We risk creating the felons of the future: Mothers & Prison, final leading article
Independent Leading article
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STATEMENT FROM MINISTRY OF JUSTICE
“For some women, prison is the only sentencing option for the courts – this is right, both in terms of punishment and the need to protect the public. But we need to ensure that sentencers have a range of options available to them which include robust community sentences and effective interventions in prisons.
“We actively work with women to reduce the risk of reoffending, which means recognising routes into crime and how those routes may differ from male offenders. For example, we know that many female offenders experience domestic violence and emotional abuse. So we are commissioning programmes of work which address the issues related to domestic violence, in particular self-confidence and healthy relationships. We also know that women offenders are much more likely than male offenders to ask for help, and this is an important route to reduce re-offending. There are appropriate community-based services available to support women both on community sentences and following release from custody.
We work hard to minimise the impact on children when parents are incarcerated, particularly mothers. Mother and baby units allow mothers to maintain bonds with the children in the very early stages of life and women’s prisons provide opportunities for children to visit their mothers in prison at special children and family visits. Where it is appropriate to do so, women are released temporarily from custody to see their children and maintain important family links.
There is nevertheless a cohort of children for whom the incarceration of their mother significantly increases their vulnerability which requires a co-ordinated local response led by local authorities together with education, health and social care service providers.
Rodgers and Hammerstein are not generally associated with hymnody but it seemed apt when the organist at our local Methodist church decided to play “You’ll Never Walk Alone” during Communion last Sunday. In its original context in the musical Carousel the song is sung to comfort a newly-bereaved widow. But it is also the anthem of Liverpool Football Club where the families of the 96 fans who died in the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster finally found some succour last week.
What made it all the more poignant was that the organist was playing in a church in Manchester, a city just 30 miles from Liverpool, but where a deeply entrenched rivalry divides the two great cities and their football teams. You might think it trivial to talk about a merely sporting antagonism in the face of such issues of life and death. So it ought to be. And yet it is not.
The day before I had been at Old Trafford to see Manchester United. We were playing Wigan. And yet anti-Liverpool chants from a small section of the crowd showed that the unfolding of the evidence of the Hillsborough Independent Panel had done nothing to assuage the visceral hatred of some United fans. Rather the national outpouring of sympathy for Liverpool seemed to have inflamed a hardcore minority.
In the pub afterwards more boors screamed the same chants at the television screen when the Liverpool players appeared ahead of their match at Sunderland. “Murderers,” they chanted repeatedly, and “Always the victim; it’s never your fault”, peddling the 23-year-old calumny that those who died were killed because of the bad behaviour of fellow Liverpudlians.
The findings of the independent panel exonerated the Liverpool fans on such a charge but, as Winston Churchill once put it “a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on”. People will persist in believing a lie if it suits them.
What hope for football yobs when a senior policeman does something similar? Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison in a statement acknowledging that the disaster was the fault of the police felt compelled to add: “Fans’ behaviour… made the job of the police… harder than it needed to be”. Sir Norman has denied being a member of a black propaganda unit set up to impugn the reputations of those who died in order to shift blame away from the police. But there can be no doubt of his poor judgement in this injudicious statement.
How the victims of Hillsborough were betrayed again and again and again – all across the institutions of the British state
“I felt a sense for the first time,” wrote a man called Adrian Tempany after the publication of the independent panel’s report into the Hillsborough disaster, “that this tragedy was no longer mine – it belongs now to the nation”. Tempany was one of those who survived the human crush in Pen 3 of the Sheffield football stadium that day so long ago in 1989. Many of the 96 died in front of him.
“Unable to move for over half an hour, I was condemned to watch them cry for help, throw up, plead for their lives and die,” he wrote. “When the police finally opened the gate in the fence and the crush abated, around a dozen of them simply keeled over and hit the concrete. A heap of corpses piled up in front of me.”
Over 700 others were injured. Thousands more were scarred emotionally to this day.
