they feel are less important. But a person breaking into your home and taking your goods IS important. You rightly expect this to be dealt with quickly and efficiently. The police are failing in their core duties of detecting and solving crime.

The courts service is straining at the limits of its capacity. Court buildings are crumbing. We have insufficient numbers of Judges, and lawyers are overburdened to a shocking degree. Waiting times for trials can now stretch into years.

The probation service has been fragmented, overburdened by bureaucracy, and is short of staff. We rely on the work of the probation service to monitor those offenders in the community, and they are unable to fulfil this to the extent we would desire.

And then prisons, the centrepiece of our criminal justice system. Our prisons are full. They do not rehabilitate offenders well. There is also a shortage of staff to do this difficult job of trying to work with people who obviously don't want to be there.

We have entered government to find all these problems coming to a head, and unlike the Conservatives, we WILL address the problems, we MUST address the problems. It is fundamental to good government and a stable society that people have a criminal justice system that detects crime, catches criminals, and gets them before the courts for due punishment, with space in prisons to take them.

We currently don't have such a system. We have inherited a shockingly underfunded and neglected criminal justice system.

This brings us to the immediate crisis - there is no more room in prisons. The Tory government KNEW from their own statistics that this was going to occur, and they decided to avoid addressing what is now a crisis. They ignored the problem and handed it to us. Well, WE are competent and confident enough to address what the Tories created then ran away from.

We are bitterly disappointed that the party of law and order has reduced criminal justice to disorder and lawlessness. People now have little faith in the system to keep them safe. This is fully a result of Conservative neglect. They chose not to deal with the prison population. They produced a plan to build new prisons, then failed to implement it. And in winning your votes, it is now left to us to pick up the pieces.

These are the difficult decisions, decisions no government should be put in the position of having to make. We are going to have to continue the Tory plans to release more prisoners early, and delay sending some people to prison from court.

I can understand how this will be shocking. People sentenced to prison should go to prison, and those in prison should serve their sentences. That we cannot now guarantee to do that shows the deplorable state of the system the Tories have left us all.

We will make every effort to ensure that the prisoners we release will be low risk. These will NOT be violent or sexual offenders. We are determined to use the space we have in prison to protect you as best we can.

The prisoners we release will be low risk, non violent criminals. Nevertheless, there is a chance that something will go wrong, that one of them will cause significant harm. We will use every lever in our power to prevent this. But we must also face this sad reality.

This decision will be condemned by some. And these are not decisions we would ever make in any other circumstances. We can only apologise that we are in this position and stress that it is not one we created. This mess was a Tory creation, but now our problem as a society to deal with.

This scandalous situation highlights many problems. But it also provides opportunities. We could just keep building ever more prisons, with each cell costing tens of thousands to build, and each prisoner in them costs 40 thousand pounds a year. And what do we get for this huge investment of your taxes? A shocking rate of reoffending.

We don't believe that this is good enough. You deserve better outcomes for your money. We need to reduce crime effectively. And prison isn't delivering what we need.

We are going to use this Tory created crisis to examine every part of our criminal justice system. Every nook and cranny. And we are determined to make it better. And I dont mean merely making the current system more efficient. The present system fails to cut crime. We must look at every avenue, every idea, every nation, to discover ways where we CAN cut crime, not merely recycle criminals endlessly through prisons.

This period of crisis is the best time to have a national conversation on crime and punishment.

I need your help to do this. I need your support and your patience while we carefully examine all the options. No government has had the courage to do this in decades. Now we have been led into crisis by the last government, it is time to face hard realities and search for affective solutions.

Crime is a blight on society. It causes huge harm to those effected. Let us use this moment to determine the future of an effective criminal justice system.

Thank you.

Hard v Soft

One of the pleasures of General Elections is that they clarify the minds of politicians. All of a sudden, blather has to be turned into policy that they can actually sell. One of the disappointments of Elections is that Labour and Conservative will retreat into an arms race on criminal justice. Any idea that Labour are reformists was shattered by New Labour and Jack Straw, who helped lever themselves into power by being tougher than the Tories on crime. Straw led up to the election trying to out-Howard Michael Howard. Once in office, Labour created ultra harsh “two strikes” laws that the years have shown to be so disastrous that even their creators have renounced them. Labour isn't instinctively harsh on criminals, but it will never forget the electoral lessons of new Labour. The myth that Labour is soft on crime should be long dead.

The Conservatives need no electoral nudge to be bilious against criminals. It is their natural home and one they invariably retreat to in the face of elections. This rests on a view of human beings and their decision making that criminology dropped about five minutes after criminology became a field. The Tories hold to the view that people are rational actors, and as such a calculus of benefits versus punishments can influence crime rates. Harsher punishments should invariably mean criminals rationally deciding it's not worth the candle. That over a century of knowledge shows us that this isn't true is not a detail that hinders Tory splenics.

