Ian Acheson

Sometimes it appears as if, over the past ten years, the government has been actively trying to destroy the whole criminal justice system. It’s like an evil experiment: impose a 20 per cent cut in the prisons budget, meaning a 26 per cent reduction in the number of operational front line staff — then sit back and see what happens. What happened was predictable, with disastrous consequences for both inmates and the public. As a previous Conservative home secretary once said, our prisons became places that ‘make bad people worse’. Imagine a young man like Sudesh Amman arriving in prison after his first offence. He was already a drug user, known to have a cannabis habit. He was mentally unstable and radicalised by Islamist propaganda.

We’ve just celebrated the birth of a refugee who went on to radicalise a group of fishermen and transform the worldview of millions of people. You might not feel comfortable with this depiction of Jesus Christ but it does illustrate the challenges and limitations of language and labelling when dealing with contemporary violent extremism. I was on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning to speak about Healthy Identity Intervention (HII) – a psychosocial approach to changing the mindset of terrorists which was used in prison to treat Usman Khan prior to his murderous rampage on London Bridge.

What should we do with adults who murder children? 'Nothing good' is a perfectly understandable response. Child killers occupy a unique position on the destitute outer fringes of humanity. Bogeymen made real, they are in fact often pathetic, hideously damaged individuals driven to satisfy appetites we can only guess at. The Conservatives have announced that adults over 21 who murder children under 16 will never be released from custody. It has made for a good Sun newspaper op-ed; justice secretary Robert Buckland is pushing against an open door with the electorate. It's not just Tory voters who never want these aberrant individuals to see the light of day again. Ask any parent and wait for the sound of sharpened pitchforks.

Home Secretary Priti Patel downgraded our national terrorism threat assessment last week from ‘severe’, where it has sat for the last four years to ‘substantial’. Attacks have now been reduced from ‘highly likely’ to ‘likely’. We’re never given the full analysis of the reasons for the changes in alert levels, which is independently assessed by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC).  But it’s fair to say from what we know, it’s more an art than a science. And there are plenty of reasons to remain pessimistic. The threat of violent extremists across the ideological spectrum to cause us severe harm continues.

We might not care for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon but we should care very much about what happens to him in prison over the next two months or so. Lennon, also known as ‘Tommy Robinson’, was convicted at the Old Bailey yesterday for contempt of court after he live-streamed footage of defendants on trial for sexual exploitation arriving at court. Yaxley-Lennon had previously served time in custody for this but was freed on appeal pending a retrial. Just to make matters more complicated, he was also sentenced yesterday for an earlier contempt committed at Canterbury Crown court in 2017, again at a rape trial that involved four Asian defendants that attracted a suspended sentence, now activated.

Twenty one years ago this week, a deal was signed in Belfast that undoubtedly gifted many people with a future who would otherwise now be cold in the ground. The Good Friday Agreement saved lives in Northern Ireland and brought a measure of consensual politics, but there is no tent big enough to accommodate the sadists who inspired and now evade all responsibility for the death of journalist Lyra McKee on Thursday night in Derry. She was murdered standing at police lines reporting on rioting orchestrated by dissident republicans who, in their desperation to kill Irish men and women in uniform protecting a community they hold hostage, took her life instead.

‘Short term custody isn’t inherently bad, but the way we do it is awful.’ I didn’t expect Justice Secretary David Gauke to start an otherwise thoughtful speech yesterday on prisons like this, but he should have. No one wants people in prison when there are better alternatives that will properly punish them and give them the tools to break away from offending. To do otherwise is stupid. But the debate has been overwhelmed by a fixation on sentence length that wrongly suggests that short imprisonment must always and forever be toxic and counterproductive. Gauke presented his audience with sobering statistics on rates of incarceration putting us at the top of the league in Europe. We seem addicted to custody in this country, as long as it’s cheap.

In response to the Westminster attack, a 100-strong new counter-extremism taskforce has been announced to deal with the terrorist threat in prisons. I’m taking some credit for this badly needed focus. In the autumn of 2015, the then Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, asked me to lead an independent review of the threat posed by Islamist extremism in prisons, the probation service and the youth justice system. I used to be a prison governor in what was known until just a few days ago as the National Offender Management Service, so I agreed on the understanding that I reported only to him and that I had his full support to go where the evidence led me, without interference from bureaucrats. To his credit, he agreed immediately. Gathering information was a complex task for a small team.