Baby P, Baby D and Baby B: Do the ‘governor’s eyebrows’ hold the key?

In the wake of Haringey’s Baby P scandal, social workers were heavily criticised en mass and those directly involved with the child’s case were vilified. Nobody could understand why action wasn’t taken, especially when another baby, named in the press as Baby B, was taken from his family immediately following suspicions of foul play.

It was a false alarm, baby B’s parents were entirely innocent, yet all three of their children were taken from them. At the end of last year the couple hadn’t seen their children for four years.

Neither case shows social workers at their best, for opposite reasons.

Another alphabet baby, Baby D, was taken from its mother last week, the Observer reported. This time the baby was taken moments after being born, without the mother being told. Social workers interfering again? Well, the mother had given birth in prison where she was serving a sentence for threatening her small daughter with a knife. Probably for the best then… (Although, I’d be interested to hear any arguments to the contrary?).

The point is that, unlike the cases of Baby P and Baby B – where social workers were paralysed and governed by box-ticking – in the case of Baby D, sensible discretion seems to have been shown. Matthew Parris, in his recent Times column, likened this sensible discretion to the judgement based approach of the ‘Governor’s Eyebrow’. Parris writes:

The judgment-based approach is what is meant by the Governor’s eyebrow. At the Bank of England the Governor had the power to raise an eyebrow at a financial practice, murmur that he didn’t care for it, and wave it away without explanation. You could call it the “doesn’t look kosher” rule or the “this stinks” method of adjudication. Parents have their own version in responding to children who keep demanding reasons: “Because”.

[The Tories’ policy chief Oliver Letwin] attacked rule-based regulation. He argued that Haringey social workers had paid too much attention to box-ticking and too little to making their own personal judgment on a vulnerable toddler. Somebody should just have stood back, thought about it, taken a deep breath, and ordered the child to be taken from his mother. Why? Because.

Damned if they do and damned if they don’t, we must be careful not to dissuade people from joining the social care profession. But, slaves to box-ticking, perhaps social workers should be released from the shackles of bureaucracy, to act with a quizzical eyebrow of common sense – an attribute which they should possess in abundance.

Death Penalty Numbers Rise as Support Falls: Where does Libby Purves stand on it?

New reports reveal that, although there has been a trend against the death penalty in recent years, more executions than ever were carried out last year.

Personally, I’m strongly against the death penalty, no matter the case. Not because there aren’t, on occasion, people who appear to deserve it, and not because, on occasion, the ‘eye for an eye’ argument doesn’t seem the most effective form of justice, but because no government can promote a strong moral code in society while administering state approved murder.

For that reason, while I understand Libby Purves’ reaction to Josef Fritzl – she declares resolutely that Fritzl represents the ‘death of hope’ and makes even her, a left-leaning journalist, rethink the death penalty – I’m disappointed that she tells us nothing new. Her point is that some crimes leave even a liberal-minded person utterly despairing. But so what? We all know that. We all feel that.

So I prefer the views of Richard Davies and the rest of the psychotherapists at London’s Portman clinic. They treat some of the country’s most unpleasant characters: rapists, paedophiles and serial sex offenders. While going through old magazines I came across an article in the Observer magazine about the Portman clinic. Their views, which I applaud above Purves’ (totally understandable) emotion, make me think. And, unlike Purves’ hopeless sentiments, give me some hope. An extract from Simon Garfield’s article reads:

Davies and his colleagues believe that a sense of futility only arises from the belief that there is no solution to the unpalatable extremes in our lives. A scientific understanding does not imply sympathy or forgiving, but it may have advantages beyond mere punishment and retribution. It is a biblical conclusion, and a civilised one, and it may be the only way we can salve a troubled soul, both the patient’s and our own.

‘Josef Fritzl Musical’. No, really. Thin line between comedy and tragedy? Or something more sinister?

From Myra Hindley paintings, to serial killer fancy dress and Fred and Rose holiday reading – gruesome crimes disgust and fascinate, in almost equal measures. Confronting something so hideous, and so far outside the parameters of our own lives, allows us to experience extreme reactions from a safe distance. Or something like that.

But, some of us always go one step further. Some bright spark has made a claymation video of Josef Fritzl ‘the musical’. No, really. Set to the music ‘Under the Sea’ from the Little Mermaid, replaced with the words ‘Under the Floor’… No, really. That ‘thin line between comedy and tragedy’ is being well and truly capitalised on in the wake of the Fritzl frenzy. But does turning Fritzl, and other notorious deviants, into jokes or cartoon villains mean, over time, we’ll lose sight of the realities of their crimes? Surely not, but are we really ready to laugh at Fritzl the musical?

I’ll let you judge for yourselves. If you can bear to watch it, click here. It is, obviously, very tasteless so those of a sensitive nature, you have been warned.