Yet in the face of such horror the authorities of the British state failed, egregiously and comprehensively, at level after level after level. Police, ambulance services, football authorities, local council, coroner, prosecuting authorities, two judges and politicians all failed and failed again. Civil, criminal and European law all fell short in the delivery of justice. Some in authority, we now know, were not just defective; they deliberately, or unreflectively, set out to obstruct that justice.
The moral of this sorry tale is that when the truth finally emerged – like the sweet silver song of the lark, as the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy put it, masterfully borrowing from Liverpool Football Club’s anthem – it did so because a small group of activists, burning with a sense of injustice, refused to give up.
The driving motor was the bereaved families but there were others too. One was the academic criminologist Phil Scraton who spent decade after decade diligently compiling the detailed evidence which so shocked the nation in recent days. In that time he has produced two major reports and a book painstakingly cataloguing the incident itself, the scurrilous allegations made by the police and press in the days that followed and the appalling treatment of the bereaved and survivors by the political and legal establishment in the years since.
I did not actually read the deathbed interview given by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini two weeks before he died until after I had seen the gloss which conservative Roman Catholics tried to put upon it. Do not believe media accounts, the reactionaries said – in what proved to be a dextrous display of revisionist mental gymnastics – the cardinal was calling for a religious revival, not for the abolition of unpopular church teachings.
But go to the text and you see something very much what you might have expected from the man who was the guardian of a more open kind of orthodoxy for the past 30 years – and who was distinguished by his ability to communicate the message of the gospel to doubters and those who were far from faith. Unlike much of the hierarchy he was a man who was not afraid of dialogue.
What was a surprise was how candid, and indeed withering, was his last spiritual testament. “The Church is 200 years behind the times,” he said. It is old, tired, bureaucratic, with liturgies and vestments which are pompous. Its wealth is as heavy a burden as was that of the rich young man who went sadly away . It needs a “radical transformation beginning with the Pope and his bishops.” The paedophilia scandals oblige it to undertake a path of conversion. It needs to see the sacraments not as “an instrument to discipline people but to help them on their journey of life and during their weaker moments”. Unless the church “adopts a more generous attitude towards divorced persons, it will lose the allegiance of future generations,” he said.
No wonder that The Tablet called it “a sweeping indictment of the last two papacies” and saw the interview as “an agenda for a papacy that never was, but might have been”. It was “a manifesto for the next conclave” from beyond the grave. No wonder, too, that the Vatican media ignored the interview; the in-house newspaper L’Osservatore Romano didn’t even mention it. The degree of official concern in Rome was clear from the fact that neither Pope Benedict nor his number two, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, attended the cardinal’s funeral. The Pope didn’t dare mention the late cardinal during his Sunday Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s Square.
Why the Hillsborough Independent Panel is a model for uncovering the real truth
The method and approach of the Hillsborough Independent Panel offers a model for uncovering the truth about other public disasters its chairman, James Jones, the Bishop of Liverpool, said yesterday. Independent panels can be faster, cheaper and more considerate of the needs of victims than inquiries led by judges.
“The problem with judicial inquiries is that they necessarily involve lawyers and barristers for all those called before the inquiry,” the bishop told the BBC Religion Rethink conference in Salford. “This usually leads to a very long process and soaring costs. The Saville Inquiry [into the Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland] took over ten years and cost well in excess of £100m.”
By contrast the Hillsborough Independent Panel took just 18 months. It did not interrogate individuals but was charged with ensuring full disclosure of all the public documents related to the tragedy and its aftermath.
“Once documents were made available to the public they could make their own minds up about the rights and wrongs,” he said. Asked whether he thought criminal prosecutions should now follow he said: “Truth has its own pressure and power”.
The panel system is also better attuned to supporting victims. Throughout the panel’s work the bishop had on his desk a photograph of the stadium at 2.59pm on the day of the disaster and the names of the 96 people who died.
