When I saw the photograph in the Torygraph showing the Harmondsworth immigration detention centre, I thought it looked like a prison. Admittedly, it is a modern structure. Nevertheless, it reminds me of the rotting hulks that used to house prisoners before transporting them to Australia. Given that the detention centre is close to Heathrow Airport, I fail to see why those who are to be deported are not simply taken straight to the airport and boarded on an aeroplane. There are those who have not committed a criminal offence living along side those who have but have served their prison term. This beggars the question, why are people still in a prison environment after time for the crime has been satisfied? To treat people who should not be prisoners as though they are prisoners, is it any wonder that they decided to riot against unacceptable conditions?

More people in UK prisons than ever before, states the Daily Torygraph headline, 29/11/2006. It makes a refreshing change to see prisoners referred to as people. They are precisely that, every one of them is someone's grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, brother, sister, son or daughter. They are not scum, or whatever some newspapers and some people prefer to call them. They are, bottom line, human beings. And, as such, are entitled not to be treated as sardines in a can. The system cannot cope with 80,000 prisoners. The prisons in the system were not designed or built to house 2 or 3 inmates in a space only fit to house one person. What we have at present is large scale inhumanity towards man. The public should be screaming out, not in our name. But, the public voice is mute on this issue. However, I have heard the welcome voice of Rachel from North London speaking out about this disgrace.

What has the government done about the impending crises. Nothing, until it was too late. Then the Home Secretary, John Reid, belatedly decides to act. He does not release from prison all those who do not need or deserve to be there, rather, he decides to use police cells to house the over flow. This means that the police do not have the cell spaces available to house those who might need locking up until they go through the due process, so the police do not police and some people who deserve to be arrested do not get arrested. I fail to see how this equates with public protection. The Torygraph reports that John Reid has met with penal experts and criminologists from Britain and Europe to discuss the way forward for prison policy. He has not met with me, bigger fool him, as I do have expertise in this area, and his going around in circles is not the best way forward. It is ironic that prisoners walk around in circles on the prison exercise yard. John Reid is a prisoner of his own stupidity. What is needed is a radical approach.

The government has rightly diagnosed that the general public has lost confidence in the Criminal Justice System. So, the government is thinking up ways to deceive the general public into having more confidence in the system. There is that old saying that you can fool some of the people all of the time but not all of the people all of the time. Community penalties are a good thing, but the government PR scheme appears to be in tatters. The public has been lied to too often to trust in what the government has to say. Iraq is just one example. Whenever I hear John Reid speak about policies designed to protect the public, I cringe because if you look closely you will see that what he advocates is not protecting the public, rather, the policy is about depriving the public of civil liberties.

John Reid is asking the question, how can we reduce reoffending. Well, John, for a starters, I would reduce the prison population to a manageable size. Face it, its unmanageable in its present state. By adopting a reductionist policy instead of expansionism, this breathing space will allow prison officers and professionals to work with prisoners on a one to one basis and in small groups. This works better than just locking them up and throwing away the key until it is time to release them. You need to win the hearts and minds of the public not at large, you cannot do this by ignoring them except to treat them as being less than human beings.

Another question John Reid is asking is how the system can control the most dangerous offenders. My experience is that the situation is usually dangerous and not the offender. For example, a car with no brakes parked on a hill is safe enough whilstever the brick is underneath the front tyre. Remove the brick and the situation then becomes dangerous because the car is now out of control. There are some people for whom prison is the only safe place available. This is an inescapable fact. However, the number who cannot ever be released is small and managable. So is the number who must serve a very long time before they may be deemed acceptably safe to be released. As each individual is precisely that, it is pointless having a regime which, in effect, says one size must fit all. I recall being asked which route I wished to take through my life sentence, and when I replied the education route, the Prison Service spent the next 10 years denying me education, as a result they had a control problem for those 10 years. I was right all along, had I been listened to, both sides could have saved having to do battle, as the price of my not being a control problem was to better myself by education. I do not believe that I asked too much and that the price was too high to pay. I proved that reform can work if you give it a chance and take the rehabilitation issue seriously. The punishment is the sentence handed down in court, not what people feel should be inflicted upon prisoners who are at their mercy and are at the mercy of the State.

John Reid is also looking for answers to how they can balance the need to deter with the necessity to punish. There is general and individual deterrence. Most people are deterred by the law, it is usually the individual deterrence which needs to be examined. Having the desire to be too punitive, in the first instance, instead of using prison as a last resort, tends to be counter productive. The going off the rails tends to be in early childhood and schooling. By the time one is caught in the Criminal Justice trap it is often too late. The person has already suffered and the punishment only serves to make the person worse. I recall my barrister in 1971, telling the trial judge that I needed help, to which the judge replied, he will get all the help he needs in prison. The judge was wrong, as the help was not available and I got worse over the years. Luckily, it was not too late for me, but most offenders give up hope that they will receive the help they need. There needs to be individual treatment for individual cases.

The public has to make up its mind. Do they wish to continue being vindictive and losing out, or do they want a system that works and benefits all?

Might I take this opportunity to remind the Tories that it was not Polly Toynbee but Winston Churchill who, in 1910, introduced legislative proposals for reducing the scale of imprisonment. It is worth repeating part of his famous speech, as it appears that the Tories are floundering about in a dinghy witout a paddle and no sense of direction.

"The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the State, and even of convicted criminals against the State, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes, and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man - these are the symbols which in treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virture in it".

Take note David Davis. Bow down and proclaim how unworthy you really are.

Memo: To Polly Toynbee, try matching the above and I will follow your leadership qualities.

Those Polly Toynbee worshippers in the Tory Party, stop being complete tossers!

Michael Howard once famously adopted a saying in America, and used it out of context over here, to claim that prison works. In what ways can it be claimed to work, and what evidence is there to support this? If we take the limited view of individual deterrence, it is true that whilst an offender is incarcerated s/he is not in a position to commit any crime outside of prison during the period of incarceration. But, this does not affect general deterrence because others will still be committing crimes outside. In addition, if the offender does not address the offending behaviour and the system just acts as a penal dustbin, there is a danger that the offender comes out worse than when s/he went into prison.

In the same way that a teacher cannot teach a class of 60 pupils, the penal estate has become too large to manage effectively. Smaller, more manageable prisons, with a smaller, more manageable prison population, is a small step in the right direction. Because prisoners are individuals, they need individual treatment programmes. This one size fits all does not work with clothes, why should it work on something as complicated as personalities?

To be continued...

'It's not like I'm killing someone now because there's no lids for my jam jars'

In 1979, John Hirst was jailed for brutally killing his landlady. He believes remorse is a 'middle class thing' and he's done his time. The victim's daughter says she can never forgive him. Andrew O'Hagan reports
Andrew O'Hagan
Saturday November 18, 2006

Guardian
John Hirst was 28 and recently paroled from prison when Mrs Bronia Burton took him in as a lodger at Normoor Road near Burghfield Common, Berkshire. It was the spring of 1979, and she gave up the main bedroom in her house to the itinerant labourer partly for a bit of extra cash, but mainly for company. She was lonely in the house. Though the incident that happened next would create the gravest upset in dozens of different lives - end relationships, darken psychologies, consume lawyers, haunt dreams - there seems to be no doubt about what actually happened. Let us use the words of Barbara Calvert QC, who prosecuted Hirst in the trial that followed. "On the evening of June 23 they were watching television when Mrs Burton asked the defendant to collect some coal from the shed. He went to the shed, got the coal and at the same time picked up a heavy hand axe. He returned to the living room, put the coal on the fire, and then approached Mrs Burton and hit her, perhaps seven times, on the head with the axe. He then went to the kitchen to make coffee and drank it, waiting for Mrs Burton to die."

