As a young man in Blackburn I used to knock around with a lad called Anthony Rigby. As teenagers we rode our bikes to Darwen Tower. We went swimming together at the Disco night in the baths in Blackburn. Anthony helped me get my first ever kiss from a girl who bore the radiant smell of cigarettes and Lemon Hooch at the West End Community Centre.
On the morning of January 7 2002, aged 18, Anthony was shot in the back of the head in his own apartment. Four days later he died in hospital. Mark Harrington was the man responsible for the crime. He too was someone I was familiar with. I had asked him to join the college rugby team because we needed the players. Little did I know he had a long standing history of paranoid schizophrenia and the tendancy to be violent. Soon after my encounter with him he was expelled from college for intimidating fellow students. He was sectioned, then released, then he wrote a "death list" which featured several of my friends. Anthony was at the top. Luckily the police caught up with him before he could do any more damage.
Harrington was found guilty of manslaughter through diminished responsibility and was taken into custody indefinately. 6 years on, an old school friend informs me that Harrington will soon be back on our streets and I am struggling to understand the logic behind the decision to let this man walk free.
A man serving time for murder once told me that prison is "a university where you can get a degree in crime. Rehabilitation is a figment of the politicians' imagination". It worries me that such a short period of time may not be enough for someone who never showed any remorse for his actions. When teaching in the prison system I met two former soldiers who had both served three tours of Afghanistan before coming home and stealing a cab drivers car keys and putting them down a drain because of a discrepancy with the fare. They were both sentenced to two years in jail and were dishonorably discharged from the armed forces. I remember that they were frustrated at the length of their sentence in comparison to a sex offender who was sentenced to six months for indecently assaulting a child, and I agreed with them.
I have recieved comments on my previous blogs about making prison a more severe place to be. Im not sure whether I agree with that, but one thing is for sure, and its that a real and practical review needs to be made of the sentencing and parole policies in our justice system. I will be in the audience of the politics show this weekend in Manchester, maybe its one of the issues I will throw at the politicians while I am there.
1 comment:
Ok, like it or not prison is the most severe form of punishment within our society. You can not say (like other commentators have done in response to other blogs) that prison works or does not work. For some it will reform whereas for others it will only serve to push them deeper into a criminal society. It is up to the discretion of the judges (with the aid of PSR's and sentencing guidelines) as to the correct course of action.
What you also have to bear in mind is that mental health issues are a factor in the cases mentioned in the post. Murder by diminished responsibility does not carry the same penalty as a calculated murder by a sane person due to the inability to rationalise the decision by a person diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. By the same token sex offenders have a mental health issue which needs to be dealt with.
I agree that the sentences are not 'fair' for want of a better word but instead of criticising the system lay the blame at the feet of the judges who's inability/unwillingness to sentence offenders to mental health hospitals (with a recommended sentence of course but that the offenders are only to be let out when not a danger to the gp)is the real issue which should be argued upon. In contrast, the ex army offenders were treated harshly by any standards but they had the capacity to make their own decisions and knew the consequences of their actions whereas people with mental health problems are not always able to do that, hence the lesser sentences.
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