Crime

Locked in Sir: Most prisons are awash with illegal drugs, much of which gets in via drones dropping off packages that can weigh up to 10kg (‘Criminal neglect’, 7 November). Prisoners can often choose from a menu of drugs and other contraband. The response from the prison service, the police, the National Crime Agency and the Ministry of Defence has been uncoordinated and desperately slow. Just a handful of prisons have effective drug recovery programmes, and homeless addicts leaving prison are often back in jail within days of release. In 2016 Dame Sally Coates produced a highly critical review of prison education. Depressingly, recent cuts of up to 50 per cent have led to even lower standards than she found ten years ago.

There are times when the absence of Jonathan Swift is acutely felt. One such moment came at the end of last month with the botched execution of a woman in Tennessee called Christa Pike. Pike has been in prison on death row since 1996 when she was convicted of the torture and murder of a classmate when she was just 18. She had originally been sentenced to death by electric chair. But society has become more benevolent since the 1990s and so, at the age of 50, Pike was prepared for execution by lethal injection. If society sanctions the ultimate punishment, it should not look away from what that punishment looks like The injections went ahead but they did not work.

Lab test Labour MP Jenny Riddell-Carpenter described black labradors, pubs and warm ale as a ‘far right fantasy’. Do labradors have right-wing roots? The labrador, as its name suggests, had its origins in Newfoundland. The breed was derived from the St John’s water dog, favoured by Portuguese fishermen for its strong fishing ability. Dogs of this breed were brought to Britain by the 10th Earl of Home to be trained as gun dogs. They were cross-bred with other hunting dogs, and the labrador was recognised as a distinct breed by the Kennel Club in 1903. Some were employed in the fight against fascism through bomb-detection duties in the war (although they would no doubt as happily have worked for the other side).

In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children in her basement and then tried to kill herself. On August 20 this year, several hundred women dressed in pink lined the street outside Plymouth Superior Court, where she was being tried for murder. Some called out “I love you,” as her lawyer went past. One of them shouted, “Team Lindsay.” Many mothers have frightening thoughts; very few become killers like Clancy The gathering had been organized by Renee Kimball, who had never met Clancy and had driven down from Maine. She had been following the trial via a livestream. She told Court TV it was neither a protest nor a rally, and that the point was “to show Lindsay support; to show her peace, to show her calm.

No one looking back on the last fortnight could say that Middlesbrough didn’t make the most of its time in the spotlight. I’ve been in the north-east these past few weeks and opening the local papers has been like a diabolical advent calendar: a new horror for every day. On Saturday 22 August we discovered that five Middlesbrough boys, aged 17 to 23, with 22 convictions between them, had raced the wrong way down the A66 and smashed into a police car, killing themselves and the two poor officers too. On the Sunday we learnt that the speeding boys had been chasing another car, a Volvo, which, in the early hours of Saturday had reversed repeatedly into the front of one of the boys’ houses.

The Harrow Council ‘enforcement officers’ might have been more extreme in their language than other members of the Fake Fuzz, but their arrogance was entirely typical. Uniformed security guards are appearing everywhere. Shops, pubs, train carriages – the wannabe rozzers are there, in your face, vests bulging, walkie-talkies at the ready. They glower and loom, filling your day with bad vibes and absurd rules. It’s unclear what started the argument in Harrow, but the member of the public whose video went viral last week was told by the two officers not to ‘butt in my business’, then ordered to come to a nearby alleyway where one of them would ‘show you what time it is’. Needless to say, the man refused the offer.

‘I can’t breathe.’ When those chilling words were uttered by George Floyd in 2020, they provoked global outrage. The combination of the horrific manner of Floyd’s choking by the police officer Derek Chauvin, the pressure cooker of lockdown and the historical tensions around American race relations led to worldwide protests; despite Floyd’s death being 4,000 miles away in Minnesota, Keir Starmer felt compelled to take the knee in solidarity. ‘I can’t breathe.’ These were also the dying words of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student in Southampton murdered by the 23-year-old Vickrum Digwa. Nowak was coming back from a night out when he was stabbed by Digwa five times with a ceremonial knife. When the police were called, Digwa accused Nowak of having been racist.