There was some dispute at the time whether Hirst had struck the victim six or seven times. It seemed important, signifying a higher or lower level of frenzy. After finishing his coffee, it was stated, Hirst walked six miles to Reading police station, where he gave himself up. The man at the desk thought he was drunk and told him to go home. "No," Hirst said. "I killed her and she's dead."

Twenty-seven years later, Nina Burton-Harris is crying into a handkerchief in a Somerset pub. "My mother and I had had a little disagreement," she says, "so I hadn't seen her for a while. You know how these things are. I didn't know he was living there: Hirst hadn't been there long." The morning after Mrs Burton's death, Nina received a phone call from a police officer who said there had been an accident and could she come to the police station. "I went there and things just got worse," she says. "I wasn't allowed to identify her because of the nature of the crime."

Mrs Burton was 63 when she died. She was born in Russia, but Nina doesn't know exactly where. "My mother never admitted to people that she was Russian," she says. "She'd pretend to be French. She didn't have a great knowledge of the English language and that frightened her. I think she was afraid they would deport her or something." Mrs Burton met Nina's father in Haifa during the war, where she was working as a nurse and he was enlisted in the Palestine police. The family moved to England when Nina was four, and they had long been settled in the Reading area.

Nina says the nightmare really began when she and her then-fiancé Bob had to clear out her mother's house. "I stood outside for nearly an hour and Bob went in. I knew there was still blood there. I knew where it happened and my limbs wouldn't stop shaking. I was sick several times and the shock of being there brought my period on." She dabs her eyes as she thinks back on it. "You see," she says, "I had no experience of violence."

I ask her what Hirst's room was like. "All I remember is the books," she says. "There was Tolkien, Lord Of The Rings - that's all I remember. It must have been a double bed. I remember saying at the time he was a very intelligent man, just because of the books. But I couldn't stand for anything to be left at the house. I cut up all the furniture because I didn't want anybody else to have it, and I destroyed all the roses in the garden because my mother loved her roses."

According to evidence presented at the trial in February 1980, Hirst appeared almost impervious to the shock of what he had done. He said that Mrs Burton hadn't liked him going out and that she nagged him constantly. "She just kept on at me," he said. On the night he was arrested, a police officer remembered asking Hirst in his cell if he felt any remorse. "No, it is part of life," he said. "It is all in the past and I can forget it now. I bet she had got a bit of a headache."

At the trial, he pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility. "In court I was just crying," says Nina. "Screaming. At one point in the trial, I looked over and he was to my left. I stared at him and I had these really bad thoughts. I couldn't believe he was alive and my mother not. He looked back at me and I know he could feel it. I just kept staring at him."

In the end, the prosecution at Reading Crown Court accepted Hirst's plea of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and he got 15 years. "I have no doubt you are an arrogant and dangerous person with a severe personality defect," said Mr Justice Purchis. "Unfortunately, this is not suitable for treatment in a mental hospital."

I ask Nina Burton-Harris whether she thinks the trial was weighted in Hirst's favour.

"Yes," she says. "He'd had a bad upbringing. He was sexually abused. And I do feel very sorry for him for that. But there was no reason to be a criminal. The judge said he should serve a minimum of 15 years, but I just couldn't believe it. I wanted him in prison for the rest of his life. I did have times when I thought, yes, capital punishment is a good thing. People who do that shouldn't be allowed to come out of prison and lead relatively normal lives.

At least, they should not be allowed out of prison at all."

In the end, Hirst spent 25 years in prison because, the authorities say, of violent offences he committed while he was a prisoner, but he was finally released a few years ago. "Yes," says Nina, "he spent a long time in prison - a lot longer than most murderers do, and I'm very grateful for that - but even so. He was reported as saying, 'What else does she want from me?' but I want the rest of his life."

I ask what is sufficient. Is there not a question of forgiveness, or the possibility of redemption?

"I'll never forgive him," she says. "I'll never, ever, ever forgive him. He took my mother away. And he broke up my relationship with my fiancé. I was prescribed tranquillisers, but I only took them once and then learned to cope without them. And it affected my father's life - I lost my mother and my father in the end. My father was never the same again and then he died. I'm not a tolerant person any more. I feel angry a) that he was in a position to do that to her and b) that he's still walking the streets."

According to the Home Office's own figures, people in Britain serving life sentences have doubled in the past 10 years. Newspaper reports of judges' leniency are strictly opposed by the facts: not only are lifers doing something closer to life, but prisoners in general are spending longer in prison. Yet earlier this year Tony Blair set out an agenda for overhauling the criminal justice system in such a way as to "greater safeguard the civil liberties of victims at the expense of offenders". But while prisons are full to bursting - inching up to the highest-ever figure - a new sentencing row seems to be instigated every other week by "public outrage" at single cases of recidivism or early release. We are, in point of fact, the biggest jailer in western Europe.

Sitting with Nina Burton-Harris, I can see how all these arguments and all these statistics come down to a very human hurt: a woman crying in the afternoon about a terrible event that still controls her life, 27 years after the event. "I do feel the families should have some say and should be taken account of," she says. "It seems the prisoners have all the rights. They can do and go wherever they want. The idea that it wasn't his fault the way he turned out, because of his upbringing, I just don't believe that."

A while later, I wrote to Nina to ask if she truly hated the person who had killed her mother. "I hate the word 'hate'," she replied. "Such an intense word. But I think it is justified. I fucking hate him, honestly."

John Hirst lives in a part of Hull where the terraced houses are decayed and where broken cars stand rusty and flat-tyred against the pavement. Set back from the road, his house wears a feeling of nervous exhaustion, and as soon as I touched the bell I knew that a dog would immediately start barking. Hirst came to the door through a hail of barks and with eyes that seemed accustomed to a hostile world. "Never mind him - that's Rocky," he says.

If one is thinking straight, it's impossible not to be in two minds about people with a violent past. Meeting a person who once hit another person six or seven times on the head with an axe does, despite all one's views about the aims of society, present an immediate challenge to one's liberal contentment. It is obvious within seconds of meeting Hirst that he is probably neither a monster nor a model citizen, but he presses his Open University learning on you without ever knowing that the overwhelming sense he gives is not of educated reasonableness but of chaos and vast insensitivity. This is just an observation: he makes a case for himself very persuasively, but everything he says makes you wonder whether this man is totally in control of himself. He talks endlessly about society's powers of control, as if he were endlessly defined by others' need and hunger to restrain him.

I arrive in his living room to see that he is able to watch me coming on his own DIY closed-circuit television unit. His TV set shows pictures of the yard outside his front door and then it flicks, for seconds at a time, to show other vistas: the backyard and other views about the house. Stacks of video tapes stand here and there in the room, and I notice the clock on the screen that shows the path I had just walked up: 14:34:07, it reads. By the time that 35th minute elapses, Hirst is sitting across from me, swearing about a woman who has thrown out the lids of his jam jars.

"Oh for crying out fucking loud," he says. "Stupid cow. I don't fucking believe this." Then he stands up and goes back into the kitchen, from where I can still hear him cursing and tantrumming. "She's fucking thrown the fucking lids out, the stupid cunt. Fucking stupid fucking cow. Stupid bitch."

I'd say, even if you didn't know, that you'd think you were in the living room of an ex-convict. Hirst has been out of prison a few years, but the living room is in every way like a cell. The CCTV is one thing, but every surface is covered in fag ash; the smell of socks and male sweat is overwhelming. His dog seems a loyal beast, and its presence is everywhere: the sofa is matted with its hair and a couple of chewed footballs lie on the floor next to the grimy window. A bottle of Tesco's Whole Orange Squash stands on a table crammed with papers. Among his video tapes is a copy of The Shawshank Redemption, and dozens of books on English law crowd the shelves next to the fireplace. In the middle of them I see a paperback copy of Crime And Punishment, and, as Hirst comes back in, I think of Raskolnikov and his brutal time with the old lady. He is squat and his hair is shorn, and where his skin seemed tough, his eyes are soft and show a certain bewilderment every time he smiles. He sits on the edge of the sofa wearing a loose T-shirt and a pair of paint-splattered trousers.