Locked Up Potential: Former minister and prisoner Jonathan Aitken publishes new report on prison reform

MP leaves HMP. Image courtesy: dailymail.co.uk

Ex tory minister Jonathan Aitken, who spent seven months in Belmarsh for perjury, has written a new report on prison reform. The report was published today by the think tank the Centre for Social Justice. Among its suggested reforms are:

Reduction of the period for which ex-offenders are required to disclose (minor) criminal records to future employers, support for early-release schemes and bonuses for prison governors and probation officers who reduce reoffending.

Aitken told the Observer his experiences of prison have changed his views on the system and penal reform. He said:

“I wasn’t quite ‘lock them up and throw away the key’, but I was in that band. I’m bang to rights: I plead guilty to not being thoughtful enough.”

The Observer reported yesterday that he dismissed claims that prisons were too soft, saying that the real punishment was deprivation of liberty, not harsh conditions.

Click here for an article by Erwin James, ex-prisoner turned journalist who met Aitken to discuss the report.

Stranger in Danger: Would you step in to save a stranger?

Image: Niko Art

A recent report revealed that British people are the least likely of all Europeans to step in if we witness a stranger being attacked. An article published in the Independent this weekend, along these very lines, parallels a story I heard at lunch today.

Last night, a friend of mine had a nasty encounter on the tube. A (clearly ‘disturbed’) young man threatened to do all manner of hideous things to her, infront of a carriage full of commuters, before snatching her bag and throwing it around the carriage. Her crime? She boarded a tube and sat down on a seat.

Far from helping her, two girls began going through her bag and stealing things while the other passengers pretended the floor had suddenly become fascinating. Only when the man threatened to ‘slam her head on the ground and rape her infront of everyone’ did another man suggest he should ‘calm down’. He was given a torrent of abuse too which, perhaps understandably, silenced him. After all, is it worth being a hero, for a stranger, if it might cost you your life? (The guy could’ve had a knife, a gun or a killer right-hook).

My friend was able to get off, unharmed, at the at the next stop but was pretty shaken up. Over lunch today a group (male and female) of us discussed it and the general consensus was: ‘I might be willing to take a beating defending a stranger but what if the attacker had a weapon?’. And that seemed to be a more legitimate concern now than 5 or 10 years ago. (Or is that just media scaremongering?) We all hoped we’d have had the balls to step in. But we probably also hoped we’d never be tested on it.

An extract from the Indy’s article reads:

Three-quarters of Britons – as opposed to 45 per cent of French or Germans – think it’s the responsibility of the police and courts to confront anti-social behaviour. The idea that intervention is an individual’s responsibility seems to be falling away in the UK.

A Cutting Edge doc focuses on these issues very soon: ‘Cutting Edge: Would you save a stranger?’, April 2nd, C4, 9pm

Here’s a little video I made on the subject: 3 men, 3 women, all asked if they would step in to help a stranger in need. Most reflect the consensus at lunch. What we like to think we’d do may not be what would happen in real time, but we’d like to think it would…

Pimlico Opera Update

Following a run of West Side Story at Wandsworth prison, governor Ian Mulholland has agreed Pimlico Opera will stage another performance at the prison next year. This is great news, especially after Jack Straw ran screaming from the tabloid press and cancelled a well-established arts programme at Whitemoor prison earlier this year. But it’s still such a small step on the road.

Pimlico Opera's production at HMP Wandsworth was a success. Image courtesy http://www.grangeparkopera.co.uk

Not only will the redtops and the comment is free community start moaning and making flippant remarks about jazz hands, but, Mulholland’s valiant decision still only means seven weeks of Pimlico Opera a year, for only twenty prisoners. It’s prohibitively expensive, completely funded by charitable donations, and for obvious reasons there are limits on how and where they can advertise. I feel qualified to respond to critics – and there are many – having actually seen the performance. I also know that those who blast the project, or others like it, can’t have seen the performance at HMP Wandsworth.

I Smell A Rat: Why Violent Video Games Didn’t Cause Columbine or Albertville shootings

Following the Columbine massacre, much was made in the press of the fact that Eric Harris, one of the teenage gunmen, was an avid fan of a violent computer game, Doom. Out came the hockey moms united, with their pickets, to blame the video games, Marilyn Manson, the devil, so on. And out came the ‘gamers’ with accusations of ‘middle-class paranoia’ and poor parenting.

As it turns out, most of the kids involved in America’s tragic school shootings seem to have been ‘gamers’, known in the online gaming community, but sadly isolated in their schools and social lives. I’m sure they all had other things in common too – find me a teenage boy who isn’t interested in video games – but can video games be blamed? Was the power of the joystick so heady that they lost sight of the line between reality and fiction? It’s a question America has asked itself a lot. But I hope not more than say, um, their gun law policies?

