On 29 November 2019, a meeting to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Learning Together prison education project ended in tragedy with two participants, Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones, stabbed to death and the perpetrator of those killings, Usman Khan, shot dead by the police on London Bridge. The fall-out from this horrific event, which took place less than two weeks before the general election, will have repercussions for many current, future and ex-prisoners with no involvement at all in the incident itself. NICKI JAMESON reports.
Learning Together was founded in 2014 by Cambridge University academics and began with a project in the ‘Therapeutic Community’ prison at HMP Grendon. Following its success, further projects were set up in other prisons. The main premise of the initiative is that a group of university students and a group of serving prisoners work together on a project, in which they all learn, both about the subject itself and about each other. Unlike other schemes involving law or criminology students going into prisons, it does not objectify the prisoners, as the external students are not there to teach or study the prison students, but to study a topic alongside them. Compared to most of what passes for ‘prison education’, Learning Together – which puts Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at the top of its list of ‘useful resources’ – is a breath of fresh air.
The 29 November event was attended by the usual range of academic and criminal justice professionals who go to such conferences; however, given the nature of the project, strenuous efforts had clearly been made to ensure that as many prisoner participants who had either been released from their sentences, or were in Category C or D prisons from which they could be given temporary licences, could attend. As the course administrator whose job included such tasks as booking external speakers for prison seminars and co-ordinating joint work between the prison and university students, Jack Merritt would have been centrally involved in ensuring that this happened and that the prisoners were properly represented at the event, as opposed to there being one token, grateful ‘offender/service user’, which is frequently the case at other less sincere projects’ events.
Usman Khan had worked with Learning Together while in Whitemoor prison, where he was serving a 16-year Extended Sentence for planning terrorism offences. He had been arrested in 2010 and originally sentenced in 2012 to an Indeterminate Sentence for Public Protection, which was overturned on appeal. He was released in December 2018 on a licence with strict conditions, including electronic monitoring. In general he was not allowed to travel to London but had a special dispensation for that day. Having sat through the morning’s programme, at lunchtime he launched an attack on the attendees, resulting in the deaths of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones, a former student participant in the programme, and the hospitalisation of three other people. Having been chased out of the building by workers from the venue and conference-goers, including other former or serving prisoners, Khan was eventually shot dead by the police.
Electioneering
There was no pause for mourning or reflection; with an impending election on 12 December, Prime Minister Boris Johnson rushed into print the day after the attack, with a Daily Mail article headlined ‘Send me back to Number 10 and I will end automatic early release of violent offenders and terrorists’. Johnson repeated the promise he had made back in August 2019, and which was then included in the Conservative Manifesto in November, to end automatic release at the halfway point for those convicted of ‘serious crimes’ (see ‘Tories plan a reign of terror – Labour has no answer’, FRFI 272, October/November 2019). He also made sure that he put the blame for Khan’s release and therefore his subsequent crimes squarely onto the 1997-2010 Labour government, promising that if returned to power he would ‘…ensure that [the police and security forces] do not come under constant attack from the human rights lobby who would weaken our anti-terror laws.’
Jack Merritt’s father David, who at this point should have had nothing to contend with but mourning and burying his young son, felt forced to respond, writing on twitter: ‘Don’t use my son’s death, and his and his colleague’s photos – to promote your vile propaganda. Jack stood against everything you stand for – hatred, division, ignorance.’ The war of words continued, as Johnson and other leading Tories continued to use the tragic incident as an excuse to complain that Labour – which, in fact, had far harsher and more punitive criminal justice policies than any previous government – was not tough enough, and that his way of remembering Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones would be to instigate an even more draconian regime.
Longer sentences
Two different processes are now in train, both of which will extend the period in prison that those sentenced in future will serve.
Firstly, following the government’s August announcement, it prepared a draft Statutory Instrument to come into force in April 2020, which will change the automatic release date for Standard Determinate Sentences of seven years or more for violent or sexual offences from the halfway to two-thirds point.
Secondly, following Johnson’s election victory, the Queen’s Speech on 19 December included the promise that: ‘New sentencing laws will ensure the most serious violent offenders, including terrorists, serve longer in custody.’ On 21 January, Home Secretary Priti Patel followed this up by announcing a new Counter Terrorism (Sentencing and Release) Bill, which will ‘force dangerous terrorist offenders who receive extended determinate sentences to serve the whole time behind bars and ensure those convicted of serious offences such as preparing acts of terrorism or directing a terrorist organisation spend a mandatory minimum of 14 years in prison’.
Collective punishment
Even in advance of these harsher sentencing laws for those not yet convicted, current serving and recently released prisoners immediately felt the after-shocks of the incident and its political fall-out. Everyone convicted of terrorism offences who had been released on licence was subject to emergency review, with at least one immediate recall to prison; prisoners due for release suddenly faced a raft of additional licence conditions, some of which had no relationship to their original conviction, and those about to move from closed to open conditions found the moves postponed. Some people already in open prisons, and with no relationship to terrorism, suddenly discovered that that their temporary licences to attend crime-prevention or educational events had been cancelled. James Ford – one of the serving prisoners who tried to fight off Usman Khan, and whose own murder conviction was subsequently covered in detail in the tabloid press – was moved from Standford Hill open prison to Elmley, one of the two neighbouring closed prisons ‘for his own protection’. A planned extension of the early release electronic tagging scheme which was due to come into operation in January 2020 was quietly dropped.
This clampdown looks set to continue. Parole Boards will be more reluctant to release prisoners, even those who successfully complete programmes such as the ‘Healthy Identity Intervention’ (a supposed deprogramming course for people with terrorist convictions), and licence conditions will become routinely more stringent.
As with almost all such incidents involving a terrorist attack or violent or sexual crime committed by a released prisoner, or (as in the case of John Worboys) even the potential release of a high-profile, dangerous offender, the government’s response is both a series of knee-jerk measures designed to reduce criticism of it for what has happened and the simultaneous exploitation of the incident as a cover for repressive measures which were already in the pipeline.
The only unusual feature on this occasion is that the family of one of the victims has strongly refused to be co-opted into supporting the government agenda, and even in the midst of their shock and grief, has fought back against the attempt. The statement from Jack Merritt’s family issued after his death says that ‘Jack lived his principles; he believed in redemption and rehabilitation, not revenge, and he always took the side of the underdog’, while writing in The Guardian in response to Boris Johnson, David Merritt wrote: ‘He would be seething at his death, and his life, being used to perpetuate an agenda of hate that he gave his everything fighting against. We should never forget that.’
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 274 February/March 2020