"I found security in prison for the first time in my life," he says. "I stopped wetting the bed when I went to prison. And here ..." - he points to the front window and then to the back of the house - "nobody can come that way and nobody can come that way." He talks in a strong Yorkshire accent about violent difficulties with his neighbours. "Their claim to fame," he says, "was they got rid of all the asylum seekers off this street and I said, 'Well, you're not getting rid of me.' I tell you what it reminds me of: First Blood, Rambo, you know, I mean 'don't push me'. I've backed myself into a corner.

I did the same in jail whenever I got into situations, backed myself into a corner."

Hirst was born on November 18 1950 in Bradford. His mother was Latvian and she came to Britain at the end of the second world war. She had four children, but she and the father divorced before Hirst was two. He says his mother couldn't cope with her children and the younger pair, including him, was placed with Barnardo's. His only memory of the home is of cutting his foot on glass from a broken milk bottle. The records show that each time he was returned from a foster home, he was described as "uncontrollable". He says he wasn't uncontrollable; he was suffering from Asperger's Syndrome, though that was only diagnosed much later. "Children were meant to be seen and not heard," he says, "and I was bright and I'd ask a question. I'm still like that."

He went from being with one foster family called the Butterfields to doing labouring work, then he did some time in a factory. Listening to Hirst, you soon notice a pattern: each stage of his story leads into a pocket of difficulty, and in each case he likes to speak of being let down by authority. Foster parents were wrong when they said he was difficult. The union was wrong when they said he was working too many hours at a bakery. "Once someone's shit on me that bad, I don't give them a second chance," he says. He tells me about prices in the early 1960s, and how you couldn't live off the money you got on the dole, so that the only option was to start stealing. "I started supplementing my income. I was quite a good burglar - prolific." He is clearly proud of it. "I could actually get through a six-inch gap," he says, "which is what you'd have for a cat flap."

"But you got caught?" I say.

"But I didn't really care. I was a drifter and I'd always seen myself as being like a dinghy without a paddle. I didn't believe I had any control over my life: everything was preordained."

Hirst suggests he had some involvement with organised criminals in Leeds and Manchester. He mentions some violent activity at that time, but maintains he never used violence when it came to any of the robberies. There was arson, which led to a five-year prison sentence at Albany Prison on the outskirts of Newport. He puts the time he spent at Albany down as the beginning of a deep psychological disturbance. He speaks of being brutalised by prison officers and of a jungle mentality in prison, which shook him up like a bottle, he says, and it was just a matter of when the top would blow off. "If you put enough pressure on anybody, then eventually they will crack." He lights another cigarette and looks into the wall; the dog is by now sleeping soundly across his lap. "Good boy," he says.

Mrs Burton was called Bronia, but she liked it better when people called her Betty. By 1979, she was divorced from her husband and arthritic, and life in Normoor Road could be very lonely. Her daughter said she did not have a particularly untroubled life. "She wasn't easy to get on with, my mother," Nina Burton-Harris says. Partly to stem the boredom, Mrs Burton started taking in lodgers. She wasn't a natural landlady, but she couldn't make the stairs in her house any more and so it wasn't any burden to surrender her bedroom to the occasional paying individual.

John Hirst was on parole in May 1979, having served half of a two-year sentence for burglary. He had no address and stayed for a while with the Langley House Trust, but he wanted out of there and the probation service gave him Mrs Burton's name as someone who was known to take in lodgers. He moved into her house on June 12. Eleven days later, in the evening, Mrs Burton was watching a Judy Garland film on television when Hirst appeared in the sitting room to say he was going out. He says she then nagged him: he claims she didn't want him to go out.

It has to be said that Hirst has a slight tendency to pathologise his victim. "She'd had six or seven ex-offenders living there," he says, "and they couldn't bear her. She was unbearable. She stole our food. It was as though I was her carer, and I was so fragile it was unbelievable. I was like a walking time bomb. She claimed she had been in a concentration camp. She was trying to control my life and ... wanted to be waited on hand and foot. I had my own life to lead."

She asked him to put some coal on the fire. He went out, muttering under his breath, wishing she would leave him alone, and walked to the shed where the coal was kept. As he filled the bucket, he looked up and saw an axe hanging on the wall. He walked back to the house, and when he reached the kitchen he told himself not to be stupid, so he put down the axe.

"Then she started on me again," he says. When he came in from collecting the second load of coal, he picked it up again, switched on the kettle and went through to the sofa where Mrs Burton was lying. He hit her seven times. "I used the blunt end," he says matter-of-factly. As he speaks about it, Hirst lifts his cigarette tin to simulate the top of the axe and uses the ashtray in front of him to indicate Mrs Burton's head. "It could have been anyone," he says. "In the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Were you relieved?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says. "I put the kettle on. I've killed her. I've heard the kettle go click. I've gone back and carried on making the brew. Then I sat down to drink it and that's when I'm having a fag ... and that's the relief, the pressure's gone. I've looked down at my feet and thought of that line from Laurel and Hardy: that's another fine mess you've got yourself into. As I'm sat there, I'm thinking, well, I'll get a life sentence and maybe I can study for a degree or something."

I wonder if Hirst knows how callous he sounds. It is difficult to avoid seeking a connection between the coldness of his descriptions of what he did - "It was like swatting a fly that's buzzing around you" - and the question of whether he is truly reformed. Sitting in his living room, I begin to feel afraid of John Hirst. He would say such fears were stupid, because the stupidity of other people's doubts about him are self-evident to John Hirst, but something in him seems amoral and the self-control he often speaks of seems teetering in his case. When he stops talking about how he killed Mrs Burton, he stands up and returns to the kitchen. I look again at the CCTV showing the space outside and wonder if I could handle him.

"Fucking 'ell. Look at this," he shouts. I take a deep breath and pick up my notepad. As I enter the kitchen, I see that he is standing over by the sink, his hands and arms covered in red liquid. The red stuff stands in pools on the worktop and is running down the cupboards underneath. "No lids for these fucking jam jars," he says, and the pool of jam seems to glow redder. He looks up at me. "You'd think I'd killed the landlady in here," he says. I step backwards into the sitting room and, as I go, see a calendar on the wall, which has "Sign on" scribbled in pencil, and nothing else, two Mondays a fortnight apart.

Does prison really change people and serve the good of society? We have to believe that it does, and that in order to be civilised we have to invest as much in the idea of reform as in retribution. But on a gut level, people are frightened of those who have proved themselves capable of violence.

John Hirst did his time. In the end he did 25 years. But he is free now. He got educated, he appears to have put crime behind him, and he is making jam. He has also committed himself to an impressive workload of prison reform, taking the government to the European Court of Human Rights over issues such as voting rights for prisoners (they found in his favour) and the right of prisoners to have telephone conversations.

We look for remorse to be the guarantor of moral change and the stamp of decency. If an ex-offender is sorry enough, we may begin to think them normal. This may be a game, but it is nevertheless one that everyone expects violent criminals to play. Hirst was helpful all the way through the process of my writing this article, but it is quite striking to observe that my taped interview with Nina Burton-Harris reveals many pauses for tears, whereas Hirst's is filled with his own laughter.

When I ask Hirst about remorse, he looks at me as if I'd missed the point of him. "Remorse is a middle-class thing," he says. That's a good line, but it's not true: the people who call for criminals to rot in jail are readers of the Sun and people who might, on the basis of Hirst's behaviour that day in Hull, ask for him to be returned to jail until he learns how to speak with respect about his victim and her family. At one point I tell him it is very difficult for Mrs Burton's daughter to move on from such a thing. He lifts a Rizla packet from the table and rips it in two. "That's her mother," he says. "You can't put that back together."

