One of the worst things about prison is the rules. Before I was sentenced I’d imagined jail as a rigid, structured, disciplined environment where infractions would be punished without fear or favour. The reality is much, much worse. In our prisons rules are often enforced capriciously or not at all. There’s a two-tier system. A favoured prisoner may be allowed to flout regulations while one who’s seen as difficult or challenging will face consequences and sanctions. Some rules are simply ignored. In my time at Wandsworth the smell of spice or cannabis would often waft from cells on to the landings where prison officers stood. They did nothing. Easier to leave a prisoner in a stupor than deal with the hassle of a cell search. Now, four years later, HM Inspector of Prisons reports exactly the same behaviour.
This lawless culture, where rules matter less than who you are, is utterly toxic. It teaches prisoners that regulations and laws are not objective standards of behaviour, but rather tools for the powerful to harm those they dislike while protecting those they favour. Sobanan Narenthiran, a former medical student jailed for drug offences, who now runs Breakthrough Social Enterprise, told me of an incident where a man failed a drug test but was able to avoid sanction because ‘he was seen as someone from a good background.’ This system ensures that many prisoners leave jail with even less respect for society’s rules. I fear that in our responses to the recent riots we risk creating the same toxic culture outside the prison walls.
The law should be clear, consistent and understood by everyone. Unfortunately, it is often not. As with prison officers ignoring obvious drug-taking, so the British state has effectively stopped enforcing whole swathes of law. Only 6.4 per cent of all crimes result in a charge. Over 73 per cent of all residential burglary investigations are closed because no suspect can be identified, despite a commitment by police to attend every incident. What this means in practice is that police solve zero burglaries in half the country. Meanwhile almost 84 per cent of all vehicle thefts are closed without a suspect being identified. Even in cases of shoplifting, where security guards and CCTV make the police’s work much easier, only 16.4 per cent of offences result in a charge. It often seems that the police are faster and more effective in pursuing online speech offences than they are in handling crimes which cause direct and immediate harm to victims.
Online speech law seems particularly unclear, especially since the introduction of the Online Safety Act, which created a new criminal offence of ‘sending false information intended to cause non-trivial harm’. As Douglas Murray wrote last week, laws seems to be enforced depending on the person’s power, status and proximity to the regime’s values. A woman who shared false information about the Southport killer’s identity has been arrested. Meanwhile Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate tweeted to his 42,000 followers a claim, later said to be false, that a Muslim woman had been attacked with acid. As far as we know, Nick has seemingly received no sanction or police contact for this, presumably because he would say that he believed the information to be true. Lowles subsequently apologised after police denied that the attack had taken place.
At this moment 29 people have been charged with online offences relating to the riots.
In cases of offline speech, the law also seems dangerously unclear. I find it hard to understand how calling for a crowd to ‘punch a Terf’ is not illegal, but silent prayer within 150m of an abortion clinic may be banned. Charges were dropped against four men who apparently drove through Finchley Road ‘with someone on a loudspeaker system calling for the death of Jews and the rape of their daughters’, as the CPS did not think there was a realistic prospect of conviction because they could not prove who made the comments in question. While Tyler Kay, a man who tweeted ‘mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care… if that makes me racist, so be it’ has been sent to prison, with a sentence of 38 months.
The judge in that case made it clear that ‘the offence is clearly aggravated by the timing of the incident and the sensitive social climate’. This is no way to run a justice system. If we are to have criminal sanction for speech then it has to be consistent. A particular form of speech can not be illegal one day and legal the next, depending on what’s happening in the news.
The belief in two-tier policing, often expressed during and after the riots, is a dangerous one. If people cease to believe that all communities and groups are policed equally then further disorder may well follow. Similarly if charges and sentencing diverge from what is seen as fair, and the public’s priorities, then faith in the justice system may entirely collapse.
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