“The problem with judicial processes involving inquests and inquiries is that it does not serve the victims and the bereaved well,” he said. “They tend to distance those most affected. People with power in the processes are often patronising to the victims. In a culture of blame, liability and litigation over culpability conspire against getting to the truth. They certainly conspire against enabling the victim to feel that their needs and grief are being respected in the process.”
Time for an enquiry into the culture of the police
In the shock provoked by the revelations about the systematic police cover-up after the 1989 Hillsborough disaster another incident was widely overlooked yesterday. In Southwark Crown Court an ex-policeman, Ryan Coleman-Farrow, admitted deliberately bungling 11 rape cases – faking records, falsifying witness statements and lying about forensic analysis. The case underscored the grim reality that Hillsborough is not some isolated aberration from decades ago but part of a long pattern of unethical police practices which continues today.
For the past four decades scandals have regularly punctuated the history of British police. The cases of the Birmingham Six, Guildford 4, Blair Peach, Stephen Lawrence, Roger Sylvester, Mikey Powell, Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson – to name but a few – have all cast doubt on the truthfulness and integrity of the British police. The cases have exposed a range of problems from incompetent racist stereotyping to the downright misinformation involved in announcing that Mr de Menezes was a “suspected terrorist” wearing a padded jacket with wires sticking out, who had run away from the police and jumped a ticket barrier.
The Macpherson Inquiry into the Lawerence case exposed deep-rooted institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police which suggested that officers had more in common with the white murderers than with the black victims – whose reputation they sought to smear much as senior South Yorkshire officers did with the 96 Hillsborough victims. The Tomlinson case revealed what the Independent Police Complaints Commission described as the “simply staggering” acceptance of ill-disciplined behaviour when it emerged that the policeman who assaulted Mr Tomlinson had faced disciplinary hearings in two separate police forces previously before being allowed to join the Met’s elite Territorial Support Group.
We ask our police to do a difficult and dangerous job. It is one which requires the creation among officers a sense of loyalty, camaraderie and internal strength. But that is not the same thing as the secrecy, closed ranks, obfuscation and dissembling which has become rooted deep in police culture.
Finally vindication for the families of the 96
The report of the independent panel into the Hillsborough football disaster stadium will be looked back upon as an important political, legal and social milestone. For it has not just brought out the truth about the unnecessary deaths of 96 football fans which the victims’ families have struggled for 23 long years to discover. It has uncovered a shocking reality which the police, politicians, coroner, local councils and a full judicial inquiry failed to disclose. And that raises questions about the adequacy of a range of key British institutions.
What it has exposed is chilling. On top of a grave failure by the public authorities to help protect their citizens the panel, by studying some 400,000 documents, has made public a massive cover-up to protect the institutional reputation of the police. But it discloses flaws too in the competence of the ambulance and emergency services. It shows that officials at football club and local council knew that safety standards at the Sheffield stadium were inadequate and that lessons had not been learned from previous incidents both at Hillsborough and other football grounds.
It lays bare, if not a conspiracy, then certainly a confluence of establishment interests in which some journalists enthusiastically peddled sensational lies to denigrate the deceased and suggest the fans were the authors of their own demise. It betrays as erroneous the decision by the coroner not to take evidence on the deaths past the time of 3.15pm on the day of the disaster – which would have revealed that as many as 41 of the 96 people might have been saved had the police and ambulance services done their jobs properly. And it raises questions about how key documents were withheld from the inquiry led by Lord Justice Taylor which neglected the shortcomings in the ambulance system and focused on the “failure of police control”.
The Taylor report gave no idea of the systematic nature of the cover-up and mud-slinging in which the police engaged. We now know that 164 police statements were “significantly amended” and 116 more edited to “remove negative comments” about the policing operation. Officers ran checks on the police national computer to try to find information to impugn the reputations of those who had died. The coroner ordered alcohol checks on all the dead in search of evidence for the false police assertion that the tragedy had been caused by drunken fans arriving late without tickets.
