The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill had its First and Second Readings in the House of Commons in March and is currently being considered by a parliamentary committee. Whilst there has quite rightly been significant opposition to the parts of the Bill dealing with protest and which target the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, these are just some of the draconian measures contained in the Bill. For prisoners, their families and supporters and anyone who may come into contact with the criminal justice system in future there is also a lot to be worried about and to organise against. NICKI JAMESON reports.
Longer sentences
As we have previously reported, since August 2019 the current government has been on a mission to increase the number of people sent to prison and the length of time they remain there. Seizing on tragedies such as the killing of two young people at Fishmongers’ Hall in London in November that year by recently released prisoner Usman Khan as justification for their agenda, Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have whipped up a frenzy of pro-carceral sentiment.
Section 106 of the PCSC Bill builds on and makes permanent measures introduced in April 2020 whereby people sentenced to seven years or more for a ‘specified’ violent or sexual offence will not be released until they have served two-thirds of their sentence (as opposed to half, which has been the case since 2005). The Bill also contains plans for increased use of minimum sentencing for a wide range of offences and of ‘whole life tariffs’ for murder.
Not only has this drive towards longer sentencing been met with no opposition from the Labour Party (with or without Corbyn), but politicians who served in the last Labour government, have been at pains to make sure Parliament is fully aware of their own draconian credentials. At the Second Reading of the Bill in March, David
Lammy told a Tory MP who was trying to interrupt him that ‘the party that introduced whole life orders – the Labour party – will not, I am afraid, take any lessons from him’.
No automatic release
Not content with longer overall sentences and longer custodial elements within those sentences, the government is planning a Kafkaesque nightmare for a further group of prisoners. Section 108 of the Bill is entitled ‘Power to refer high-risk offenders to Parole Board in place of automatic release’ and essentially gives the state the power to decide that someone who is serving a determinate sentence (including one for a non-violent, non-sexual offence, which means they would still ordinarily be automatically released at the halfway point) will only be released if the Parole Board says that it is safe to do so. To make such a referral the Secretary of State needs to believe that the prisoner poses a significant risk of harm to the public. If the Parole Board agrees, they will remain in prison.
This measure poses a real danger to any prisoner who organises protests, stands up for themselves or defends themselves against attack from officers or other prisoners. A Briefing Paper published on 20 May by the Criminal Justice Alliance entitled Entrenching Racial Disparities Response to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill points to the likely way in which this power will be used to target Muslim prisoners in particular: ‘This would enable people convicted of non-terrorism offences to be prevented from release at the end of their sentence if there is concern that they have become radicalised in prison and now present a terror threat … This is retrospective sentencing … which bypasses the important protections of judicial process … the perception of a link between Islam and terrorism has become institutionalised in the criminal justice system … despite only 1% of Muslim prisoners being convicted of terrorism-related offences.’
Targeting children
In the name of ‘protecting children’ Clause 101 of the Bill increases the punishment for anyone convicted of the premeditated murder of a child, making the ‘starting point’ for sentencing a whole life sentence, with no prospect of release ever. However, Clause 102 provides a power whereby children who themselves kill are also ‘in exceptional circumstances’ subject to this measure, meaning that a teenager involved in the killing of another could face the prospect of spending the next 60+ years behind bars.
Furthermore, Clause 104 substantially undermines a provision which those who kill as children have been able to rely on. Until now, there has been a recognition by the British legal system that children who kill should be treated differently to adults. It has been accepted that the brain does not form or mature properly until after we are fully physically grown, with much psychological thinking indicating that in young males in particular, full mental maturity is frequently not reached until the mid-twenties. Consequently, people who commit murder while under the age of 18 have been treated differently to older people.
All life sentences consist of a ‘minimum term’ which must be served in prison prior to release and a life-long licence during which someone can be recalled to prison if they are deemed to pose a danger. However, while once the minimum term for an adult lifer is fixed by the sentencing judge it can only be changed via a full criminal appeal, the length of the minimum term for those who committed murder as children can be reconsidered once they have served half that term, with further reviews annually for the duration of the minimum period.
Such reductions in the length of the minimum term have never been handed out lightly: many applications are refused and of those accepted, plenty result only in small reductions of six months or so. However, the existence of the provision has been of great comfort to young lifers and their families, providing a goal to strive for in the midst of an otherwise bleak situation.
The PCSC Bill tramples over the differential treatment of adult and child lifers by narrowing the parameters of the minimum term reviews to only apply to people who were sentenced while still under 18, irrespective of their age at the time of the murder. Any further review beyond the initial halfway one is then dependent on the applicant still being under 18 at that point – a set of circumstances which will almost never occur.
To add insult to injury, in February 2021, the Public Protection Casework Section in the Ministry of Justice jumped the gun and sent letters to all the HMP lifers in the system, telling them that any reviews for prisoners over 18 at the point of sentencing were now cancelled. This was a month before the First Reading of the Bill in Parliament. Legal challenges relating to reviews which were already underway have been successful but the remaining prisoners look set to be left without any way to alter the term set by the sentencing court.
Filling up the prisons
It is estimated that the combined measures in the PCSC Bill will result in the prison population reaching 100,000 by 2026. The government is busily building new prisons to hold these additional prisoners. Like the existing prison population, those who will be targeted for incarceration will be overwhelmingly working class and disproportionately black, Asian and minority ethnic. The Covid pandemic has already given those who run the prison system an excuse to further oppress people behind bars. Now is the time to resist further attacks by highlighting the measures in the Police Bill, opposing the building of new prisons and demonstrating our active support for prisoners’ rights.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 282 June/July 2021
