People Are Not Things

It was sad news indeed to learn that the former chief inspector of prisons, Lord Ramsbotham, passed away in the lead up to Christmas at the age of 88. Long after his impressive tenure as chief inspector, he remained a tireless campaigner on improving prison conditions and a staunch voice for penal reform in the House of Lords. He will be much missed.

A few years ago, Lord Ramsbotham undertook a review of the then part-privatised probation system. He was deeply critical of two decades of reforms which had led to a probation service “subordinate” to prisons, merged as the two systems had been within first the National Offender Management Service, and now His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.

This coincided with a steep growth in the prison population as sentences became longer and probation itself became more punitive. Out went the old ethos of probation – ‘assist, advise, befriend’ – and in came a new emphasis on punishment in the community. For those people with a plethora of problems – be it substance misuse, or mental health, or a lack of employment or housing…or all combined, and behind those problems, histories of neglect and abuse – the criminal justice system has become a second home, with many cycling in and out of custody on short prison sentences. Far from being helped out of this cycle by probation, the service became focused on assessing risk and monitoring people during their brief spells back out in the community. Soon enough, they would be sent back to prison.

A paper Lord Ramsbotham wrote as part of his probation review was memorably titled, ‘People Are Not Things’ – chosen deliberately, he wrote, because “after a lifetime in an operational service, I have come to hate the cult of managerialism – the issuing of paper orders and instructions in the belief that they will automatically be obeyed”.

When it came to probation, Lord Ramsbotham felt managerialism had led to the depersonalisation of a deeply personal service, for work in the community with those who commit crime must by needs delve into the reason for an individual’s offending. Probation, properly done, should indeed treat those who commit crime as people and not things. And such an approach was in fact vital to the fight against crime. As he wrote, “achieving meaningless targets and performance indicators has no place in probation, where every offender has different needs, which must be analysed and satisfied if the public is to be protected”.

The day before obituaries of Lord Ramsbotham began to appear, a particularly horrific case was heard in court. Jordan McSweeney, 29, was handed a life sentence, with a minimum term of 38 years, after the brutal murder and sexual assault of Zara Aleena, 35. In many ways, this awful case illustrates the current failings of prisons and probation. Nine days before he went on to commit murder, McSweeney had been released on licence from prison for an earlier offence of robbery. Not only that, but he was already in the process of being recalled to prison after missing two appointments with his probation officers. All told, McSweeney had been convicted on 28 occasions of more than 69 previous offences.

It will be difficult for many to view a man such as Jordan McSweeney as a person, and not a thing, given the inhumane nature of his behaviour to his victim, who herself was treated by her murderer as little more than a thing. But it is important to note that McSweeney only became a murderer that evening. At one point he was the child whose first memory of his father, according to the court, was when said father tried to drown McSweeney’s mother in a bath. His first criminal conviction was at the age of thirteen. One way or another, Jordan McSweeney has been in the criminal justice system for most of his life, cycling in and out of custody, and it seems the system only served to make him worse – culminating in the most appalling loss of a woman’s life.

The Ministry of Justice is conducting a review of how this ‘serious further offence’ occurred. It will focus on the assessments of probation officers and on how speedily they informed the police of McSweeney’s recall to prison. It is unlikely to focus on these broader systemic questions. It is also unlikely to be titled ‘People Are Not Things’.

Andrew Neilson

Comments