He has a great deal to say about freedom and rights, and wishes Nina Burton-Harris would move on. "She thinks I'm free," he says. "My life sentence goes on until the day I die. But she is filled with assumptions about my life being all freedom and jollies. In a sense, your life sentence only begins the day you get out."

"But do you want to be forgiven by her?"

"Honestly, I don't give two fucks," he says. "That might sound callous, but it isn't. Her being in the court brought home to me what I'd done. Here's someone now before me who hasn't done anything, and I was feeling for the daughter, but all I could see was her anger and bitterness coming back. She probably wanted me to be hung, but it still wouldn't have brought her mother back ... I've satisfied retribution. I've satisfied deterrence. I owe society nothing now." He strokes the sleeping dog and looks at the pictures of his own front yard on the TV set. "Society owes me," he says.

"I did my sentence. It's not like I'm killing somebody now because there's no lids for the jam jars."

After weeks of wondering about John Hirst and Nina Burton-Harris, I called a lawyer named Humphrey Forrest. Forrest had worked with Hirst over many years, and his educated voice seemed to elucidate some of Hirst's views about himself and his predicament. "We met," he says, "when John was a prisoner in Hull. It came to my attention that he was being treated appallingly. One time he was disciplined for having cigarettes and placed in solitary confinement for 21 days. The warder had implied it was fine to give him the cigarettes, and as soon as we left John was punished. It was entrapment. An action for misfeasance in public office was later taken and the disciplinary was quashed. But he was treated appallingly because he challenged authority."

Forrest goes on to say that, in Hirst's case, the fact that he spent 25 years in prison rather than the 15 recommended by Justice Purchis at his trial was not because he continued to pose a threat to the public, but because he continued to buck the system. "He challenged authority by suing them, not by punching them in the face," he says, "and he was gravely punished for that. If he had knuckled under - as many of us advised him to do - he would have been out much earlier."

"But wait," I say. "He was violent in prison. He committed further offences."

But Forrest insists that Hirst did not commit 10 extra years' worth of offences. He was simply judged to be unfit to re-enter society because he "disrespected authority" by challenging the decisions they were making. "There came a point in prison [about the time he'd done 15 years], where he had a road-to-Damascus moment. He discovered the law, and he channelled his sense of frustration and his sense of justice into knowing the law."

"But does that mean he was no longer a threat to public safety?"

"He was no longer a physical risk to anyone - he hadn't attacked anyone for a long time. The circumstances that had led him to do what he did had totally changed. There was no evidence that would lead one to suspect he would ever commit such an offence again. Prison psychiatrists weren't saying he was dangerous: they were deducing dangerousness from the fact that he would not respect their authority."

I make the point to Forrest that Hirst seemed at times to show contempt for his victim and for her family. "He hasn't expressed this view to me, and I'd pull him up if he did," Forrest replies. "The fact about John is that he has a very literal view of justice: he did the crime and he served the time. He got 15 years and he did 25. He accepted what society said of him at the time and his position now is to say, 'Enough is enough'. He is probably wrong not to betray more sensitivity, but that does not in any sense mean that he is a risk to the community."

Bronia Burton, or Betty, is long gone from the house near Burleigh Common, and she will never know how her ending was both a gross culmination of anger in one person and the terrible beginning of pain in the lives of others. Her daughter and her killer will never meet, yet they are condemned to meet in their respective imaginations: the whole of England separates them, but they must always live with the thought of what happened in the house in Normoor Road. In the end, it was the house I kept coming back to. I thought of its quiet modern facade - the house at the centre of the evening. "Home is so sad," wrote that other one-time denizen of Hull, Philip Larkin.

It stays as it was left

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

Of anyone to please, it withers so,

Having no heart to put aside the theft.

A factory near Burghfield Common used to produce nuclear warheads, and now it is the great place for decommissioning them. The housing estate where Mrs Burton lived is not far from there, and is these days very quiet in the afternoon, the dogs walking without a sound on the pavement and the children at the end of the summer running out towards a stretch of grass as if the future means nothing to them. But there are new shoots in Mrs Burton's garden, and change is evident. "I dream of him sometimes and just wish he would disappear," Nina Burton-Harris had said. "At the end of the day, you just want to move on and live a decent life."

· Andrew O'Hagan's latest novel, Be Near Me, is published by Faber & Faber
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006

The Sunday Times November 19, 2006

Treasury cuts Reid jail plan
David Cracknell, Political Editor
GORDON BROWN has questioned key parts of John Reid’s new “get tough” prison sentencing plans, leaked cabinet letters have revealed.

In what may be seen as another demonstration of the rivalry over who takes the lead on crime and security, the chancellor is challenging the cost of the home secretary’s proposals.

According to an exchange of confidential letters, the Treasury has asked Reid to cut costs by using more suspended sentences, electronic tagging and bail for offenders rather than create more “inflationary” pressures on the beleaguered prison and probation services.

The tension between the camps has risen in recent weeks since Reid has publicly refused to rule out standing against Brown for the premiership. The home secretary was dismissive of Tony Blair’s “endorsement” of Brown as his successor last week, and Reid’s aides have claimed in recent weeks that the Treasury has blocked his plans to double the number of new prison places.

A new battle line has been drawn over Reid’s sentencing plans, due to be published within weeks.

Stephen Timms, Brown’s chief secretary to the Treasury, has written to the Home Office to suggest Reid’s plans will create “substantial new pressure” on the prison and probation services.

He points out that the home secretary’s proposals for extending supervision of persistent offenders could cost the equivalent of 450 extra prison places — adding tens of millions of pounds to taxpayers’ bills. Timms says he “could not agree” to such an expensive programme.

The Treasury minister also urges Reid to come up with more creative ways “to stabilise sentencing and manage the prison population” by using more suspended sentences, fines and community orders.

The clash is revealed in a letter sent to cabinet this month by John Prescott, who is seeking to broker a compromise.

In his letter, dated November 8, the deputy prime minister reveals a split high up in government over a review of sentencing that began in the summer.

The review was prompted after Reid clashed with senior judges in June, accusing them of handing out “unduly lenient” sentences, following the release of a convicted paedophile after just over five years. The Tories blamed the government, saying the judge was merely following the sentencing guidelines in Labour’s own Criminal Justice Act 2003.

Prescott makes clear that the row between the Treasury and Home Office could delay the publication by Reid of plans to toughen up sentencing.

In his letter, headlined “Sentencing consultation”, the deputy prime minister reveals the Treasury and other departments have written to express concerns about Reid’s proposals.

He wrote: “Stephen [Timms] expressed concern at the short deadline. He noted the proposals would create substantial new pressures on the prison and probation services.

“The proposal for extended periods of probation supervision for prolific offenders might require more than 450 additional prison places. He could not agree to the inclusion of this proposal, given the current pressures on custodial capacity and the probation service.”

Timms asked that, before Reid’s proposals are published, the Home Office would have to sign up to an “agreed plan” showing that the “national offender management service” would live within “planned capacity” — Treasury code for not running over budget.

Prescott added: “Further steps would be required to stabilise sentencing and manage the prison population. Stephen wanted the consultation to be used to address the increase in the use of suspended sentence orders as a substitute for low-level community orders . . . Stephen felt that [Reid] should consider what more ambitious steps could be taken to address the declining use of fines.”

Prescott’s letter, to Baroness Scotland, the Home Office minister, and circulated to the cabinet and prime minister, goes on to summarise the result of ministerial consultation on the subject: “You assured Stephen that you would continue to pursue measures to offset the impact of ensuring dangerous offenders are retained in custody, by working with sentencers to stop sentencing drift, addressing the increased use of suspended sentences, and continuing to encourage tagging on bail as an alternative to remand. Stephen has indicated that urgent work to take this forward was a condition of his agreement.”

Sources close to Brown blamed the leak on “rogue elements” trying to “destabilise” the succession.

