Normal Cynicism Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible
Normal Cynicism Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible, read a headline in one rag almost before the echoes had died away from the final ceremony that closed the weeks of Olympic and Paralympic celebration which seized Britain over the summer. Don’t Be Afraid to Go Back to Being Your Cynical Self, said another.
It was not just British reticence which evaporated during the great festival of sport, with strangers smiling and chatting to one another on the capital’s normally dour streets. Members of the commentariat who had spent the build-up to the Games in full sneering mode suddenly began to confess that they had been wrong and developed wild enthusiasms not just for sport but for collective enterprise and the power of positive thinking.
What this highlighted was the extent to which jaded cynicism is in normal times the default mindset of sophisticated metropolitan chic. Disdain is the standard mode of modern discourse along with a disposition of disbelief in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions.
Cynicism, of course, originally had more noble antecedents. To the ancient Greeks it was a philosophy that rejected conventional desires for wealth, power, sex and fame. It advocated a way of life characterised by the discipline of living a simple life, free of possessions. Its most prominent exponent, Diogenes, lived on the streets of Athens in a barrel. Suffering, the Cynics believed, along with the Buddha, was caused by false judgments of what was valuable and what was worthless.
Indeed some thinkers have even regarded Jesus as a Jewish Cynic mainly because of the similarities between his life and teachings and those of the Cynics, but also because the city of Gadara, a centre of Cynic philosophy, was only a day’s walk from Nazareth. It was a tradition continued in the medieval church in the ascetic orders of wandering mendicant monks who, in both appearance and practices, bore a striking similarity to the Cynics of ancient times.
All that is lost. What remains is the original Cynics’ habit of using bitter irony, biting sarcasm and mirthful ridicule to critique the lives of those around them. The word Cynic, it is often noted, derives from the Ancient Greek kynikos which means “like a dog”. But snapping and snarling has passed from the Greeks of old to the grumpy old men of today – and to a lot of grumpy young ones too, which is why Maya Angelou once observed: “There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing”.
FollowHow police, prosecutors and social workers failed sexually-abused children in Rochdale
If there is one thing more shocking than the conviction of a gang of men for sexually abusing under-age teenage girls it is the revelation of how negligent our public authorities have been in their failure to prevent the crimes. An inquiry into the conspiracy to groom young teenagers for sex in Rochdale has revealed systemic malfunctions in the institutions of the state. Social workers, police and officers of the Crown Prosecution Service all failed repeatedly for more than a decade. And there must be fears that authorities have demonstrated similar failings in scores of other cases all across the country.
The report by Rochdale Borough Safeguarding Children Board has highlight deficiencies in training front-line staff, alarming snobberies among police and prosecutors and a missed opportunity to end the abuse four years ago.
Lurking behind all that is the claim that the abuse has a racial component, since most of the abusers are of Pakistani heritage and most of the victims are white. The judge in the Rochdale case said that a factor in the men’s treatment of their victims as “worthless and beyond any respect” was that the girls were “not part of your community or religion”. Local MPs in Rochdale and Rotherham have called for an inquiry into the cultural roots of the problem.
The most authoritative figures suggest caution is required here. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre looked at 1,217 offenders and found just 28 per cent were Asians. Most abusers in the North and Midlands have been Asians but in Devon they have been white, in Bristol Afro-Caribbean and in London of many ethnicities. Sensationalist reporting, which confuses the vulnerable with the victims, risks damaging police attempts to build the confidence and trust needed to combat the problem among ethnic minorities.
A minefield of racial, religious and political sensitivities surround the issue, which was lamentably omitted from the Rochdale report. Cultural factors in these crimes must be confronted not buried. Thankfully a number of Muslim religious and community leaders have begun that task.
But there is no ambiguity in the clear evidence that the social services failed to intervene when they had information about exploitation. The law is clear: sex with a girl under 16 is rape. Yet some social workers claimed that 13-to-15-year-olds were “making their own choices”. Police and prosecutors decided that theses young victims would not be found “credible” by a jury because of their “chaotic”, “council estate” backgrounds. A culture developed which blamed the victims for the abuse.
