PC Andrew Harper died in a way no police officer, no citizen, should ever die. He was called out to a burglary in rural Berkshire. When he tried to apprehend the culprits, he was caught in the towing strap of a fleeing car and dragged for around a mile at speeds exceeding 40 miles an hour, sustaining catastrophic multiple injuries and a ‘very severe’ brain injury that doctors could not treat. His widow, Lissie, has spoken with devastating clarity about living with the knowledge that her husband’s last moments were spent being ground into the road surface by thugs who saw him as nothing more than an obstacle to their escape.
In court, those men – Henry Long, Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole – behaved with a swaggering and depraved indifference. They laughed, joked and smirked in the dock, showing no remorse for the officer they had killed or the family they had destroyed. The jury convicted them of manslaughter rather than murder. The trial judge, Mr Justice Edis, applied the law as parliament has written it before sentencing Long to 16 years’ detention and Bowers and Cole to 13 years each.
We are told that lessons have been learned
Now we learn that two of these men – Bowers and Cole – are still eligible to benefit from Labour’s early release scheme. A policy supposedly designed to ease pressure on an overcrowded prison estate has been drawn so broadly that the killers of a serving police officer – men whose offence outraged the country and whose conduct in court epitomised contempt – remain in scope for a shorter time behind bars, potentially serving only half of their 13 year terms. Ministers have paused the scheme’s rollout and promised a review, but Downing Street has confirmed that, as currently constituted, the Sentencing Act still allows Bowers and Cole to be considered for early release. Henry Long, the driver, is excluded from the scheme, but that is cold comfort when his accomplices are not.
We are invited to see this as a story of the system ‘working’: a pause button pressed, some exclusions tightened, a reassurance that nothing will happen until a review is complete. It is a glimpse into a justice bureaucracy that has come to treat sentences not as immutable just deserts, but expedient on cell space. Ministry of Justice apparatchiks looked at a list of offences and decided that the answer to chronic overcrowding was not to build capacity but to whittle away at punishment in the hope that no one would notice who was being put in line for release.
Defenders of the scheme will say that justice must be blind, that rules should apply without fear or favour, that we cannot redesign an entire sentencing framework around a single horrific case. In the abstract, that sounds high-minded. But in the real world, where public trust in the justice system has already been hollowed out by years of soft pedalling on serious crime, these lofty philosophical sentiments will do Labour no good at the ballot box. Voters can see the difference between a system that is principled and one that is simply indifferent to the gravity of particular harms – and they know which one they are living with now.
The inclusion of Bowers and Cole among those potentially being considered for early release is the foreseeable consequence of a political class that has spent years talking grandly about public protection while refusing to do the unglamorous work of planning and funding a prison system that can hold the people we know we must fear most. If the state wishes to claim the authority to lock up dangerous offenders for long periods, it has a corresponding duty to provide the cells in which to do it. That duty has been shirked by successive governments of all colours, which have preferred to gamble on clever sentencing tweaks and ‘earned progression’ models rather than invest in the concrete reality of space, staff and security.
We are told that lessons have been learned, that no one will be released under the policy until the review is done, that rapists, child sexual abusers and some murderers will now be excluded. But again, the problem runs deeper. A justice policy that starts from the question ‘how many beds have we got this week?’ rather than ‘what do these crimes deserve?’ is in deep trouble. Seeing the punishment of a police officer’s killers as just another variable in an overcrowding model is political suicide.
We need to dispense with sophistry here. A police officer, doing his job, dragged to his death by criminals who turned a car into a weapon and then treated the courtroom as a stage for their contempt must count as a crime for which early release schemes are simply off the table. But the Prime Minister is telling us he is impotent to act. The fact that Bowers and Cole remain eligible for early release even after a supposed tightening of the rules tells us everything we need to know about the priorities embedded in this strategy.
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