The devilish advocate

The devilish advocate John Hirst taught himself law in jail, and has never lost a case against the prison service. Erwin James meets up again with the former 'lifer' who won inmates the right to vote

Wednesday October 12, 2005
The Guardian

It began as an act of "devilment", explains John Hirst, the 55-year-old former prisoner who last week defeated the government in the European Court of Human Rights on the issue of voting rights for convicted prisoners. I'm sharing a sofa with him in the cramped, untidy sitting room of the three-bedroom terraced house in Hull that he rents from a private landlord for £60 a week. He works casually, as a driver. His only company in the house is his dog, a lively labrador cross called Rocky - a "rescue dog" - that is clearly loathe to be out of his new owner's sight even for a moment.

"It was October 2000 and I'd been listening to the news in my cell when it came on that the Human Rights Act had been incorporated into UK law, he recalls. "I thought, 'Right!', and I went down the landing and spoke to a couple of other lifers. They were two grumpy old men who always sat at the same table during association, but I knew they had a little bit of legal knowledge. I said: 'Do you fancy setting up a union?' One said: 'They won't allow that.' I said: 'They can't stop us now, we've got the Human Rights Act.'"

In fact he ended up setting up an association, instead of a union, because, he explains, it sounded "less threatening". And here is the devilment. After searching through his library of law books, built up over the 20 years he had already spent inside, he discovered that anyone could set up an association in direct opposition to any other association that was already in existence. "It was obvious," he says, still tickled by the memory. "Prison officers had the Prison Officers' Association, the POA, so I thought, we'll have the AOP, the Association of Prisoners."

As is the way in prison, word got around fast, and soon the minimum of 10 members necessary to form an association had been recruited. After agreeing on a constitution, the members met in Hirst's cell to plan objectives. Somebody suggested pushing for better food. Somebody else proposed conjugal rights. But Hirst had a better idea. "It was when someone mentioned that we should try and lobby the House of Commons," he says. "I'd read about interest groups lobbying and pressuring politicians to change things, but I knew that, as prisoners, we weren't allowed to vote. It was obvious that politicians only take notice of people who do have the vote - that's why there's never been any real will in parliament to take prison reform seriously. I decided to find out why we weren't allowed to vote."

During his research, he read books on the British constitution and studied the suffragette movement. Eventually, he felt confident enough to mount a legal challenge to the government. It wasn't the first time that he had decided to take legal action to address his grievances in prison.

Hirst was sent to prison for life after being convicted of the manslaughter of his landlady, Bronia Burton, in 1979. She had asked Hirst to bring in some coal. Hirst felt he was being "nagged". He says this caused him to "snap" and attack Burton, hitting her several times on the head with the blunt end of an axe taken from the garden shed. After hearing all the evidence, the court found that he had acted with "diminished responsibility". He eventually received a tariff of 15 years, but served a total of 25 before being released in October last year. He believes his activities as a litigant against the Prison Service and Home Office are the main reason he had to serve the extra years.

Locked in solitary

Hirst proved to be the most prolific prisoner litigant of modern times - and, he says, like Perry Mason and Rumpole of the Bailey, he never lost a case against the Prison Service. He won the right of prisoners on segregation punishment to keep their beds in their cells during the day, and overturned the blanket ban on prisoners communicating with the media. He also, after he was kept locked in solitary for 28 days without a break, successfully sued a prison governor for "malfeasance in public office".

It took Hirst a while to settle into prison life. He quickly gained a reputation as a "difficult" prisoner who would stand up against the authorities if he felt that things were not as they should be. "I've always been someone who questions," he says.

There are clues in Hirst's early years that give some indication of the attitude he exhibited in prison. He was born in Hull in 1950. A year later, his mother gave birth to his brother, and soon afterwards his father left home. A year after that, unable to cope with the children, his mother handed him and his brother into the care of a Dr Barnardo's home in South Yorkshire. By the time he was seven, he and his brother were in their fourth foster parent placement and Hirst had a history of bed wetting and soiling. "We were all over the place," he says.

His bad behaviour caused the foster parents to send him back to the institution, but he would return intermittently for holidays. When he was 10, a primary school teacher described him as "vulnerable, easily hurt, good sense of humour, never bored or fed up, willing, with a nice social manner, very loving to animals". Yet by the time he was 13, his foster mother reported her concerns about Hirst's temperament. "John gets furious easily," she said, adding that she was "afraid of what he might do". Incidences of "pilfering" and general bad behaviour continued to be reported.

He left secondary school at 15, with no qualifications, and got a job as page boy in a city hotel. Two months later he was dismissed for "extreme impudence", after arguing about the sugar allocation for the porters. Afterwards, he embarked on a life of casual work and petty crime. "Building sites, burglary and car theft," he says. A series of prison terms, ranging from six months to five years, followed until he was 30, when he was sentenced to life. "The wetting and soiling never stopped until I went to prison," he says.

As a lifer, he was moved around the system regularly, and frequently spent periods in prison segregation units. In 1989, he attacked a prison officer. He says that on that day the officer had "offered out" (challenged to a fight) a number of prisoners. Hirst was working as a food- serving orderly, and one of the "perks" was extra milk for his cornflakes. The officer stopped the extra milk and, when Hirst argued, he says the officer offered him out. The ensuing violence left the officer in an intensive care unit for some days. Hirst was segregated immediately and later transferred to a special high security unit in Hull prison.

The unit was experimental, designed to hold at most a dozen prisoners marked down as being among the most difficult and dangerous in the system. Ironically, the unit provided prisoners with better treatment and conditions than would have been available to them otherwise.

Hirst began to read more. Stephen Shaw, now prisons ombudsman but then director of the Prison Reform Trust, visited the unit and gave Hirst a copy of a book published by the trust, Prison Rules: A Working Guide. Armed with the correct information, he successfully sued the prison governor for compensation regarding a quantity of his property that had disappeared during his earlier transfer. "The first law book I read was on administrative law," he says. "I opened it up on a chapter on power and the abuse of power. I thought: 'This is what prison is all about.' Suddenly, my brain seemed to kick into gear. I wanted more books. I had them sent in, or teachers would bring them for me. My brain was insatiable for knowledge of the law." So does he see himself as anti-authority. "Not at all," he says. "I'm just anti the abuse of authority."

As we talk, I am reminded of the time that I knew John Hirst when we were fellow prisoners on the same wing in a closed prison in 1994. I didn't know him well, but I knew of his formidable reputation for legal knowledge. Everybody on the wing knew where his cell was. He had a sign on his cell door: Prison Law Centre. Underneath, another sign proclaimed: Free Legal Advice. Every morning before breakfast he had a queue outside his cell waiting patiently to take advantage of his legal skills and his straining shelves of law books.

Legal eagle

Hirst did not discriminate. Even prison officers were known to open his door occasionally during "bang up" to ask for advice on problems affecting them inside or outside the prison, and the self-taught legal eagle was always happy to assist - although not all prison officials were impressed. A psychologist reported that he "showed no remorse for the people he had litigated against".

His first success in the property case marked the beginning of a preoccupation with the law and prison conditions that has left modern law books littered with dozens of references to his cases: Hirst v (numerous prison governors), Hirst v Secretary of State for the Home Department; and, in relation to last week's ECHR judgment, Hirst v UK.

When I get up to leave, the dog bounds into action, yelping and excited for some exercise. "Shut up, Rocky," Hirst says gently, stroking and hugging the animal. "Silly dog." I ask him about his plans for the future. "I'm going to keep on fighting," he says. Any regrets? "No," he says, and then thinks for a second and adds: "Well, just one. If I could go back to the night of the offence and change it, I would."