Why David Cameron is right about aid and the right-wing Tory ideologues are wrong
Why give foreign aid at a time of austerity? It’s all wasted money anyway, squandered on bad projects and hijacked by corrupt politicians, say a handful of Tory back-benchers and right-wing ideologues. This is one of the great political lies of our time. Yesterday the prime minister went to New York to tell world leaders at the United Nations that they must keep their promises to increase spending on aid, as Britian has done. He was quite right to do so.
Last week authoritative figures were released on the number of children under the age of five who died from preventable causes. The number was 700,000 down in 2011 on the year before. It was the biggest annual fall in child mortality ever recorded. It was not a blip. Some 5 million fewer children died last year than in 1990. The fastest rates of reduction are in Africa.
In no small measure this is down to global aid levels. Aid has wiped out smallpox. It has controlled HIV and Aids in six million people. It has put 46 million more children into school in the past two decades. It will vaccinate one child every two seconds for the next five years
Critics can always find examples of aid that fails. The National Audit Office recently found £48 million spent on four poor-value aid projects. Yet the total aid budget is £8bn. Comprehensive studies show that most aid is far better spent today than even a decade ago.
Aid can always be improved. So it is good that the new International Development Secretary Justine Greening is scrutinising the £500 million it pays to consultants – though she should bear in mind that aid was out-sourced in this way by her predecessor to slash the numbers of civil servants in DfID, one of the best development organisations in the world.
It is right too that programmes to individual countries should be kept under review.Indiais now the world’s 11th largest economy with its own space programme. Aid must eventually taper off there, though not so swiftly that it will put at risk help to the half billion desperately poor people who live there – more than in the whole of Africa put together.
Why everyone loves a gangster – and really shouldn’t
They call him Charlie. Even when they are recounting horror stories about how he snapped peoples fingers off with bolt-cutters or nailed his victims’ limbs to the floor, they call him Charlie. NotRichardson. No, they refer to him with a familiar affectionate diminutive – like they do with those other Sixties gangsters Reggie Kray or Ronnie Biggs.
One minute the media are reporting in tones of sombre horror the murder of two policewomen and grenade-and-gun lawlessness on the streets of Manchester. The next the BBC is recalling how Richardsongave his bloodied victims a clean shirt to go home in, as if that were quaint rather than sick. Huge obituaries in papers like the Daily Telegraph end with the sepulchral conclusion “Charles Richardson, born January 18 1934, died September 19 2012” as though he were someone who achieved something.
There has been a wallowing Hammer-horror self-indulgence about the lurid detail given on his crimes. But added to that there has been a terrible false romanticism about much of the reaction to the death of the 1960s gangster Mayfair-based East End Cockney boy made bad.
In part this is to do with a distinctly British tendency to allow the passing of the years to soften and sentimentalise our view. Enoch Powell went from being a chilling racist to a great parliamentarian. Tony Benn from a dangerous revolutionary to a national constitutional treasure. When enfants terribles stop being enfants they also somehow stop being terrible.
But there is something else too. It is to do with the glamour of evil which is routinely romanticised in movies, and not just in gangland films like Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or the 2004 film Charlie in which Luke Goss portraysRichardson as both likeable and charismatic. It is part of the whole individualist Hollywood myth of ‘one man against the world’.
The same perverted impulse is there in the adulatory Facebook sites which sprang up in recent days about Dale Cregan, the alleged killer charged with the twoManchesterpolice murders. Various sites praised him as a “hero”, a “cop-killer” and “the greatest legend since Raoul Moat”. Nearly 30,000 joined an internet tribute group to Moat who died in 2010 following a police hunt which 24-hour tv news reported as though it were a live action movie.
Children in peril as women are jailed in record numbers: Mothers & Prison, introduction
The number of women in British prisons has more than doubled over the past 15 years. Some 10,181 women were put behind bars last year. Britain now has one of the highest rates of female imprisonment in the European Union.
Today at least 17,240 children are separated from their mother because she is in jail. Some 80 of the youngest of those children are accommodated with their mums behind bars in eight prison Mother and Baby Units. The remaining 17,160 suffer as the innocent victims of Britain’s criminal justice system.
