As Labour invests in more prisons Mickey Master looked at sentencing in our last issue. Here he examines wrongful imprisonment.
Are there any innocent people wrongly locked up in jail? If there are, then releasing them is a pretty quick win, both for the individuals concerned, and for the taxpayer. The answer is “almost certainly”. With 85-87000 prisoners in the system, no system is right 87000 times. If you copied 87000 names, then you would get a few wrong. Given that a criminal justice trial is inherently harder than copying a name, it follows that there must be some mistakes. (Of course, some mistakes also include guilty people getting acquitted.) I have met a few prisoners who insisted that they were innocent, including one who told me that on the day he went home, having never mentioned it before. But there are not that many of them. The overwhelming majority are guilty as charged.
There are also some people who are in for defending themselves too well. This is a grey area, as maybe a different jury on a different day (or the same jury with a different defence) might have acquitted. But this does not necessarily mean that an acquittal would be right, and a conviction would be wrong. Paradoxically, some people defend themselves too well if they are not used to fighting. Then their points of reference are films and television, where violence is far more extreme, and far more likely to be lethal. Real fist fights are actually over in seconds. So, they might genuinely feel hard done by, but still be guilty in the eyes of the law.
Another issue is people who are only guilty of some of the crimes that they are convicted of. This sometimes happens with burglars. Burglars resemble the apocryphal farmer who won the lottery. When asked what he was going to do with £10 million replied “It’s great. Now I can keep on farming until it’s all gone.” Burglars are the same. They start burgling in the early end of secondary school, think they are getting good at it, and then keep on burgling until the police work out who they are and catch them. Then the police bring out the back catalogue of unsolved burglaries. They can then find themselves charged with ones that they didn’t do. I once spoke to a burglar who told me that he was in for six burglaries, but had only actually done five of them. However, he told me that he had pleaded guilty to all six. It was safer, as he knew that he would get the same (concurrent) sentence for each case. Whereas, if he went “Not Guilty” and lost, he might get a longer sentence. A Miscarriage of Justice? Certainly. But it is hardly the Birmingham 6. Crucially, he did not spend another day in jail. Which is why he gamed the system as he did.
This does, however, raise an issue where there are miscarriages of justice that keep getting overlooked in the mainstream media. The last Conservative government tried to limit compensation payments for miscarriages of justice, trying to suggest that some people had themselves to blame for getting convicted (unlikely), and limiting compensation to lost earnings. This is wrong. A convicted prisoner is sentenced to lose his/her liberty, not their earnings. Any loss of earnings is a by-product of that. Compensation should be for the loss of liberty itself, with any loss of earnings over and above that. It would be difficult to see how the above mentioned burglar could have any claim on that system. If a man is wrongly convicted of rape, and then acquitted on appeal, he could have lost a lot, including job, family, home and reputation, as well as his liberty. He will expect some compensation. If a man is convicted of six rapes and gets one overturned on appeal, he will serve the same number of days in jail, and will not have suffered any reputational damage, as he’s still a serial rapist.
Spokespeople for the last government have stated that any compensation for a wrongful conviction should deduct the cost of the “free” board and lodging that prisoners received while they were inside. This is totally unjustified, as it is not free. The law states that convicted prisoners are required to work. Sometimes prisoners complain that they are not getting National Minimum Wage, but are only getting a little over £10 a week. We respond by saying that they are getting more than that, because we also supply their board and lodging. While they are with us, we pay their rent, supply their food, give them free soap and shampoo, prison clothes if they want (most don’t and wear their own) and a subsidised television at £1 a week. Fact: prisoners do not get free board and lodging.
The number of wrongfully convicted people in jail is relatively small. However, it is still important to correct mistakes wherever possible. So, I have to ask why the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) is underfunded. It is over-cautious, sets too high a bar to review cases and is subject to delays. Why? There is nothing to wait for. If an innocent person is wrongfully convicted, they should be released as soon as possible. If they are guilty, but trying it on, their case should be thrown out sooner rather than later. Can the new Labour government run it better?