And so we return to the perennial issue of being “hard” or “soft” on crime. The Overton Window doesn't seem to allow us to see outside of this criminological dimorphism that we are sold by our leaders. And it is deeply depressing. Everyone is pretending that the rise in sentencing that has been constant for decades has seen a concomitant fall in crime. This hard v soft discourse is deeply dishonest, partly because we insist it is. Its nice and simple. And we seem to be insisting that our politicians lie to us and feed us simplistic pseudo solutions rather than tell us “this is complicated, we can't guarantee we will get this right but we will do our best”.

And so the escalation continues, the waste of lives and billions of pounds, with no reduction in crime or social harm. The question of whether a measure is hard or soft is meant to relate to crime, but in reality applies only to criminals. Being hard on crime itself would mean measures that reduced it. Being hard on criminals means inflicting harsher punishments. The two are not connected, leaving us in a spiral of increasing sentences without any effect on crime rates. An absurdity. One we seem content to support.

Abandon hard v soft. Walk away from this dead end. The only question should be - Is this policy EFFECTIVE? Does it cut crime? Most current policy does not, it is expensive and stupid. And we will continue to vote for it.

The Mandela Question

Ever since I read Nelson Mandela's autobiography some questions have been floating my mind. They have not resolved themselves with the passage of time. Why did Mandela opt for a campaign of violence against apartheid, rather than follow a Gandhian path? And why was Mandela such a compliant prisoner? This latter question is the one that catches my keenest attention...

Mandela was held in pretty horrible conditions. Take that as read. Prisons ar4e the essence of State power, nakedly visceral. Being a Black anti-apartheid lawyer convicted of treason inevitable implies that time in a White States prison will be more interesting than your average prison.

The physical conditions may not be unappreciable. A cell is a cell. Slavery is slavery. There are a thousand variations on those themes, some more horrific than others, yet the core aspects of imprisonment are common across all jurisdictions and institutions. Their purpose is the same.

And all prisons have objectionable aspects. Mandela faced more complications, difficulties, in being a Black leader advocating the violent overthrow of the State which held him in prison. Every moment should - I'd expect - be an affront not only to the human dignity of those contained but also morally repellent in being part of the White machinery to oppress the Black majority/

The question, then, is why was Mandela so compliant with the prison institution? Why did he spend years being marched to a quarry to break rocks under the lash and the sun? Alongside the outrage every prisoner invariably feels, Mandela faced the heavy burden of the racial disempowerment weighing his every step. His cell, his daily existence, was the essence of apartheid.

Why, then, did he not revolt? Why did he not organise? Why did he not, for example, refuse to work as a slave in the quarry? For Mandela did none of these. Oh, there was a lot of talk. The internal machinations of the ANC were endlessly debated under the guise of football team meetings. But actual action, resistance against the institution that limited his horizons? No.

I find this incomprehensible. Perhaps I take a hard, and harsh, line on these things, an outgrowth from my own history. But any moral being faced with injustice should feel compelled to stand up. And undoubtedly so when there is a political imperative to challenge injustice alongside the bare human one.

Yet Mandela didn't challenge. This is not uncommon amongst "political" prisoners, those whose external activities challenging the State lead them to prison. The PIRA prisoners in UK prisons, for example; Animal rights activists; A whole spectrum of political prisoners actually put their feet up in prison. This is strange to me, as prison is the essence of the very State against whom they are fighting.

To comply is, to some degree, to cooperate - and to collaborate. Prisons only run with the cooperation of prisoners. That latent power is rarely appreciated, let alone realised. Yet a political. moral being - such as Mandela is proclaimed to be - should have had the insight to appreciate how potent his actions within prison could have been.

Not that utility is an argument for or against action. Moral beings challenge injustice because it is right to do so; not born of a calculated chance of success. Mandela did nothing. Of course, it could be argued that the penalties he faced for prison activism could be severe. To which I shrug my shoulders. Resisting abuses of power carries an inevitable price.

Prisoners revolted in Auschwitz. Prisoners in the Gulag revolted. All paid heavily.... In recent times, we have the likes of Michnik held by the Polish-Soviet dictatorship/ Having being imprisoned for resisting totalitarianism, he wrote from his cell to the  head of the secret police - "Is that all you've got?" Prisoners in Germany sew their mouths shut. Turks go on hunger strike. As do Californian prisoners held in solitary. Prisoners everywhere resist abuse, and all accept the cause is right and the price must be paid to have any chance of success. In this context, that Mandela may have suffered even further for campaigning in prison is not an argument that absolves his inactivity.