As quotes go, it does jump out of the page at you: "It's not like I'm killing someone now because there's no lids for my jam jars". It is an off the cuff remark, and at the same time I am making a self judgement of a continuing acceptable risk to the public. Not that I killed for that reason in the first place. True, there was an outburst captured by Andrew O'Hagan. I had let him into my personal space to conduct an interview for a piece he was writing for the Guardian Weekend magazine. It appeared in print on 18 November 2006, my 56th birthday, and I was informed of this by my friend Lucy sending me a text. I went out and bought a copy of the Guardian. Sometime later I went to Lucy's house to collect my birthday present, and she asked what I thought of the article. I said that I liked the photo, and that I had only scanned the article quickly and that I would need to read it a couple of more times before I was able to respond properly. I did add that initially I thought that it was less than flattering.

The subheading appears to be a mixture of two sides to the story, mine and the victim's daughter, and the writer being judgemental. Andrew O'Hagan appears to have used artistic licence to describe the area I live in as being decayed, I am not proud of the neighbourhood but I have seen worse. And he describes pushing my doorbell. This is fiction because I have a gothic looking doorknocker. He says he just knew that a dog would start barking as soon as he pressed the bell. He maybe psychic, if not observant, but as soon as he entered the gateway the sensor on the CCTV camera would detect his presence and a audible "beep!" would alert the dog if he had not already sensed the intruder and barked his warning to me. In my view, the writer has probably got his timing of the events confused in his mind because of his apprehension at meeting me.

It is not as though I have a sign above the door like that at Dartmoor Prison "Abandon all hope ye who enter here". He lived to tell the tale, for what it's worth. It is a well written article from an established author. It's not what I would have like to have seen, or written myself. But, it is realtively accurate and he is entitled to his opinion and I support the notion of freedom of expression. At least it wasn't a hatchet job like the gutter press are fond of doing on me. I had forgotten that the idea was to tackle the story from two different angles. I got confused with sentencing which is what Duncan Campbell wrote about. So, to be confronted with the victim's daughter again was uncomfortable. She is unforgiving and wants me dead. I cannot say that I blame her for holding these views. She wants to transfer some of the guilt she is feeling onto me, and I won't wear it. I did suggest in a Ch4 news programme, that she needed to move on. It is interesting to note that Andrew O'Hagan ends the article quoting her saying, "At the end of the day, you just want to move on and live a decent life". My sentiments exactly. This is what I had to do mentally, move on, and now I try to live a decent life with what time I have got left.

Yesterday, Tony Blair came out with the Queen's speech. I noticed that he failed to address the issue of his government's continued breach of prisoners human rights to vote. Given that Ireland has fulfilled its obligation to the Convention on this issue, there really is no excuse for Tony Blair failing to act. I am not happy about Tony Blair remaining in power if he does not support human rights. What makes it worse is that he introduced the Human Rights Act (1998), into domestic law. Clearly, Tony Blair is a law breaker. That makes him not fit for purpose, he should resign or be removed from office for setting a bad example.

IPRT welcomes introduction of prisoner voting legislation
Date: 18 October, 2006

On 5 October, the Electoral (Amendment) Bill 2006 reached second stage debate in the Dáil. When passed, this legislation will enable prisoners to vote in forthcoming elections by postal ballots.

The IPRT has been lobbying the Government and Opposition parties on the issue of prisoner voting rights since the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2004 that blanket bans on prisoner voting contravened the European Convention on Human Rights.

The IPRT welcomed the introduction of the Bill by Local Government Minister Dick Roche, and was pleased that it received all party support in the legislature.


Following the second stage debate, the Bill will go to committee. The IPRT was asked by the Government to provide a written submission on the proposed legislation in advance of the committee hearings. This submission was made in mid-October. In it, the IPRT welcomed the Bill, and made a number of technical proposals to modify aspects of the legislation with the goal of ensuring prisoners are best able to register and vote at election time.

The Government has stated that it hopes the Bill will become law before Christmas.

It is disappointing that this story from the Grauniad has not received more coverage in other newspapers and media outlets. It is a subject that should have the public going hopping mad, instead they go about their daily lives with their heads buried in the sand...

Prison whistleblower lifts lid on 'regime of torture'


· Violence at Wormwood Scrubs involved 160 staff
· Knowledge went higher than admitted, says report

Vikram Dodd
Monday November 13, 2006
The Guardian

More than 160 prison officers were involved in inflicting and covering up a regime of torture which saw savage beatings, death threats and sexual assault inflicted on inmates, a secret report reveals today.

The Guardian has learned full details of the Prison Service's reports on a nine-year reign of terror at Wormwood Scrubs in west London. Many incidents which the Prison Service had publicly refused to admit are acknowledged in the reports, which remained confidential until now. Some managers colluded in the abuse and turned a blind eye, says one report, which brands the terror as the worst case of prisoner abuse in modern history with 164 officers involved from 1992 to 2001.

Article continues
The author of one report, Peter Quinn, has decided to turn whistleblower and told the Guardian that there was a real possibility of inmates being assaulted today by officers who got away with their abuse. Mr Quinn's report, which was prepared in 2004, found more than 100 officers who had been involved in or turned a blind eye to the assaults still working in the Prison Service, with more than 50 still at Wormwood Scrubs. He said: "Because they have not been disciplined and because there's been no inquiry, those still remaining in the Prison Service may well feel they've got away with it and can assault prisoners again. Because there were no consequences they may feel invulnerable."

The documents and Mr Quinn's statements show knowledge of the abuse went much higher and involvement was more widespread than officially admitted. The reports were obtained under freedom of information requests and have fuelled demands for a full inquiry into the scandal, which the government has opposed.

Mr Quinn, a prison governor with 30 years' service, said he was shocked by what he found. The report described the assaults as "a prolonged period of staff brutality ... Often this approximated to torture, and was of greater gravity than in any British prison, at least over the past 40 years ... There has never before been such a concentration of sustained malpractice as illustrated in this review."

Blatantly falsified records were signed off by managers. Paperwork on the day of one assault shows the names of the staff on duty being recorded as officers "Nobody", "Officer Invisible, Non-existent and Absent". Mr Quinn's review concluded an inquiry should be held. But that decision was overturned by the then home secretary, David Blunkett, a position his successors have stuck to.

The Quinn report said: "A public or other official inquiry would be a manifestation of public accountability from which policy makers, senior managers and governors could learn."

Last week the current home secretary, John Reid, used Wormwood Scrubs as a backdrop for a speech announcing reforms in the probation service. The jail has improved since 2001, but other jails are still dogged by allegations of abuse. A report by the official prisons inspector, Anne Owers, in October found that one in eight inmates at Wandsworth jail claimed to have been assaulted or kicked by staff.

The prison was at the centre of a police investigation which began in 1998. Three officers were jailed for violence and 24 were cleared or had the cases against them dropped. The Prison Service dismissed six officers, including three cleared on appeal.

The Prison Service paid nearly £2m in compensation to settle claims for assault, with £2m spent in legal fees. One inmate was paid £100,000 after saying an officer raped him, which Mr Quinn says he believes. The Quinn report said disciplinary charges against officers could not be brought because of patchy or inaccurate record keeping, and because too much time had elapsed.

Solicitor Daniel Machover, whose dogged work secured the Prison Service reports, said: "A public inquiry would help the government to learn crucial lessons."

A Home Office statement said: "The government does not believe that there is a need for any further inquiry. The management of Wormwood Scrubs has vastly improved, the internal investigations were thorough and critical and the vast majority of the recommendations have been implemented."

Backstory

The review by Peter Quinn into allegations of assault at Wormwood Scrubs was ordered by ministers the day after the Guardian reported revelations about the prison in December 2003. The paper reported that after legal proceedings brought by inmates who had suffered at the hands of officers, the Prison Service had admitted 14 prisoners had been assaulted.

In one incident, an Irish inmate was choked as eight officers beat him, with one shouting for him to call him "English master". Others were left with broken bones; one was so terrified that he slashed his wrists. On several occasions officers psychologically tortured prisoners by threatening to hang them.

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, has displayed that he too is not fit for purpose and therefore should not become the Home Secretary. I refer to his comments that it has set a disastrous precedent for a party to settle out of court when faced with an indefensible case. This is not a disastrous precedent, it is a well established principle of English law that a party who has been injured can sue the offending party. It is common sense to pay up rather than incur extra costs trying to defend the indefensible.

