Kenneth Roy My plan for saving a great Scottish…

23.08.11
No. 441

Jill Stephenson

Is four years in prison a harsh sentence for inciting affray? In one sense, I really don’t know. This is because I don’t know what a sentence of four years means.
     There was a great furore a few months ago when Kenneth Clarke suggested giving an automatic 50% discount for those who confessed their guilt at an early stage, before the trauma and expense of a court case had been incurred. This was deplored by the opposition, who preferred to stick with the 33% discount that, when in government, its leaders had introduced. Yet it seems that a great many criminals serve only about half of their ‘time’ as it is.      This being the case, the instances quoted by Kenneth Roy of malefactors who were guilty of extreme violence, including rape, seem disturbing. If these malefactors were sentenced to four years in prison, presumably they were eligible for parole, at least, in two years. Is that an appropriate punishment for crimes of violence against the person? I doubt that the victims would have thought so.
     Yet two years does seem excessive for a couple of daft laddies who seem to have been playing a silly game on a ‘social networking site’ and whose incitement didn’t actually incite anyone. And sending to prison at all the woman who received a pair of looted shorts but was not herself involved in the riots or associated looting seems like overkill.
     In the former case, but less plausibly in the latter, there is, though, another consideration. Civil peace – law and order – depends on all of us abstaining from rioting and affray. The recent incidents in English cities demonstrate by how thin a thread that civil peace hangs. It is not merely a matter of panic and scare-mongering, or of heavy-handedness and draconian justice, to react against those who perpetrated it and those who, however hamhandedly, incited rioting without effect.

     On this issue above all, the authorities have to exert their power to restrain and to deter. The threat of the alternative – anarchy – is not one to be taken lightly or to be encouraged with lenient sanctions. Our whole existence – for all of us, in whatever corner of society we inhabit – depends on there being civil peace. That is why rioting has to be punished with what may look, at first sight, like disproportionate severity.

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Today’s banner

Taking a dip off Mull
Photograph by
Islay McLeod

Scotland safe? Try telling

that to the shop-keepers

who pull down the shutters

John Forsyth

It’s rather spooky how often first thoughts of a prospective piece for the Scottish Review are turned by events into an entirely different story. A couple of weeks ago I had considered offering up some thoughts on prison sentences prompted by the reported outrage at ‘disgraced-former-MP-Jim-Devine’s’ release from prison after four months of his sentence. Much reporting of outrage, though, isn’t necessarily the same as reporting of much outrage.

     There was around the same time the case of a Hearts footballer, Craig Thomson, who was found guilty of lewd and libidinous behaviour via the internet with two young girls. He was fined £4,000 and placed on the sex offender register but a lengthy queue formed including sponsors, some supporters and the children’s charity, Children 1st, and editorial writers demanding that as well as accepting the sentence thought appropriate by the sheriff who had heard all the evidence and seen all the background reports, Thomson should also be sacked.
     I don’t know the supervision requirements that would have been imposed on Thomson by the case officer assigned to him but not many reports that I read even bothered to mention that supervision based on risk assessment is part of the sex offender package. Now that he has been driven from Edinburgh and has signed to play for a club in Lithuania I imagine the supervision will be somewhat less rigorous than it would have been if he had stayed in Edinburgh.
     In these days where so much political debate appears to be phone-in driven, where our nation seems to be populated only by victims or villains, it appears that no punishment is ever enough. Our elected politicians in Holyrood proclaim the distinctiveness – ie superiority – of Scots law but have spent much of their time since 1999 replacing the common law that embodies differences by prescriptive Westminster-style statutes hemming in the scope for judicial discretion when sentencing the miscreant in the dock. The politicians seem obsessed with classes of offence rather than individual offenders.
     Not so long ago I interviewed the English judge, Lord Leveson, recently appointed to explore the highways and byways of phone-hacking and other alleged journalistic misdeeds. I was speaking to him then in his lower-profile capacity as chairman of the Sentencing Council for England and Wales. He admitted being intrigued and impressed by the results of its online ‘judge for yourself’ exercise that members of the public can play on the Sentencing Council website. The facts and circumstances of an offence and information about the accused are gradually revealed and we, the public, are invited to suggest the punishment. Despite the background phone-in clamour, in most cases we, the public, generally undershoot the actual sentence handed down by the judge.
     Thinking again about sentencing, I recalled a visit to Wormwood Scrubs in the mid-1980s. Hugh Prysor Jones and I were making a series of programmes for BBC Radio 4 about homicide. Our notion was that we only wanted to interview people with a first-hand story to tell, including witnesses, families, investigating officers, pathologists, judges and so on. No politicians or academics.We were in the Scrubs to interview some convicted murderers.
     The original recollection I intended to share with the Scottish Review was of the conversation afterwards with the governor. I asked him what he considered to be the optimum length of a prison sentence. He thought for a moment and suggested ‘about 48 hours’. His reasoning, for first offenders at least, was that, whatever their previous bravado, the crash of the door behind them, the stink that permeated the whole place, the humiliation of the induction processes and the fear and loneliness would be enough in most cases to make sure they would never want to come back. ‘But after 48 hours they begin to get their bearings and work out how to get by just as any of us would. As far as deterrence goes we’ve pretty much lost them after that.’ I’m not advocating a 48-hour tariff, just reporting it.

