The Dark Side of the Mind by Kerry Daynes

Author:Kerry Daynes [Daynes, Kerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788401739
Publisher: Octopus
Published: 2019-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

INSULTS AND INJURIES

The human brain is unprepossessing to look at – a pinky-

grey wrinkled lump with the consistency of congealed

porridge – but appearances are, of course, deceptive.

Professor Peter Kinderman, The New Laws of Psychology

Gary had a Sainsbury’s bag for life that he carried with him wherever he went. It was bright orange plastic with a cartoon drawing of an elephant on it and a strapline that said ‘I’m Strong and Sturdy’. Sometimes he had things in it, but he was in prison so the shopping wasn’t great, and very often the bag was empty. It didn’t matter to Gary. It was a bag for life and that meant it was his, for life.

I learned some time later that his mum would quietly replace his bag for life with a fresh one whenever the old one wore out or, as sometimes happened, other inmates stole or damaged it. He once smashed up his own cell after an inmate burned holes in the bag with a cigarette.

I had been asked by Gary’s solicitor to review him; his family needed advice about how to help him move more effectively through the prison system, which seemed to them like a complex maze with no exits. Although he wasn’t a lifer he might as well have been one, because Gary was serving an imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence – a jail term with no fixed end date.

These now-defunct sentences were introduced by former Home Secretary David Blunkett, presumably on an especially act-first-think-second day. They were intended to protect the public from offenders whose crimes were serious but didn’t warrant a life sentence, and were applicable to 153 crimes, from affray to manslaughter. IPP sentences – abolished in 2012 yet many are still being served today – consisted of a minimum punitive term (known as a ‘tariff’) which offenders had to spend in prison, and bolted onto this was a further 99-year licence, meaning they could technically stay in prison for an extra 99 years – after the tariff has expired, they have to apply to and satisfy a parole board that they are fit for release.

Some ideas are best left on paper. The IPP model was applied far more widely than intended, and used in the wrong way by many courts. Swathes of offenders received short tariffs but went on to spend many extra years in prison, effectively being punished for crimes that they might commit, because they couldn’t meet the demands of the parole board.

A three-person panel led by a judge, the parole board decides who can and cannot go home based on whether or not they are judged to pose a continuing risk to the public. But as the prison psychologist Robert A. Forde points out in his book Bad Psychology, we can predict statistically whether a person is likely to reoffend seriously with only around 70 per cent accuracy. This leaves an alarming void that the system likes to fill by prescribing offending behaviour courses, and assessing prisoners by their abilities to complete them and to wax lyrical about their reformed character during an interview.

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