Anyway. I’m not a great fan of video games, violent or otherwise, but I can see why people are. So this line of questioning – as regards the ills and failings of our society – has come up again with the news that Tim Kretschmer was also a user of the video game. I don’t really know what I think so I’m going to direct you to this (not so expert) podcast I made, of an interview with games designer James Hughes. He is, as you might imagine, not playing the blame game. But he is playing something equally fun, called Hitman, a ‘stealth’ game apparently. I’ll let him explain.

Here is an argument I’ve reproduced from Daniel Finkelstein, of the Times, who reproduced it from Jonah Lehrer’s new book, How We Decide. It’s about rats, and psychopaths (John Wayne Gacy). But there is an important point too. Finkelstein writes:

When Gacy was a young boy he was entirely unremarkable. Save for one thing. He liked to capture mice and rats in a wire trap. Then he would dissect them while they were still alive. He was oblivious to their agony. Years later Gacy was living a perfectly normal life. Or at least he seemed to be. He became a successful building contractor and he liked holding barbeques for the neighbours. His wife, however, couldn’t help noticing a strange smell from under the floorboards. And nothing Gacy did – lime, concrete, whatever, would make the smell go away. Hardly surprising. By that point he had buried more than 30 boys in shallow graves underneath his property.

[Lehrer’s] point was that we could see Gacy’s future in his lack of emotion when dissecting the rats. Anybody arguing that Gacy’s violent behaviour with rats caused him to be a murder, would appear ridiculous. Obviously the same brain dysfunction caused both torture of rats and torture of boys.

Now what about Tim Kretschmer? After his shooting spree, his local paper naturally asks “Warum?” (Why).
And in the reports we get this: “He was completely unremarkable, there was nothing in his background to suggest this could have happened,” Mr Rech said. Fellow students described him as “quiet” and “reserved,” although it appears that he had recently spent increasing amounts of time before a computer playing a shoot-em-up video game called Counter Strike. There have been quite a few mentions of this violent computer game this morning.

Naturally, however, Kretschmer’s game is no more responsible for his acts than Gacy’s rats. Game addiction is a symptom of something wrong and not a cause.

And, of course, the same can be applied to Columbine, summed up by Tim Buckley, a webcomic artist in a 2005 interview with GameCore magazine:

“I think that if someone plays a video game, and then goes out and harms another human being, or themselves because of what they just saw in the video game, they were screwed up in the head long before they got their hands on a controller.”

Charles Bronson on Film

Tom Hardy as Britain's most notorious prisoner image: filmofilia.com

So Charles Bronson is Britain’s most notorious prisoner eh? So says the film that’s just been made about his life. I know who he is. But then I’ve always been interested in crime and its characters. When I’ve mentioned him to other people they’ve often never heard of him. No he’s not the actor, no he’s not the serial killer. Perhaps not so notorious then… And it must be said, although I’d heard of him I couldn’t tell you what he’d done or why he was in prison. I assumed he’d killed, raped, pillaged. I was amazed to learn he’s never killed, raped or pillaged. But Bronson, 56, clearly enjoys the notoriety, real or imagined.

Actually, Bronson was imprisoned for seven years for a robbery where he came away with a paltry £26. He has been in prison for 34 years because of crimes committed inside. Crimes like assaulting prison guards, taking hostages and staging protests. The film chronicles these prison years.

Some people are furious that a film has been made about the ‘notorious’ prisoner. They say it will serve only to make him more notorious, and to glamourize violence. Nothing new there then. Others think his treatment in prison highlights the failings of our prison system. Others think his life makes perfect film fodder. I saw the film last week and – not just because of the very annoying man who coughed every, I kid you not, two minutes (huge, spluttering, seizure-like maniac coughs) – didn’t enjoy it very much.

Yes it was violent, yes it was morally ambiguous, but mainly it just wasn’t very good. Danish director, Nicholas Winding Refn’s film doesn’t glamourize crime or violence any more than a Bond film: in fact it paints Bronson as a two-dimensional basket case rather than an antihero. Its failing is its all-too-evident ambition to be a heavily stylised cult biopic. Nothing really happened. In stylising the film so self-consciously, dramatic pauses and brooding shots stilted the natural flow of the story.

The Times’ Cosmo Landesman falls for what Peter Bradshaw describes as the film’s ‘geezer-porn’ appeal. Landesman writes:

Shocking, surreal, brutal and beautiful, Refn’s film ignores the man and lays bare Bronson the myth.

But that’s the problem. In trying to build on popular mythology, Bronson gives us what we could so easily find in a quick google search: the myth, but not what could be most interesting: the man. What Bronson does is not to glamourize, but to trivialise a story which biographically and socially is good. There is a story to be told about Charlie Bronson – why he has spent 30 of his 34 years in solitary confinement, why he has been non-violent for the last nine years yet is still not eligible for parole, for example – but Bronson doesn’t tell it. Instead Bronson himself is drawn as a caricature and scene after scene of him (played, it must be said, superbly by Tom Hardy) naked, punching and bleeding are strung together by scenes of him naked, punching and bleeding.