Separation by imprisonment, research suggests, causes long-term emotional, social, material and psychological damage to children. It begins with damage to the mother-baby bonds which are essential to a child’s ability to form normal relationships throughout its life. And it continues through to teenage years. One study shows that damage can still be measured at the age of 48.
An astonishing 95 per cent of children whose mothers are in jail have to move out of the family home. Many must move schools. They live in homes with lower incomes than before. They suffer shame and stigma, and are teased and bullied at school. They truant more than other children and achieve less in education.
Children with a parent in prison are three times more likely to engage in anti-social behaviour than their peers. Their chances of suffering mental health problems also increase threefold.
All this is storing up huge problems for the future. Nearly two thirds of boys who have a parent in prison will go on to commit some kind of crime themselves.
On the last official figures there are around 200,000 children with a mother or father in prison – more than three times the number of children in state care. More children are now separated from a parent by imprisonment than by divorce. Children do worse when it is their mother rather than their father in jail.
“I know why I am in here,” a woman inside Eastwood Park prison told us. “But my children didn’t do anything wrong. Why should they be punished?”
Family breakdown is increased by prison. Some 45 per cent of prisoners lose contact with their families. Women prisoners are held, on average, 55 miles from home. Some are more than 100 miles from their children. Visiting times often clash with school hours. When they leave prison a third of women prisoners find they have lost their homes. That reduces their chance of finding a job and of rebuilding shattered family ties.
Yet two thirds of the 10,181 women sentenced to prison in 2011 served sentences of six months or significantly less. Over a third were jailed for theft or handling stolen goods or other low level ‘nuisance’ offending. A quarter had no previous convictions.
More than half of women entering custody do so on remand. They spend on average six weeks in prison and 60 per cent of them do not then go on to receive a custodial sentence. Yet severe disruption has been done to the lives of their children.
“A significant number of women in prison aren’t a risk to the public,” says Baroness Jean Corston, who wrote a seminal report on women in British prisons in 2007. The average cost of keeping a woman in jail is £56,415 a year. Punishment in the community costs less than a quarter of that.
Meantime their children are effectively being trained up to become the next generation of prisoners. “The effects on children of having their mother imprisoned,” Baroness Corston says, are “often nothing short of catastrophic”.
Additional reporting by Sarah Cassidy
Introduction: Children in peril as women are jailed in record numbers
Introductory comment: The hidden victims of a ‘lock them up’ culture
Part 1: Babies behind bars
Part 2: The 17,000 children separated from their Mums
Part 3: The grandmothers left holding the baby and bringing up the children
Part 4: The devastating hidden toll on children
Part 5: More effective alternatives to custody
Part 6: The changes that are needed
Government response to Mothers & Prison series
Final comment: We risk creating the felons of the future
The hidden victims of a ‘lock them up’ culture: Mothers & Prison, Introductory comment
Lock them up and throw away the key. That is not just the right-wing populist attitude to crime and criminal justice. It also effectively sums up the attitude of our whole nation when it comes to the question of prison. The numbers of individuals locked away in British prisons has reached a record high, it is periodically announced, with a tedious regularity. The nation tuts, for a variety of reasons or political motives, and then turns away. Prison is an issue which we all, metaphorically, prefer to lock up and throw away the mental key.
There are two groups of people who suffer most out of the spotlight of national awareness. The number of women in our jails has rocketed. Over the past 15 years it has more than doubled. We are now sending more than 10,000 women to prison each year. Towards the end of the major five part series which The Independent begins today we shall explain why and offer some idea of what might be done to change that.
The cost of this huge surge is enormous in financial terms; the average bill for putting a woman behind bars is £56,415 a year. But the social cost is even greater. Taking mothers from their children causes such emotional, developmental and psychological damage that it is hugely accelerating the creation of the next generation of criminals. A child who has a parent in prison is three times more likely to exhibit anti-social behaviour and three times more likely to develop mental health problems. A staggering 65 per cent of boys who have a parent in prison will go on to commit some kind of crime themselves.
