Stuart - a life backwards

The screening on BBC2 of the TV film “Stuart – a life backwards” on 23 September 2007 at 9pm has a special resonance for The Dialogue Trust and for me in particular. More broadly, it should open some people’s eyes as to why lives become chaotic, criminal and out-of-control.

Having spoken to hundreds of prisoners, ex-prisoners and homeless people, I know first-hand that no-one chooses a life of crime, or a life on the streets. If you scratch just under the surface, you find that they all want the same things as we all do: a home, a job and a loving family.

There’s always a reason why these things have become unattainable and in almost every case, there is a remedy. I won’t spoil your viewing of the film (or your reading of the book on which it was based) by letting you know the reasons for Stuart’s plight. But every Stuart has their own story, often desperate and painful.

Our Patron Alexander Masters wrote his best selling book “Stuart – a life backwards”, and the subsequent screenplay, as a result of his involvement in the Campaign to free the Cambridge Two. I was one of them: imprisoned for allegedly allowing heroin dealing in the courtyard of a Cambridge day centre for the homeless. My prison experience led me to help found the Dialogue Trust.

Alexander’s unusual friendship with Stuart grew out of their joint work on the campaign. If Stuart had been treated differently in prison, he might have got the chance he needed to live a happier and more fulfilling life. That would have been a good result for him, his family and for society as a whole.

It is a tragedy that so many people like Stuart suffer so pointlessly at the hands of our under-resourced, ineffective and old-fashioned prison system.

Prison Officers’ strike

Prison officers around the country have finally had enough and gone on a 24-hour strike. It’s not surprising. Prisons have been getting more and more over-crowded. Numbers recently hit record levels, prison staff cannot do their jobs effectively, prisoners become increasingly desperate and the inevitable happens: violence ensues.

This is a crisis that has been a long time coming. But there were repeated warnings of it, right up to the Lord Chief Justice who described over-crowding as a cancer in our prisons.

What did the government do? Nothing of any real substance. Reassuring words and plans for more prison places in five years time don’t mean much to struggling staff and despairing prisoners.

To add insult to injury, word leaked out about plans to actually cut prison budgets, and remember that these budgets are already cut to the bone.

In fact, earlier this month Michael Spurr, the Head of Operations at NOMS (the National Offender Management Service), suggested that all prisoners be locked up every afternoon to make the £60 million savings he had been charged with. More lock-up means less rehabilitation work and therefore more chance of prisoners offending on release, and being incarcerated once again. Surely that’s a false saving.

In my experience, Michael Spurr is a sensible man. We were both lecturers at the Prison Service’s annual Perrie Lectures a couple of years back. I heard him stress the importance and benefits of rehabilitation, and how it was an essential component of prison life if we really wanted to reduce offending.

He won’t be happy about the cuts. I haven’t met anyone in the Prison Service who is – those on the coal face know it means a worse service, continuing failure to address crime and its cause, more damage to those locked up and damage also to prison staff who have to implement these short-sighted policies.

The Government is terrified of appearing to be ‘soft on crime’ and look where it’s led them (and us). Now the Tories are jacking up their tough stance, in response to taunts from the tabloids. Yet it is generally accepted by independent-minded criminologists that prison does not work, and that the experience actually does make people worse. This results in more crime.

Now the public is getting wise to this. A recent Guardian/ICM poll overturns the assumption that the public think tough prison sentences are the best way to tackle crime. The majority of those polled think the government should scrap its prison building programme and find other ways to punish criminals.

But we live in a cynical world. Not long ago The Dialogue Trust representatives met a senior politician who wanted to know how to make reducing the use of prison palatable to the public, because he knew it was the right policy. Needless to say, he has now been demoted.