All species have an inherent right to exist; not just cute ones
All species have an inherent right to exist, insist the 8,000 scientists from the International Union for Conservation of Nature who have just compiled a list of the world’s 100 most endangered species. Since all the life-forms listed are unique and irreplaceable, they argue, there is an ethical imperative which places on society an obligation to save them.
But is this so? Many feel certainly feel that way when the animal concerned is cute or cuddly. And there is a clear logic to ensuring the survival of those species which are of demonstrable use to humankind. But where does that leave the three-toed pygmy sloth, of which only 500 remain on an island off the coast of Panama where they are easy prey for local fishermen and lobster divers?
Certainly we are not sentimental about the eradication of some species – the smallpox virus, for example, or the mosquito which carries the deadly malaria micro-organism. An absolutist position would protect them. According to Dr Sarah Chan, of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at Manchester University, it would even place upon us an obligation, when it is technically possible, to resurrect long-gone species like the dinosaur.
Extinction is a natural phenomenon not an ethical one. But there is a difference between natural extinctions and those driven by the behaviour of humans. All the rare mammals, plants and fungi on the endangered 100 list are at risk because their habitats are appropriated for human use. A clearer case can be made for our moral obligation to preserve for future generations the species we inherited.
There are good grounds to question a utilitarian “what can nature do for us” approach. Nature is more than a commodity which can be valued and placed in marketplace for its disposal to the highest bidder. In any case, such is the nature of scientific discovery that we cannot afford to be dismissive of the utility of the brightly-coloured Willow Blister fungus which grows only on trees in Pembrokeshire and whose habitat is being squeezed. It may well have a use of which we as yet are ignorant. If it becomes extinct we will never know.
What that Nokia ad was really about
Optical Image Stabilisation is the name of a piece of mobile phone software to reduce shaking in a hand-held video. But it could equally be a piece of PR jargon for the strategy executives at Nokia have just had to employ to steady the wobble that was delivered to their reputation when it emerged that an advert for their latest flagship product – which purported to be shot on a shaky bicycle using the new device – had in fact been shot with a high-tech professional camera from a smooth-running white van just behind the cyclist. A sharp-eyed techno geek spotted a reflection of the real cameraman in a window when Nokia put the video on the internet.
It was a PR nightmare. The launch of the new Lumia 920 was supposed to arrest the dramatic decline of Nokia, once the world’s biggest mobile phone maker, whose share of the market has plummeted thanks to the launch of the iPhone. Instead the firm’s advertising gurus have joined greedy bankers, expense-fiddling MPs, paedophile priests, dodgy journalists and bribe-taking policemen in the dubious pantheon of professions which the public can no longer trust.
Many might think the advertising industry did not have so far to fall. After all, as we all know from Mad Men – with its bacchanalia of smoking, drinking, sexism, adultery, homophobia and racism – this is a ruthlessly debased world alienated from the values of basic human decency.
But in the past there were respectable arguments of advertising apologia. “Advertising nourishes the consuming power of men,” said Winston Churchill. “It creates wants for a better standard of living… It spurs individual exertion and greater production.” It informs consumers about the existence of new products, provides incentives for innovation and stimulates economic growth. And it employs large numbers of people.
But even in those early days it had a more sinister aspect. The Harvard economist J K Galbraith saw advertising as the unnecessary creation of artificial wants. Indeed it deceives people into buying things they don’t need and shouldn’t want. Vance Packard’s seminal book The Hidden Persuaders, in 1957 explored the dark arts of motivational research, deep psychology and subliminal advertising.
Welfare reform cannot be an excuse for cuts
Reforming Britain’s expensive and cumbersome welfare system is long overdue. The ideas’ behind the approach of the work and pensions welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith – to make the system less complicated and to provide people with more incentives to find work or work for longer – are laudable. But today’s news that a typical family will lose £600 a year under the plan to replace jobseeker’s allowance, tax credits, income support, employment and support allowance and housing benefits with a single Universal Credit should give pause for thought.
