Continuing our major series on the criminal justice system, Nick Davies reveals the scandal of the tens of thousands of mentally-disordered men and women who have been herded into our prisons and left there without effective treatment.
In the second part of his investigation into mentally-disordered prisoners, Nick Davies tells the story of a prisoner who has become a living nightmare, one of the several thousand severely ill held behind bars and denied a hospital bed.
There is order in the court. There is chaos on the streets. And they meet in the main hall of Thames magistrates court in the East End of London. It is busting with people – this guy made of muscle yelling at his tiny female lawyer “This is MY case, this is MY life”; the elegant Somali man with the beautiful black suit cruising quite lost through the crowd without a word of English to find his way; the young Bengali lad who just blew a spliff in the toilets; the prosecutor reading “God Knows” by Joseph Heller; the little knot of regular defence lawyers, Charlie and Teresa and Denis and Keith, swapping the gossip and wondering how long it will be before somebody tells them the new security code for the door to their room so they can finally start work for the day.
Joey Ganguli is at it all the time. He lives and breathes and earns his rolls of cash right in the middle of the Asian gang wars which run through criminal life in the East End of London like beach life runs through Blackpool.
Senior probation officers have told the Guardian that some life prisoners are being kept behind bars for two or three years too long, simply because their overstretched service cannot provide the reports which the parole board needs to consider their release.
For £400, Allan Seymour would stop breaking the law. He’s been breaking it now for 34 years. He’s been punished with fines, punished in the community, punished in prison. Everybody is always telling him they’re going to rehabilitate him – he’s done all the courses. But here he is: 53 years old and up in court yet again. All for want of £400.
Andrew Chubb devoted most of his working life to justice, first as a lawyer in the merchant navy, then as a barrister (he appeared, for example, at the Rosemary West murder trial) and finally as a crown court judge on the western circuit – nearly 30 years of service to this country’s system of civil and criminal justice. Then he died. And justice deserted him.
To be more precise: the police failed effectively to investigate his death; two forensic experts produced reports whose conclusions quite openly owed more to guesswork than to evidence; a pathologist conducted a post-mortem which came up with a cause of death which was not proven; a coroner returned a verdict which does not stand up to scrutiny; and so, the truth was lost – because the system failed on almost every front, even when it was required to investigate the possible murder of a judge.
“Whatever damage we have done to Al Qaida, they continue to operate…. Whatever damage they are able to inflict, they will do so. We cannot be sure where or when they will strike. But we can be certain they will try.” David Blunkett, Home Secretary.
There are a lot of chief constables who would happily strangle George Dixon. It’s not so much that the old BBC copper with his folksy winking ways makes any real officer look inadequate, nor even that he had the infuriating advantage of scriptwriters to deliver his perfect results. The real problem is that Dixon is cemented into the public imagination – and he’s not very good at his job.
Here is a safe bet: at some point in the future, there will be a major scandal in this country when police are exposed for submitting fictitious reports of their work; specifically, we will discover that they have been cheating in their recording of crime and cheating in their claims to be detecting it.
