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The sterility of punishment. By William Byfield
I studied Criminology as an undergraduate. It was for a selfish motive. I needed some lighter options (as I saw it) to allow me to enjoy the more hedonistic pursuits of student life and so I opted for Criminology and Moral Philosophy to while away the summer months.
My Criminology tutor worked in the bowels of the Law Library and acted the part of a frustrated business executive. ‘Viv,’ he would say to his assistant, ‘get me the file and statistics on adolescent recidivism’ in a tone of voice more suited to launching a takeover bid. My philosophy tutor, on the other hand, was a gentle American with impeccable taste in clothes and sherry. My tutorials with him were, however, not the highlight of his week. Freedom of will proved to be my breaking point. I asked tetchily how we could know whether freedom of will existed because even our analysis of that very issue might be pre-determined by our genes. He gave me a long smile and commented, ‘That’s the first intelligent thing you have said in six weeks.’
Criminology did not influence the judges of my early years as a junior and discussions about culpability in terms of freedom of will were even less likely to produce a trouble-free mitigation, unless one happened to be appearing in front of a very cerebral High Court judge, and even he would doubtless eventually pull himself from the memories of Magdalen deer park to the reality of Pentonville Prison.
Yet the topic has risen again recently in the newspapers, no doubt as a prelude to a critique of academic wokery, and the doubt stirs in me periodically whenever I hear of some person, usually male between 18 and 25, being sentenced to a massive term of imprisonment for killing another person, again usually a male, often with a knife or a gun. Even the crushing sentence in cases of murder is not finite. Release is dependent on the judgment of the Parole Board, increasingly tinged with attempted political interference.
The Criminology tutor was noticeably hard-headed and pointed out that retribution alone may justify severe sentences and that without them, public vengeance may replace public justice. What he found more questionable was whether length of punishment was in fact any sort of deterrence. In a world where human indifference to life – which is seemingly triggered with very little effort by tyrants and autocrats, populists and extremists – is now globally commonplace, what is the evidence that increasingly long sentences actually deter people from committing crime even assuming they can sensibly visualise long periods of time in advance?
Those thoughts were crossing my mind when recently my junior and I visited our client in the cells after he had received a sentence on a joint-enterprise murder, meaning incarceration as a teenager and return to the world most likely in his 50s – if by then he would be fit to be released at all into a world of which he will know little.
To look at, he had the face of a chorister pictured on a snowy Christmas card. To talk to, he came over as any teenager might. What was disturbing was his complete resignation to his fate. My junior, a sturdy young man of abundant common sense called Will Gaisford, looked genuinely puzzled. ‘Couldn’t you have got out of the gang somehow, Tags [we used his street name]?’ I had seen during the case that Tags had good academic results at school until he left in the sixth form. ‘Allow yourself time for it to sink in,’ I chimed in. ‘Then maybe get your A-levels and who knows.’ In my mind, I was thinking ‘why’ and ‘for what’.
‘Cool,’ he said, smiling wistfully. ‘In my life I die before 30 or I get 30 years. The only way out is getting too old for it.’ Was he trapped? Could he in reality have done much else? Was his fate sealed all along given his circumstances?
I left the cells feeling sad. A boy died. His parents and friends had the right to punishment, but unless we are going to terminate the offender’s life, I wondered whether the waste, the cost and the actual fact of hugely extensive incarceration for the best part of a young person’s life didn’t start to feel like pointless cruelty unless either he were too dangerous to release earlier or the sentence really deterred others.
Looking at the diaries of our criminal practitioners and the court lists, I think we can safely rule out the latter.
William Byfield is the pseudonym of a senior member of the Bar. Gutteridge Chambers, and the events that happen there, are entirely fictitious.
I studied Criminology as an undergraduate. It was for a selfish motive. I needed some lighter options (as I saw it) to allow me to enjoy the more hedonistic pursuits of student life and so I opted for Criminology and Moral Philosophy to while away the summer months.
My Criminology tutor worked in the bowels of the Law Library and acted the part of a frustrated business executive. ‘Viv,’ he would say to his assistant, ‘get me the file and statistics on adolescent recidivism’ in a tone of voice more suited to launching a takeover bid. My philosophy tutor, on the other hand, was a gentle American with impeccable taste in clothes and sherry. My tutorials with him were, however, not the highlight of his week. Freedom of will proved to be my breaking point. I asked tetchily how we could know whether freedom of will existed because even our analysis of that very issue might be pre-determined by our genes. He gave me a long smile and commented, ‘That’s the first intelligent thing you have said in six weeks.’
Criminology did not influence the judges of my early years as a junior and discussions about culpability in terms of freedom of will were even less likely to produce a trouble-free mitigation, unless one happened to be appearing in front of a very cerebral High Court judge, and even he would doubtless eventually pull himself from the memories of Magdalen deer park to the reality of Pentonville Prison.
Yet the topic has risen again recently in the newspapers, no doubt as a prelude to a critique of academic wokery, and the doubt stirs in me periodically whenever I hear of some person, usually male between 18 and 25, being sentenced to a massive term of imprisonment for killing another person, again usually a male, often with a knife or a gun. Even the crushing sentence in cases of murder is not finite. Release is dependent on the judgment of the Parole Board, increasingly tinged with attempted political interference.
The Criminology tutor was noticeably hard-headed and pointed out that retribution alone may justify severe sentences and that without them, public vengeance may replace public justice. What he found more questionable was whether length of punishment was in fact any sort of deterrence. In a world where human indifference to life – which is seemingly triggered with very little effort by tyrants and autocrats, populists and extremists – is now globally commonplace, what is the evidence that increasingly long sentences actually deter people from committing crime even assuming they can sensibly visualise long periods of time in advance?
Those thoughts were crossing my mind when recently my junior and I visited our client in the cells after he had received a sentence on a joint-enterprise murder, meaning incarceration as a teenager and return to the world most likely in his 50s – if by then he would be fit to be released at all into a world of which he will know little.
To look at, he had the face of a chorister pictured on a snowy Christmas card. To talk to, he came over as any teenager might. What was disturbing was his complete resignation to his fate. My junior, a sturdy young man of abundant common sense called Will Gaisford, looked genuinely puzzled. ‘Couldn’t you have got out of the gang somehow, Tags [we used his street name]?’ I had seen during the case that Tags had good academic results at school until he left in the sixth form. ‘Allow yourself time for it to sink in,’ I chimed in. ‘Then maybe get your A-levels and who knows.’ In my mind, I was thinking ‘why’ and ‘for what’.
‘Cool,’ he said, smiling wistfully. ‘In my life I die before 30 or I get 30 years. The only way out is getting too old for it.’ Was he trapped? Could he in reality have done much else? Was his fate sealed all along given his circumstances?
I left the cells feeling sad. A boy died. His parents and friends had the right to punishment, but unless we are going to terminate the offender’s life, I wondered whether the waste, the cost and the actual fact of hugely extensive incarceration for the best part of a young person’s life didn’t start to feel like pointless cruelty unless either he were too dangerous to release earlier or the sentence really deterred others.
Looking at the diaries of our criminal practitioners and the court lists, I think we can safely rule out the latter.
The sterility of punishment. By William Byfield
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