Just in time to meet his self-imposed deadline of early September, the Prime Minister has found a way of preventing two cop-killers from returning to the streets. The method of keeping the killers of PC Andrew Harper, convicted of manslaughter in the 2019 killing, behind bars is to block all those convicted of any form of manslaughter – along with grooming, death by dangerous driving and causing or allowing the death of a child – from eligibility for the early release scheme.
I don’t think it lessens or trivialises the moral enormity of PC Harper’s death to feel uneasy about this
This seems to me to be a telling decision, and not necessarily in the way the PM will hope. As incoming Prime Minister, Andy Burnham has been faced with two huge Home Office headaches. One is prison overcrowding. This is a general, practical and systemic problem. The prison estate is at 97 per cent capacity, and simple maths says that you have to let some people out of the jug if you’re going to keep putting new people into the jug. Building whole new prisons might be a long-term solution to the problem, but the crisis is in the short to medium term and besides, money is distinctly tight and tax rises distinctly unpopular.
The second problem Burnham had was the deep public anger about the prospect of the young men who killed PC Harper being let out of prison under the very early release scheme invented by his predecessor to deal with problem one. This is a particular, moral and (from the point of view of the government) public-relations problem. I don’t doubt that Mr Burnham shares all our instinctive revulsion at the idea of PC Harper’s killers walking free after serving only six years in prison. He’s empathetic: we’re forever being told as much. The prospect of his being savaged by the popular press should a brace of cop killers walk free on his watch might have served to further concentrate his mind. Problem one is a slow-burn catastrophe, in other words; problem two is the magnesium flare of a headline-grabbing outrage.
It is fairly obvious that these two problems pull in opposite directions – or at least seek opposite remedies. The systemic problem asks you to let people out of jail; the public relations problem asks you to keep them in. By changing the whole early release rules, in perpetuity, to accommodate public feeling in this particular case, the government emphatically prioritises the public relations issue. It keeps two particular prisoners in, but in order to do so it permanently closes the door to early release for many hundreds of others. In practical terms, it is hard to see how this won’t seriously exacerbate the systemic problem of overcrowding. And it’s not without its moral component. Given that offences that fall under the rubric of manslaughter vary considerably, we could at least consider it questionable that punishment for the particular vileness of PC Harper’s killers is being visited uniformly on everyone in prison for the crime of manslaughter. The cliché that hard cases make bad law seems to apply here. Also, the good old principle that on the whole government should avoid getting involved in individual legal cases – where the only remedies in its remit are very sweeping ones.
I should enter what I hope is an appropriate note of caution. I’m not an expert on the ins and outs of criminal law or the administration of the prison estate. There may well be a coherent case why nobody found guilty of manslaughter should be eligible for early release, and why their inclusion in the scheme was in need of swift remedy. There may be some very clever, very principled and carefully thought through rationale for this decision. But if there is, the onus is on Mr Burnham and his government to communicate it.
What they have communicated instead, and with some emphasis, is the Prime Minister’s determination to find some way, any way, to keep the killers of PC Harper behind bars. No. 10 briefed that he specifically tasked his justice secretary to do so, and Mr Burnham himself claims to have spent his summer “turning over every single stone” to make sure Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers remain in prison. He turned over the stone, and found his solution. It was to use a dragnet to catch a salmon.
I don’t think it lessens or trivialises the moral enormity of PC Harper’s death to feel uneasy about this. Wouldn’t you rather have a Prime Minister who, when confronted with a choice between a systemic problem and a particular one, has the clarity and determination to recognise there’s a trade-off – and to prefer big-picture governance to quick-hit public relations?
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