Yet children are the innocent victims of the British criminal justice system. In any given year as many as 200,000 children have to cope with the varied and wide-ranging consequences of having a parent in prison – far more than are separated through divorce. Of those the ones who suffer most are the 17,000 children a year for whom it is their mother who is put behind bars. Often the sentences are short, for the offences committed by women are generally far less serious than those of men; shoplifting, non-payment of fines, benefit fraud and offences surrounding drug addiction and sex work are the most common crimes. Most are inside for less than six months but the female prison population last week was more than double what it was in the 1990s.
Yet the disruptive impact of even a short sentence can be catastrophic for children who have committed no crime at all – and who have already suffered disproportionately because of the chaotic lives their drug and drink-dependent mothers often lead. They almost always end up moving house and school and must cope with stigma and trauma.
Babies behind bars: Mothers & Prison, Part 1
Sandra McConnell was not expecting to go to prison. She knew that the charge against her – conspiracy to supply drugs – was serious but it dated from some years before. Since then she had got her life together. She had been off drugs for nearly two years. She now had her my own three bedroom house in Birmingham where she lived with her four-year-old daughter. She had started a course with the Open University. And she was pregnant.
“I was expecting to walk out of the court but I got sent down,” she says sitting with her baby, Morrison, on her knee. She has just come in from the garden, where she has been entertaining her three-month-old son by watching the pink and yellow flowers waving in the wind.
But this is not a normal garden. It stands in the lee of a ten foot metal fence with spikes on the top. And above that is another 10 feet of metal mesh topped with a double roll of razor wire. Morrison was born in prison, and he will spend the first nine months of his life there – until his mother has completed her sentence.
There has been a dramatic rise in the numbers of women in British prisons. The figure in England has more than doubled over the past two decades to 4,144 this month – the highest rate of female imprisonment in the European Union. But because so many sentences are short that figure disguises the fact that some 10,181 women were put behind bars last year. Over half of those women are mothers. According to statistics published by the Ministry of Justice in March there were around 200,000 children with a father or mother in prison on the last official figures – more than three times the number of children in state care.
Thanks to the Mother and Baby Units which the Prison Service has established inside eight of Britain’s 13 jails it is now possible for around 80 of those children to be with their mothers – but behind bars.
One of the units is at Eastwood Park, a closed women’s prison in a rural setting between Gloucester and Bristol. To get through it you have to pass through three 20 ft high green metal gates which clang fiercely shut behind you. But once inside the final gate there are no locks on the doors in the low brick Mother and Baby Unit (MBU).
In the grounds is a small slide and climbing frame, a set of hoops made from giant pencils and, amid the flower beds, a set of willow arches beneath which babies can gaze up from their prams at the fluttering leaves. Inside a row of baby-buggies fill the hallway.
The 17,000 children separated from their Mums: Mothers & Prison, Part 2
Vicky’s children are acting up. That is hardly surprising, since they only see their mother once every three or four months. “They have gone off the rails,” she says. “They’ve been bunking off school. One was taken to the local hospital A&E department after too much alcohol. They are lashing out.”
When Vicky talks about the local hospital she means one in Truro in Cornwall. But she lives four hours drive from there because she is halfway through a two year sentence in the women’s prison at Eastwood Park in Gloucestershire.
Long-distance parenting from prison is not good for either a mother or her children. Vicky has two boys, aged 12 and 13, who live with their father. The relationship is complicated by the nature of her offence. “My crime was against him. He was violent for years and eventually I stabbed him,” she says. Her case is not so unusual as might be thought. Over half the women in British prisons are victims of violence and one in three has experienced sexual abuse.
That may explain the questions her sons ask. “They write to me and ask: ‘Do they hit you in prison? Do you get beat up? Do they treat you badly?’” she says, sitting in a spartan association room at Eastwood Park. “I only see them every three or four months. It’s an eight hour round trip and costs £130 in diesel. I can’t expect that every fortnight. Their father can’t afford it. I don’t mind; if he spent the money on that that the boys would have to do without something else”.
It also explains something else. During their sentence 45 per cent of prisoners lose contact with their families, and many separate from their partners. That has wide repercussions because statistics show that family support reduces a woman’s chances of returning to jail significantly. Government figures reveal that the odds of reoffending are 39 per cent higher among those who had not received visits whilst in prison compared to those who had.