What got David Davis's goat up was that the Home Secretary has abused prisoners over failing to allow them to have the treatment they were entitled to under the NHS. That is, methadone as a heroin substitute whilst they were weaned off drugs. The Home Secretary forced the prisoners to suffer cold turkey in an attempt to save money. The message from David Davis is clear, he wants the opportunity to abuse prisoners and not suffer any responsible accountability.

I am disappointed to read in prisonworks.org that I missed a challenge by John East to anybody to prove that prison doesn't work. Apparently, Alan Drew made a halfhearted attempt at accepting the challenge but then bottled out and joined the otherside. It takes two to tango, so I accept your challenge John East. There is no debate if only one side speaks up. I am reminded of the advice from publishers that authors should only write about what they know about. I don't believe that either John East or Alan Drew know what they are talking about. They take a positivist approach and begin with an assumption, this is followed by so-called argument which is supposed to support the assumption. However, if the critical approach is employed instead, which attacks the assumption, and the assumption falls, so does the so-called argument that follows. I believe that John East and Alan Drew have built a house of cards, and will set out to prove them wrong for using a foundation stone that is not supportive. When an author like Jack Higgins wrote The Eagle Has Landed, he craftily wove fact and fiction together and leaves the reader wondering how much of the yarn is true. It becomes all the more believable if the blend is just right, I suspect that this is what John East and Alan Drew have done. So, it a question of separating the chaff from the wheat. Or, as I call it, getting the shovel out to plough through the bullshit.

TV Licensing abandons case against unlicensed TV owner

OUT-LAW News, 10/11/2006

A former prisoner at the forefront of prison law advocacy has overturned a TV licensing conviction on appeal. John Hirst said that he used his television only for watching videos, DVDs and CCTV footage of his own house but was found 'technically guilty'.

Hirst, who tells this week's OUT-LAW Radio about the case, represented himself at Hull Magistrates' Court despite suffering from Asperger Syndrome, a form of autism. Again representing himself, he won his case on appeal to the Hull Crown Court when the TV Licensing Authority decided not to defend the case.

Hirst claimed that the interview on which his conviction was based was improperly carried out when representatives of TV Licensing visited his home. An unusual verdict at the Magistrates' Court found him 'technically guilty' but gave him a complete discharge.

Hirst said that he thinks that is because the court believed him that he did not view television broadcasts on his set. "That was when I knew they believed I was telling the truth," he said.

Despite the fact that Hirst was discharged, he took the appeal on a point of principle. "The TV Licencing Authority assume if you say that you don't watch your TV for live broadcasts you're a liar," Hirst told OUT-LAW Radio. "It's still down to the prosecution to prove guilt, not for the assumption to be there that you are guilty and you need to prove innocence."

"As far as I am concerned there is nothing such as 'technically guilty' in English law, you are either innocent or you are guilty," he said.

Hirst is an expert in prison reform. Convicted for manslaughter in 1979 he was a violent prisoner who was moved from prison to prison. In the late 1980s he applied for an experimental educational programme and learned that prisoners had the right to air their grievances through official channels that he said prisoners were never told about.

Diverting his energy to legitimate protest he successfully used the Human Rights Act to challenge the governments' attempts to ban prisoners from speaking to the media and in 2000 formed the first prisoners' representative group, the Association of Prisoners.

Hirst believes that if more prisoners knew about their legal rights they would not have to conduct riots to voice their objections to their treatment. "I realised that I could now start complaining and receiving responses to complaints rather than start throwing the desk around and being violent," he said.

It was a sense of injustice that led him to take his TV licence case as far as he did. "It began with a whole lot of letters that came, each letter got more and more threatening as it went along," he said. "It was a whole lot of assumptions that I was doing something wrong."

"I have admitted to offences as sever as manslaughter and arson, so I'm not going to lie on something as piddling as a TV Licence," he said. "They got that wrong, they picked on the wrong person."

When contacted, the TV Licensing Authority did not say why they did not defend the Crown Court appeal.

See: OUT-LAW Radio

"Judges given more sentencing powers", claims the Guardian headline in an article by Matt Weaver, 9 November 2006. This is contradicted by the first paragraph which begins, "Judges are to get powers...". It annoys me that the Guardian has sunk to the gutter level of the Sun in its attention grabbing headlines. It does not appear to matter that the headline is not true. Whatever happened to integrity in journalism?

This is another attempt by the home secretary John Reid to restore public confidence in the Criminal Justice System. In my view, public confidence is gained by seeing a system that works and not seeing a system that is continually failing. These so-called new measures have been tried before. It is rather like trying to stick a soggy plaster on the hole in the Titanic.

Why is John Reid looking towards the American system to bring their ideas over here when they have failed over there? If it is success he is looking for, he only has to look as far as the Netherlands where they have a Criminal Justice System that works.

To be continued...

The Parole Board annual report 2005-06 appears at first glance to be a public relations exercise. In its statement of purpose the Parole Board claims that it is an independent body, and claims that it protects the public. In my view, neither of these claims are true. The Parole Board has a duty to protect the public, and a duty to release prisoners eligible for parole. It is a balancing exercise, the scales of justice. The problem is that when there is an imbalance on one side or another, either the public or the prisoner suffers an injustice. In my view, this is unacceptable. The problem is that the Parole Board makes a risk assessment. In my view, the risk assessment procedure is flawed. This means that the Parole Board may release a prisoner who poses an unacceptable risk to the public, or it may mean that the Parole Board does not direct the release of a prisoner who poses an acceptable risk to the public, or it may mean that the Parole Board recommends the recall of a released prisoner unjustifiably, or fails to recommend recall of a prisoner when it should.

I call for the resignation of the author of the following letter, aswell as the resignation of the person to whom it is addressed:





I burst out laughing when I read the words at the foot of the letter, "Protecting the public and contributing to the rehabilitation of prisoners", particularly at the claim to be contributing to the rehabilitation of prisoners. Twice recently on 18doughtystreet.com the question was raised what happened to the idea of rehabilitation of prisoners. The view expressed on the programme was that it had been forgotten about. In my view, it does appear to have been shoved into the bottom drawer of prison politics. The letter is evidence of the Parole Board's lack of independence. John Reid knee-jerks to the Sun headlines and editorials, and pulls the strings of the Parole Board so that it toes the Home Office line. In my view, the Parole Board needs to be the subject of close public scrutiny. Only then will it improve public protection of those serving sentences and the public at large. It is often forgotten that prisoners are a section of the public. I doubt that the public inside has confidence in the system. Prisoners rightly expect justice and are denied it by the Parole Board. The system is not only in need of top down reform but also reform from the bottom up. In my view, as it presently stands, the Parole Board is an unnacceptable risk to the public. Crystal ball gazing is no way to assess whether a prisoner is a risk to the public. This is nothing less than thought crime. The George Orwell 1984 template is not fit for purpose in 2006 going on 2007. Wisen up!

We believe that Saddam Hussein should not be hanged. You may leave your vote here...

The so-called independent judicial body known as the Parole Board is guilty of violating the human rights of prisoners. This kangaroo Court sits behind closed doors, in secret, and fails to treat the cases before them on a case by case basis. The Parole Board is wrong to take into account the rabid headlines and editorials of the Sun in its deliberations. Now prisoners who should have been released are added to the overcrowded prison population. The Parole Board labours under the mistaken belief that its knee-jerk response to a couple of high profile cases in the media is somehow serving the public interests. However, these couple of cases have nothing whatsoever to do with the Parole Board's duty to release prisoners on parole. There is no way that every prisoner who is released is not going to reoffend. The odds are that some will reoffend. The vast majority of lifers do not reoffend. They are a safe bet for release. And yet, the Parole Board has cut the number being released by half. This cannot be justified. It is arguable that the Parole Board is subjecting prisoners to periods of unlawful imprisonment.