In not even attempting to treat the various questions the film throws up, Bronson appears futile and leaves itself wide open to criticism.

For someone who does try to answer a few questions click here.

German High School Shooting a Month Before Columbine 10 Year Anniversary: 3 Teenage Gunman, 30 People Dead, O Lessons Learnt

The infamous Columbine Massacre started in the school's cafeteria image courtesy reviewjournal.com

A teenage gunman has opened fire in Germany, just over a month before the 10 year anniversary of the Columbine massacre.

On April 20 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into the cafeteria of Columbine High School, Colorado armed with grenades, home made bombs and firearms. They killed 12 people and wounded 23 more. Like the teenage killer in Germany yesterday, Harris and Klebold left written and internet records of their intent and possible motivations – bullying, isolation, egotistical desire for world wide notoriety (and presumably varying degrees of mental instability). An interesting article in Slate magazine discusses other theories.

Germany’s newest mass murderer, Tim Kretschmer, has been described by those who knew him as “a normal boy” but is further proof – as if more was needed – that teenage angst + undiagnosed ‘issues’ + slack gun laws = a lethal combination. A boy like Kretschmer, without access to guns, may still pose a danger to himself, and maybe even a few others, but is unlikely to ever be able to commit homicide on such a scale.

In 2002 a similar massacre in Germany left 17 people dead and the country tightening up its gun laws. But 17 year old Kretschmer managed to gun down 15 people, using guns from his father’s extensive and legally owned collection. The 15 people Kretschmer killed included nine schoolchildren.

The history of high school shootings are, in the main, dominated by the same narratives: a teenage loner in the pangs of miserable adolescence strugges through his grief and hormones until he obtains a readily available firearm and bang, his problems are solved. But those of his victim’s families’ are just beginning. The cyclical shame of murderous gun laws continues.

For the disturbing history of High School Shootings click here

For the flipside – I wouldn’t want to be accused of bias now – an article in Vice this month profiled these people.

The Michigan militia believe in their right to bear arms.

They say:

A well-armed citizenry is the best form of Homeland Security and can better deter crime, invasion, terrorism, and tyranny. The intention of this website is to inform, promote and facilitate the development and training of the militia. Everyone is welcome, regardless of race, creed, color, religion or political affiliation, provided you do not wish to bring harm to our country or people. If you are a United States citizen (or have declared your intent to become such), who is capable of bearing arms, or supports the right to do so, then you ARE the militia…”

Images courtesy Vice magazine and Michigan Militia

The Madness of Michael Shields: Innocent Liverpool fan still in prison?

As Liverpool prepare to take on Real Madrid at Anfield there is one loyal fan who won’t be in the kop tonight: Michael Shields. Michael’s name, for Liverpool fans and residents at least, is now synonomous with an extraordinary miscarriage of justice. Jack Straw and Merseyside Police are still thrashing it out and it’s already cost the 22 year old the last four years of his life.

Wrongfully convicted of murder, Michael Shields waits, and waits

On the 30th May 2005, following Liverpool’s Champion’s League win in Bulgaria, Bulgarian citizen Martin Georgiev was violently attacked (with a slab of paving stone) in the seaside resort of Golden Sands.

Shields, a life-long Liverpool fan, was in Bulgaria with friends to support Liverpool’s campaign. After groups of drunken fans ran riot after the match, barman Georgiev came out to investigate and was subsequently attacked. He suffered multiple injuries but survived and recovered. Shields was later arrested at his hotel, where large groups of Liverpool fans were staying, although he says he was not even present during the attack. Two other fans were also arrested, but were later cleared of attempted murder.

Shields was tried in Bulgaria and convicted, despite no evidence being found. His conviction was purely on the basis of witness identification. (In a line-up which he and his lawyers have argued was biased and flawed). He was sentenced to 15 years, later reduced to 10, and served a year and a half in a Bulgarian prison.

Shields has now been moved to England, after numerous appeals and reviews. Jack Straw has been asked to release Shields and grant him a pardon after Graham Sankey, a Liverpool fan who was arrested at the time but has no connection whatsoever to Shields, confessed to the crime in a written statement. Straw has not yet granted a pardon and Shields remains in a Wigan prison.

An extract from Sankey’s confession reads:

My conscience has been tormenting me ever since. I read in the papers about Michael Shields’ trial, and I felt that I could not let an innocent man take the blame for what I had done.

I expected that the Bulgarian court would accept my admission and free Mr Shields. I was horrified that the court has refused to do this, so I am making this signed confession in the hope that an innocent man will no longer have to take responsibility for what I admit I did.