But maintaining contact with children is made more difficult because women prisoners are held, on average, 55 miles from home. Some 700 of the 4,144 female prisoners who were last week in prison in England and Wales are held over 100 miles from their children.
The grandmothers left holding the baby and bringing up the children: Mothers & Prison, Part 3
Chloe and Rachel still wake in the night crying for their mother. They are not infants. The twins are aged 11 and starting secondary school this month. But their mother, Charmaine, has been in jail for the past three years, and has at least two more to serve.
“It was a terrible, terrible thing for the girls,” says their grandma Margaret Jones who, at the age of 59 should be making indulgent grandparental visits but now, instead, cares for them full-time. “When they were only eight they lost their mother, their friends, their school, their home all in one go. I think they found it not too bad to start with – it was a bit like a holiday – but later when they realised she wasn’t coming back for such a long time they found it very difficult.
“The twins have gone through some very emotional times – and they still are. Emotionally I think they are still doing quite badly. Even now they need hugs all the time.”
More than 4,000 children every year in England and Wales move in with their grandmothers because their mother has been sent to jail. Another 5,000 are taken in by other family members or friends. Some 2,000 others are adopted or fostered because their mother is behind bars. Those who volunteer – often at dramatically short notice – are faced with substantial responsibility, stress and expense as a result.
It often begins with a sudden call from the local police station or social worker. “Relatives get a call out of the blue to be told: ‘Can you come and pick this child up from us, otherwise they will go into care’,” says Sarah Salmon, deputy director of
Action for Prisoners’ Families. “In some cases it is not until the woman gets from the court to the prison that she announces: ‘I’ve left my baby with a neighbour who’s expecting me back’ and the authorities have to go round.”
Children often seem an after-thought in the British criminal justice system, says another charity involved. Grandparents Plus is campaigning for changes to the system in order to put the interests of children first. Its policy and research manager Sarah Wellard says: “One of the appalling things is that a child can go off to school without any idea that their mother is going to be jailed and that nobody is going to be there to pick them up. There is no duty to inform social services when a mother is given a jail sentence. It can leave children in a very vulnerable situation.”
It is revealing that a charity acting for grandparents is taking a lead here. Only a few children are cared for by their fathers when their mother goes to jail. That has far-reaching consequences. When a father is jailed, it is likely that his children will remain in their own home with their mother. But when a mother is put behind bars her children only 9 per cent are cared for by their fathers.
The devastating hidden toll on children: Mothers & Prison, Part 4
The two teenagers were living on their own. Their mother had been jailed after the rioting in London last summer. Her sons, aged 16 and 17, were living in the family home without an adult. No-one had thought to inform the authorities.
“They were in a pretty poor state,” says Nikki Bradley, who manages the Family Interventions service at Tower Hamlets in the east end of London. “They only had one pair of trainers between them so they used to take turns to wear them, going to college in them on alternate days.”
When a woman is sent to prison it is not just she who is punished. The children of prisoners – who have done no wrong, whatever crime their mother may have committed – are punished too. But little account is generally taken of their needs. They are the invisible victims of both their parent’s crime and the penal system.
According to the most recent figures around 200,000 children each year suffer from the loss of a parent in prison – far more than are separated through divorce. When mothers are jailed only nine per cent have fathers who step forward to take care of them. That means that 17,000 children a year are left effectively parentless. They are the hidden victims of a system in which the number of women jailed has doubled in the last 15 years.
“Prison is needlessly cruel in the harm it does to children,” says Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust.
The problems begin almost from birth. In the first six to nine months of life a mother and baby bond in a process which psychologists call attachment. “If the quality of that relationship is impaired it can damage the way a child develops, emotionally and socially, and impair its ability to form normal relationships throughout its life,” says Tessa Baradon, Head of the Parent Infant Project at the Anna Freud psychotherapeutic centre who devised the parenting course currently used in a number of women’s prisons.
The extent of the disruption is significant. For eight out of ten children when their mother goes to prison it is the first time they have been separated from her for more than a day or so. Half of the babies who are taken into care when their mothers go to prison are moved from one carer to another two, three or even four times.