The question remains, then. Why was Mandela so inactive in prison activism? After all, this is a man who stared down the Death Penalty for Treason. Moral cowardice is not an easy accusation to throw around. And yet...

This may relate to some strand in Mandelas politics or personality. In response to the Governments appalling brutality, the ANC decided that their response would be a campaign of violence (let us not be diverted into the morass of "terrorism" here), and an armed organisation grew up as part of the ANC.

This decision, in Mandela's autobiography, was not the result of any great debate or moral wrangling. but almost flowed organically from the situation of the time. It does indeed seem an obvious response for an oppressed and brutalised people. However, as Mandela was fully aware, there was an alternative in Gandhian active nonviolence.

Mandela chose violence. It has to be asked if a campaign based on active nonviolence may have avoided a generation of bloodshed. Equally, it has to be asked, why Mandela ignored, cooperated with, helped sustain even, the wicked part of the apartheid State which oozed from the pores of his cell walls.

Mandela changed his nation. Without him, I doubt that a peaceful transition from Apartheid would have been maintained. His achievements are huge.  And yet....

Sexual Politics

Being in this social cul-de-sac may give me the advantage of distance from the issues of the day, allowing me to take a broader perspective without being particularly swayed by the fever of the mob. Maybe.

For decades I have been out of the swing of sexual politics and the shifts in the mores of interpersonal relationships. It has been interesting, watching the debates pass by my window, although sometimes it has been horrifying to see a social consensus develop into an unchallengeable ideology.

I absolutely detest any situation where a subject is ruled out of order for discussion. As a broad guide, I enjoy unpicking an idea, extracting the principles and putting them under a conceptual microscope.

The politics of sex is an area fraught with topics which are sacrosanct from debate. These are the areas which most attract me, in a iconoclastic sort of way. The matters most worthy of discussion are precisely those which people are too afraid to discuss.

To stick to the remit of the blog, prisons and their adjacent environs, this brings me to sex crimes.

There have been a few obvious shifts in beliefs and culture over the years I've been observing from my seclusion and seeing the knots that society, and law, has tied itself into has been bemusing.

Political Prisoners

Between being a terrible Home Secretary and being installed as Governor of one of our more amenable Caribbean territories, David Waddington popped along to Westminster to blag a Peerage. Pausing in the House of Lords, he made the remarkable statement that “life sentence prisoners are political prisoners. Their lives are the property of the state." Such was the arrogance and power of the Home Office in 1989 that this declaration raised not a single eyebrow. The British judiciary repeatedly turned its back on us, leaving us utterly in the hands of secret decisions, made via secret processes, by politicians. Since then, the law has risen from its slumber and wrested control of lifers away from the fickle, grubby paws of the Executive. In this sense, we are no longer political prisoners. This does not mean, though, that there are not prisoners who are highly political. I am one of them, and there aren't too many of us. Or if there are, most are keeping their heads down and their mouths shut. Who could blame them? Prison is all about power. It is the sharpest edge of political philosophy, the crucible of all that it means to be a citizen. One of the things that baffles most of my peers is that I find this fascinating. Each day is a perpetual lesson from Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesqueu, Locke, Mill and Machiavelli. I never have understood why my peers are largely indifferent to the meaning of their situation, why they do not begin to wonder about the nature of power, of government and of the individual. It is, surely, a small step to from asking oneself why some order from a screw should be obeyed to asking the far bigger question of by what right is any man given authority over another? What is the basis for their authority? This is where my education and my daily existence intertwined. My first degree being history and politics, as I gained a deeper appreciation of political philosophy then my understanding of my situation became increasingly sophisticated. I suppose that daily life outside obscures the reality of the relationship between the individual and the State. You could go years without bumping into people in uniform whose actions make you question authority. In prison, though, the State parks itself in my doorway several times a day and there is a much clearer link between daily life and the politics and mechanisms of power. How, then, could I not be a political animal? If a man knocks on my door to talk about some conflict with the institution, or to ask about various Rules, how could I possibly turn him away? When a man is facing disciplinary charges, how could I possibly refuse to help him with his defence? And how can I fail to become angry and frustrated at the perpetual stream of stupidities that flow from managers in suits who retain a quiet belief that they are omnipotent in their closed world? Even this blog is a political act. You must conceptualise prisons as totalitarian societies, those with power and those without. In such a situation, the mere feeble act of speaking out and questioning carries some political potency. This is why "they" don't like it one bit; not so much for what I write but for the very fact that I dare to write at all.