My personal view is that the TV Licence fee should be scrapped. In this day and age, the BBC can no longer claim a monopoly over what is broadcasted. Therefore, it is time that the people are relieved of having to pay this TV tax. I remember back in the mid 1950s that our family were one of the first in the village to own a 14 inch black and white television set. I was too young to know and understand about the TV Licence fee. Programmes only came on for so many hours each day and ended the night playing the National Anthem. One of my lasting memories is that of Dixon of Dock Green, where the crime was committed and the criminal was brought to justice all within half an hour.

In prison I set up the Prison Law Advice Centre in my cell, and one morning a fellow inmate sought my advice in relation to a prison disciplinary offence he had been charged with, namely being in unauthorised possession of a TV in his cell. On the face of it, it first appeared that he did not have a leg to stand on. However, the more I listened to his story there emerged what appeared to be a legal loophole. I informed the inmate that the question the defence must ask the adjudicator to decide is, when is a TV not a TV? I was reminded of this case recently when I received a summons to appear before the magistrate's court for alleged non-payment of the TV Licence fee.

I had received numerous threatening letters demanding that I pay a TV Licence fee or else! I ignored the letters, so one day I received a visit from two Enforcement Officers. They asked me some questions, cautioned me, then asked me some more questions and left. The visit only lasted 5 minutes. My appearance before the magistrates lasted longer, and they decided that I was technically guilty and awarded me a absolute discharge. Had I been guilty, I could not have complained at the lenient sentence. However, I still believed that I was innocent of the charge and lodged my appeal against conviction to the Crown Court. I received notice that the appeal would be heard on 2 November 2006, at 10.30 am. Yet, on the court list beneath my case reference it stated "Respondents attendance excused". I telephoned the court to enquire whether I needed to attend, I was assured that I still needed to attend. The judge apologised for my inconvenience and waste of time, and informed me that my appeal was not contested and therefore would be allowed and he wished me well and said go and live in peace.

The inmate's computer was missing the piece of equipment which would enable it to receive live broadcasts therefore it was incapable of receiving live broadcasts and was not a reciever under the Communications Act. He was found not guilty of the charge. By the same token, my TV is used as a CCTV monitor, for viewing DVDs and pre-recorded video tapes. There is no ariel attached and the TV is not capable of receiving live broadcasts. The magistrates had been confused by the prosecution hoodwinking them, and they had misconstrued the terms receiver, possession and installation under the relevant statute. It is not for us to prove our innocence but for them to prove our guilt. I wonder how many people are unnecessarily paying the £130.50 TV Licence fee?

The case for prisoners votes in a legal sense is HIRST v UNITED KINGDOM (No2), application No. 74025/01, judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg, 6 October 2005. Despite this legal decision, the case for winning the hearts and minds of the public and politicians in this matter has not been won. Under EU law, the government is under an obligation to implement the decision of the ECtHR. And, the Committee of Ministers supervises the execution of judgments of the ECtHR. However, the government over the years has adopted a policy of minimum compliance with the ECtHR decisions. Disturbingly, the Joint Committee On Human Rights - 19th Report, shows that the UK has so far failed to implement the decisions in 50 cases in which violations of human rights against the UK have not been remedied. This is not even minimum compliance. This is non-compliance on a large scale.

It is disappointing to still hear and read the views why prisoners should not have the vote after these views were aired by the government in its submission to the Court and the Court rejected these views as being incompatible with human rights. Its a bit like Ground Hog Day all over again and again and again. Iain Dale accused Shami Chakrabarti on Vox Politix on 18doughtystreet.com of going around in circles on this subject. However, she was trying to move the subject forward and it was Iain Dale with his entrenched views that kept him going around in circles. Whilst Shami was right in stating that if the franchise is to be taken away from prisoners it needs to be justified, Iain was wrong to keep airing his views based on fear, ignorance and prejudice as though these amounted to the necessary justification needed.

Iain Dale's Victorian mentality dates back to the Forfeiture Act 1870. This introduced the notion of "civic death", that is, that convicted felons are deprived of citizenship upon receiving a custodial sentence and therefore are denied the franchise. However, the common man in the street had not been given the franchise at this time so it is difficult to see how something can be taken away that has not been given in the first place! I am attempting to discover the reasoning behind Parliament passing the Forfeiture Act 1870. Meanwhile, prison case-law since 1979 recognises that prisoners have rights of the citizen, and that prisoners are a section of the public. Therefore, it would appear that the notion of "civic death" and prisoners being denied citizenship upon entering prison is now a thing of the past and should be left there. This is because the ECtHR accepts that the right to vote is not a privilege. In the 21st century, the presumption in a democratic State must be in favour of inclusion. Universal suffrage has become the basic principle.

Yesterday I went along to the Social Services to see the person who is supposedly looking into my complaint against an employee of the Social Services. She ended up talking about whether I would agree to being assessed by the Social Services to see if I was a risk to a 13 year old girl. I have no problem with being assessed, however, given that the girl was initially being the subject of racial bullying at school, I am somewhat surprised that the whole thing has turned about and that I am now a suspect.

Apparently, alarm bells started to ring when a letter I typed on behalf and signed by the mother was delivered to the school. They took exception to the term legal guardian. In hindsight, this would appear not to be the proper term to use when looking after a child in the absence of the parent. What is the proper term I have not got a clue. In any event, the girl was suffering from toothache and was crying and wanted to leave school but the school would not let her leave. She was unable to contact her mother on the phone at work, so she phoned her friend, who is also a friend of mine, and as we were not far from the school we rushed to the girl's assistance. It was to no avail, as the school would not release the girl into our custody without her mother's consent.

I do not criticise the school for having a security policy in this respect. But, the girl was in pain and in distress, and she had known this friend for many years in Latvia before coming to live in England. We sat helplessly in the school's reception area for an hour and a half before being allowed to see the headmaster. As my friend only speaks a few words of English, she has asked me to act as her interpreter even though I only speak a few words of Latvian. I complained about the lack of help we were able to give the girl in this situation, and mentioned that we were concerned about the racial bullying that the girl was suffering from English pupils during classes. I mentioned that when the girl had complained to one of the teacher's, and the teacher had responded that it was not her problem, I said I disagreed and that it was not just the teacher's responsibility but also the school's to deal with the issue.

Eventually, the girl was able to contact her mother on the phone and her mother said it was alright for us to take the girl out of school. The headmaster suggested that to save a problem in the future, the mother should write a letter to the school authorising us to take out the girl in the mother's absence. When the school received the letter they referred it to the Social Services. I received a visit from the Social Services and the police. I was asked whether I knew the family, and when I responded with an affirmative I was asked if I knew the 13 year old and what my connection to the family is. I replied that I am a family friend. I was then advised not to be alone with the girl. When I asked why, and said that I am not a paedophile I did not receive an answer.

The Social Services visited the family and informed the mother that I was not to be allowed to be alone with the girl. This had the effect of planting a seed of mistrust in the mother's mind whereas before this she had grown to trust me over a period of time. I asked the mother if she understood everything that the man from the Social Services told her, and she replied only 50/50. I submitted a complaint based upon the issuing of advice without justification in relation to my being a risk to the girl, and that the Social Services had visited the mother without taking a interpreter along to overcome the language barrier. The impression I was left with after the meeting to discuss my complaint, is that the complaint has been pushed to the sidelines as the Social Services wish to carry out an assessment of me to determine if I am a risk to the child.

I have a criminal record for violence committed over 25 years ago. It was not a sexual assault nor was the victim a young girl. I am puzzled by the missing link between this offence and the Social Services present concern. I get the feeling that neither the school nor the Social Services are being as open as I think they should be on withholding information in this matter. I cannot address the "charges" if they keep them secret from me. This whole thing has something of the Kafkaesque about it.