So too should the concerns of 70 charities and lobbyists who have warned that the new system will disadvantage the 8m Britons who have no access to the internet and 14 million more who lack computer skills. Those are not the only worries. There are anxieties in Whitehall that the computer system to be installed to cope with the reforms may not be up to the job but is rather, as one civil servant put it, a “car crash waiting to happen”. (Whitehall does not have a good track record on the efficiency of its new huge computer systems.) There are worries that the new system will alter the dynamics within families, skewing control and autonomy away from women. And moving from fortnightly to monthly benefits payments could increase the grip of pay-day loan sharks on those in society who lack budgeting skills. Fair and sustainable reform must take account of such factors.
The government has said that from Day One of the new system no individuals will see their benefits fall – and that any longer term squeeze, as benefits rise less than the real rate of inflation – will be offset by shifts elsewhere in the tax and benefits system. That should be taken with more than pinch of salt. Rates which were previously based on the Retail Prices Index are now to be tracked against the Consumer Prices Index which is a far less accurate measure of how prices will rise for the low-to-middle income families who qualify for Child Benefit or in-work tax credits. There are always losers when changes are introduced to any complex financial system. That is a hard fact of political life. But the shift to the Consumer Prices Index will hit the least well-off disproportionately as prices rise faster than benefits will.
But there is another, far bigger, political reality which cannot be ignored. It is that in a time of economic austerity the temptation will grow increasingly less resistible for reform to be used as cover for all round cuts in welfare. The Chancellor George Osborne has made no secret of the fact that he wants £10bn cuts in the welfare bill. But reforms like those proposed by Iain Duncan Smith, though they might eventually produce savings, will initial cost more up-front. Reforms usually do. The Work and Pensions Secretary knows that, which is why he dug his heels in when the prime minister asked him to switch jobs in the Cabinet reshuffle. He suspected that a new occupant of his post would be far less able than him to resist pressure from the Treasury for wider and deeper cuts.
I have no time for those, on both the right and the left, who say that church leaders should keep out of politics. But Desmond Tutu’s intervention to suggest that Tony Blair and George Bush should be arraigned at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague for war crimes suggests that clerics – however distinguished in matters at the interstices of morality and politics – would do well to tread a little more carefully when it comes to the business of the law.
Archbishop Tutu called for the prosecutions as he announced that he is to boycott a conference on Leadership where he was to share a platform with Mr Blair. His grounds were that “the immorality of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, premised on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, has destabilised and polarised the world to a greater extent than any other conflict in history”.
Many people were alarmed and affronted by the invasion of Iraq. I opposed that war too and yet I am distinctly uncomfortable about Desmond Tutu’s high-octane outrage. I worked out why when I heard the human rights lawyer, Sir Geoffery Bindman QC, go on the radio to back the idea.
He was pitted against Mr Blair’s former Lord Chancellor, Charles Falconer. And though Sir Geoffrey was strong on querulous indignation he too was wobbly on the law. For a start, though it is now clear that Tony Blair was wrong about his casus belli – the weapons of mass destruction which proved non-existent – there is no evidence that the then prime minister lied, only that he was badly-informed or self-deluded, perhaps even wilfully. And on the question of legality, as Lord Falconer made clear, it is perfectly possible to argue that the pre-war United Nations resolution 1441 gave sufficient authority to give the invasion had legitimate authority.
Most importantly the war crimes tribunals in the Hague hear cases on genocide, atrocity and crimes against humanity. Sir Geoffery’s assertion that, in the future, it will also indict wars of aggression, was disingenuous; even if that notion is ratified by the 30 states which are party to the ICC, it will only apply to crimes committed a year after the ratification. A lawyer would, of course, have known that, which is probably why Sir Geoffrey was eventually forced to concede that there would indeed be difficulty in proving a case against Mr Blair.