More effective alternatives to custody: Mothers & Prison, Part 5
Maria Jackson, a single mother-of-three, stole a lasagne from Marks and Spencer. Her youngest son was having a friend round for tea. That morning she had discovered that her benefits had been stopped. It was a mistake and they were quickly reinstated. But, temporarily without cash, she stole a lasagne – and some olives – so her 13-year-old would not be embarrassed when his friend arrived.
“I was desperate and literally had no money,” she recalls. When Maria appeared in court she thought she was going to jail. It was her second offence. She had already been convicted for benefit fraud. Struggling to make ends meet, Maria had taken an extra job working night shifts without declaring it. She had done it for a year, over-claiming £40 a week.
But Maria, who is 49, was one of the lucky ones. Some 10,181 women were put behind bars in 2011 and the population of Britain’s women’s prisons has more than doubled over the past 15 years. Maria, however, was sentenced to attend something called the Inspire project, a ground-breaking initiative run by a women’s centre near her home in Brighton.
Similar projects are being pioneered in Bradford,Glasgow, Calderdale, Worcester and London to find more effective ways of stopping women from offending than the traditional prison system affords. At the centres women undergo a detailed individual assessment and then are given help with a range of problems including drug and alcohol misuse, parenting and budgeting skills, debt, housing and employment problems, anger management, and mental and physical health problems.
The aim is to address the root causes of crime more effectively – and more cost-effectively – than prison. The approach works. The average court-directed order at the Together Women Project in Bradford costs between £750 and £1000 per woman per year – compared with the £56,415 a year it costs to keep a woman in jail. It has a compliance rate of 80 per cent. And it has reduced reoffending to less than 10 per cent compared to a national average of 62 per cent.
Funding for these centres grew out of the recommendations of a major report commissioned by the Government from Baroness Jean Corston in 2007 into how to improve the way the criminal justice system deals with women offenders. “The vast majority of women offenders are not dangerous,” it said. Only those comparatively few women who are a danger to others need be locked up.
The changes that are needed: Mothers & Prison, Part 6 – with recommendations for change
When Clive Chatterton retired as head of the women’s prison at Styal in Cheshire he wrote a private letter to the then Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke. It constituted a damning indictment of the way this nation’s criminal justice system handles many of the ten thousand women we put behind bars each year.
Mr Chatterton was no soft-hearted prison reformer. One of the country’s most experienced prison governors he had spent 37 years working in men’s prisons. But what he found in his first women’s prison profoundly disturbed him.
“I have never come across such a concentration of damaged, fragile and complex-needs individuals,” he wrote to the politician earlier this year. Half of the women in the prison should never have been sent there. Giving short sentences to vulnerable women is damaging and self-defeating, he said, citing one woman jailed for 12 days for stealing a £3 sandwich.
Many judges and magistrates to whom he had spoken “acknowledged that many of these women did not require a custodial sentence but then ask: ‘What else can we do with them?’ ”
Urgent reform was needed, Mr Chatterton said. The government should vigorously pursue alternatives to jail. He called for an immediate end to short sentences and the transfer of many women to secure mental health units where they could receive proper care. Alternatives to prison could be funded by the “huge” savings that would be made if we did not jail women for minor offences – around a third of the current prison population.
The idea of alternatives to prison was at the heart of the Government-ordered Corston review of the state of women’s prisons in 2007. Its author, Baroness Jean Corston, had called for big women’s jails to be closed and replaced by smaller units dedicated to tackling the problems which led women into crime in the first place. She also wanted a major expansion of punishment in the community as an alternative to prison.
“The Corston report was seminal and was mostly accepted and implemented except for her recommendation for smaller units,” says Debra Baldwin, the senior civil servant responsible for women’s prisons in the Ministry of Justice. Smaller units would be too costly at a time of public spending cuts.
“But it’s not just that,” she says. “In small units it’s harder to deliver group programmes in things like occupational therapy, learning and skills training. And drugs prevention programmes work better where you can get a sizeable group because the women interact, supporting and challenging one another. If you kept women closer to home, in smaller units, it would be at the expense of such interactions.”