There is a difference between organised crime and the loosely organised opportunism that arises from the intimidation and the lawlessness of
sheer numbers..

     I haven’t been in a prison for a long time but I’m told the stink is less now. However, recent events remind me of the other memory I have from that visit. We had been in the building less than a minute, proceeding through the main hall, when I found a hand-written note thrust into my hand. I think I still have it somewhere but the gist was ‘can you help me get out of here? I shouldn’t be in here’. The arrival of ‘the BBC’ on the premises hadn’t been a surprise judging by the crowd waiting for us. The note was signed by Engin Raghip, then one of the three men convicted of the murder of Police Constable Keith Blakelock on the night of the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985.
     I never knowingly met Keith Blakelock but the police station at which he was based was at the end of the road where we lived. I passed it every day on my way to the railway station. I’d also been privy to the detail of his injuries as the mob around him tried to decapitate him. The information was deliberately withheld for many months afterwards.
     Raghip was released in the end and his conviction quashed. Not only was his confession demonstrated to be unreliable but the police notes of the interviews were revealed to have been tampered with. His fellow Broadwater 3 convicts, Mark Braithwaite and Winston Silcott, also had their convictions quashed. The police, traumatised by the murder of their colleague and under political pressure to get convictions, had undermined their own investigation.
     It isn’t to excuse the unacceptability of looting and violent mayhem on the streets in which people died, businesses were destroyed and families lost their home and possessions, to point out the importance of standing steadfast against the sweeping demonisation of whole groups of our fellow citizens.
     The collective excitement of the opportunists on the streets of Tottenham, Manchester and Birmingham has already been matched by the prime minister and several of his cabinet in their unseemly haste to bring baton rounds and water cannon to our streets. It now seems to be spreading to pockets of the judiciary in England.
     The collective excitement was clearly matched by the TV news programmes who treated the events in some English cities as they would a general election results programme. ‘Sorry, we have to cut you off there, we have to go now to Solihull/Enfield/Winson Green where there’s a 3.2% swing to the riot police.’
     There is a difference between organised crime and the loosely organised opportunism that arises from the intimidation and the lawlessness of sheer numbers.
     I couldn’t help but notice the contradiction between the first minister’s insistence on TV last week that Scotland is safe for tourists and his instigation before the summer recess of his football-related anti-sectarianism measures. The shopkeepers of the streets around most of our football grounds and in many of the poorer parts of our towns and cities would be hard put to tell the difference beyond the scarves when 20 or 30 people decide to exert the power of their numbers to strip the shelves and threaten anyone who asks them to stop.
     Do our politicians think it is acceptable that Scottish shops in Scottish streets pull down the steel shutters early on match days or most evenings employ security staff to patrol the two aisles of their corner shop or sell drink through a two foot by one foot hatch in a counter to ceiling security screen? How many of them even know?

John Forsyth has worked for BBC Radio and TV in London and ran his own independent production company in Scotland for 10 years, supplying programmes to BBC Radio 2, 3 4, 5 Live, Radio Scotland and the World Service. He’s a former political editor of Scotland on Sunday and is now a freelance journalist and editorial consultant.