ANOTHER VOICE

Time for us all to bake a cake with a file in it

AUBERON WAUGH

Imust confess to a fairly complacent, hard-nosed attitude to British criminal justice. There was a card game we used to play at my prep school called 'I Commit'. The idea was to fit a criminal to a crime to an opportunity. Then you would declare: 'I have the Gangster Georgio (or the Lime- house Kid), the Ruritanian Crown Jewels and an Open Window. I commit armed robbery.' Then another player would pro- duce a Detective, a Clue and a policeman to arrest you. Or something like that. Obviously, in real life, the police did not always fit the right crime to the right criminal, but so long as they confined their attention to the criminal classes, it did not seem to matter very much. If the Lime- house Kid went to prison for a bank robbery which was in fact committed by the Gangster Georgio, he would probably meet up there with the Swell Mobster doing time for the Limehouse Kid's job at the Co-op, and they would both be joined, sooner or later, by the Gangster Georgio who had been set up for a cat burglary in Neasden committed by someone else.

Any pedantic insistence on the punish- ment fitting the crime could result only in more money for lawyers, more criminals at large. The purpose of the criminal courts, the police force, and the prison system was to make the world safe for respectable, hard-working, tax-paying citizens and for their Georgian silver tea-pots. The envy, malice and aggression of those less fortun- ate than ourselves had to be kept at bay somehow, or anarchy and misery would follow, and one would lose the silver tea pot, or cow creamer, or ancestral gold pocket watch of which one was most particularly fond.

All of which worked very well so long as the police confined their attentions to the criminal classes. I do not think that at my most complacent, I ever allowed any ele- ment of sadism or vindictiveness to creep into my penology. At one time we were told that prisoners spent all their time playing ping-pong and watching television. I now know this to be untrue, except possibly in a few prisons. They are more likely to spend their time locked three in a single cell, without sanitation, and with half an hour walking round a yard every other day as the only break in the mono- tony. But I was happy to suppose prisoners spent their time playing ping-pong, or chess, and am sorry to learn they do not. The plain truth is that like most people, I never bothered to enquire.

This may have given the sadists and retributionists a free run. I was astonished to learn that prisons were still being built without sanitary facilities in the cells well into the 1960s, and possibly even later. Only last ..week I learned from a news release of the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (Nac- ro) that the Home Secretary has rejected a proposal by the Chief Inspector of Prisons to instal integral sanitation throughout Wandsworth Prison within seven years.

I have not seen any mention of this anywhere else. The Chief Inspector's, Re- port on Wandsworth was published last Friday, 20 October. It was prompted, I imagine, by the deplorable run of suicides at Wandsworth over the last 18 months or so, of which I have seen occasional men- tion in the newspapers. It says, according to Nacro, that the regime at Wandsworth `does not meet basic standards of humanity and propriety'; that staff there operate a `thoroughly institutionalising routine' in line with a traditional attitude that 'prison- ers get nothing' and that 'there is an urgent need for greatly improved regimes, more work, education, association and exercise'.

Two third's of prisoners at Wandsworth, according to the Chief Inspector, have no work to do; many spend long hours in their cells without access to sanitation; prisoners often do not receive even a weekly shower or change of clothes.

Nobody who has been through public school and the army will be a stranger to this form of sadism which masquerades as a concern for punishment. Many might even subscribe to it, pointing out that IRA terrorists have no great concern for their victims' finer feelings, or that child moles- ters seldom care about the long-term psychological damage they may inflict. To such people, I would merely point out that times have changed, and none of us is as safe as we once were. So long as the police This is horrible, like a Greenaway movie.' confined themselves to locking up (or hanging, in their day) a random selection of the criminal classes, we had very little to fear. But the Guildford Four were taken away and locked up for nearly 15 years of a life sentence, so far as we can tell simply' because they were Irish, or suspected of being Irish.

Very well. One is not, as it were, an Irishman. But the police have changed, too. Far from being the upholders of an

ordered, hierarchical society, the new gen- eration of policemen, suckled by Shirley

Williams and fed by Rupert Murdoch, now demonstrates as much envy, resentment and hatred for its betters as was normally to be attributed to the criminal classes.

Outwitted, as often as not, by the real criminals, it seeks to harass and terrorise

ordinary citizens. Newly articulate, it de-

mands greater powers and unfettered dis- cretions to work off the traditional, smouldering hatred of the other ranks for the officer class. Worse than this, I suspect there is a new generation of judges coming up inspired by much the same motives. One does not need to have followed Rosie Johnston's sufferings at the hands of Mr Justice Otton (Bablake School, Coven- try and Birmingham University) or to have looked into the jaws of hell, as I did two weeks ago on a Piccadilly Line tube, to be aware of the way things are changing. Most people have stories to tell from their own experience. A few weeks ago a friend of mine found that his shotgun certificate had run out; he had received no reminder, having changed address, so he wrote to his local police station describing the situation and requesting a renewal. Receiving no reply, he eventually went round to the police station where the officer, having taken his fee, warned him that by posses- sing a shotgun whose licence had expired, he was committing a serious offence. Hav- ing formally cautioned him and taken a statement, he left my friend to wait and see whether he would press charges.

My point is that in a climate of incompe- tence, power mania and hostility from police and Bench, allied to a particularly stupid and unpleasant national leadership, we might any of us end up in prison at any moment. It is time we all took a much more active interest in penal reform. The address of the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders is 169 Clapham Road, London SW9.