Crime

I slept only between the hours of 5 and 6 a.m, thanks to self-induced terror tactics. My son Adam stayed over, having offered to accompany me for my angiogram – or ‘the procedure’. He kindly moved my old Honda Jazz round the corner and parked his car in my space overnight. The procedure revealed that a) I am impossible to sedate – I once told a full joke under anaesthetic; b) I am neurotic; and c) I didn’t, after all, need a stent. So why was I so breathless? Could it be because, at three score and ten... er... plus eight, I find myself in love? Prescription: I must walk more, breathe more, change medication and cool it. Adam came back to check on me and rebuked me for moving my car – which I hadn’t, because the doctor said that I shouldn’t drive for a day or two.

Even Horace Rumpole could not have secured an acquittal for Lucy Letby. The more I look at this case, the more I suspect that there could never have been any other outcome than a conviction. I think a great cloud of emotion hung over that courtroom during the whole trial. I think that cloud spread outwards into the public mind before and during the long months of the trial. In my view, the actual prosecution of Ms Letby began on Thursday 5 July 2018, two days after she was arrested for the first time, and more than four years before she finally sat in the dock. The prosecution knew throughout that they had no objective proof of their case, large or small On that day, police officers dug up her tiny garden in a Chester suburb.

There was recently a mass public party at which all sorts of offences were committed. As innocent attendees cut loose and jived, shadier actors took advantage. There was a burglary, a robbery, 19 drug offences, 26 acts of theft and no fewer than 30 acts of violence against individuals. There were also two sexual offences – shameful. What hell was this? Where did all this moral abasement occur? Must have been at the Notting Hill Carnival, right? Actually, no – it was at Glastonbury. Yes, at this year’s Glasto, famously the hangout of middle-class white folk who like rock, crimes were committed. In those tent cities, amid the thick haze of Mary Jane, things got stolen, people were punched, women were abused. So should we shut it down?

Whatever happened to the likes of the BBC’s Rough Justice and Channel 4’s Trial and Error? Why did human rights organisations such as Liberty and Justice stop campaigning on behalf of UK prisoners wrongfully jailed? Why are there fewer MPs plugging away on behalf of constituents they believe to have been victims of miscarriages of justice? All this activity seemed to be wound down after the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) began its work in 1997. Outsiders were no longer needed to look into the criminal justice system, many believed, now that we had a one-stop shop for prisoners protesting against their convictions for crimes they insist they did not commit.

There is no doubt that the new government (and in particular the prisons minister, James Timpson) is faced with a serious prison population crisis. Original thinking and a willingness to challenge the system will be the only way out. As HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, I know this all too well. Last month I inspected Durham, a Georgian reception jail which regularly vies for the dubious honour of being the most overcrowded prison along with Leeds, Bedford and Wandsworth. Half of all prisoners are functionally illiterate and yet few are taught to read With remand populations (those who have yet to be convicted) at historic highs, reception prisons across the country are busier than ever.

Thanks to an underage relative who’d stolen my driving licence, I recently found myself ID-less at the local Co-op. I know the woman at the checkout reasonably well, so I said hi, enquired about her day and then asked if I could have my usual vape anyway. She had the decency to look shifty and said: ‘Sorry love.’ Did she not remember me and my ID from just a few days earlier? Was she senile? Did she hate me? I suspected that the reason she was unswayable was because she was bugged. She was wearing a body worn camera and the Co-op’s Security Operations Center was spying on us. The public is accustomed to, or at least aware of, the police’s use of body worn cameras (BWCs). But in recent years, the technology has been proliferating at a dizzying rate.

‘London has become a jungle, right? Anyone with anything nice risks having it taken.’ Bobby, the manager of one of Hatton Garden’s watch shops, does business in a windowless room as far from the street as possible, watched over by a thickset guard and a couple security cameras. ‘I’m a paranoid person,’ he says, and he’s right to be. While the level of general theft in London is going down, more and more luxury watches are stolen every year – tens of millions of pounds’ worth. There’s no sophistication to stealing a watch. Gangs smash into shops with machetes or rip them from wearers’ wrists. Last week, Oliver White, a watch broker in south-west London, had £3 million worth of watches stolen.

The Sentencing Council, consisting of various legal authorities, has told judges and magistrates to consider, when sentencing the young, their ‘difficult and/or deprived backgrounds or personal circumstances’. To what end? To induct the young into proper moral behaviour, Aristotle thought that family discipline should go hand in hand with the community’s laws, customs and education. But it was also possible for the young to receive bad training, on which Aristotle thundered: ‘It makes no small difference whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather, it makes all the difference.