The Eternal Quest To Blame Crime on Anyone But Criminals

Book Review: ‘The Knife Went In’ (2018), by Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of Anthony Daniels, was born in London in 1949 to Jewish parents. Qualifying as a doctor in 1974, and as a psychiatrist later in the 1970s, Daniels had jobs in depressed areas of Britain, the Midlands and the East End of London, and in Rhodesia, South Africa, and Kiribati. By the early 1980s, Daniels was combining journalism with his medical work, travelling in Africa—at one point traversing the continent solely on public transport, which took six months—and Latin America, as well as touring behind the Iron Curtain just as the Soviet Empire was crumbling and thereafter visiting the remaining Communist outposts, including North Korea.

In 1990, Daniels took a job as a prison doctor in Birmingham and simultaneously worked in a nearby hospital. This was to be his life until he retired fifteen years later, and it is largely experiences from this period that are related in The Knife Went In, a phrase Daniels heard “invariably” from the murderers he met, who made it seem “as if it were the knife that guided the hand rather than the hand that guided the knife”.

The Knife Went In is structured in a slightly odd way, a series of snapshots of aspects of the British prison system—and the related worlds of the medical and psychological professions, academia, and the courts—but because these elements overlap so much, there are no neat divisions between the chapters, and the description of events is interspersed with Daniels’ thoughts, in real time and on reflection, such that the book also doubles as a semi-memoir. There is no overarching narrative nor sustained argument, as such, except perhaps how monstrously ridiculous the entire set-up is, with political pressure, the fads of psychotherapy, and a number of other factors creating an incentive structure that favours the promotion of mediocre careerists and forces even diligent employees to implement policies that produce the opposite outcomes to those that are the stated aims of the various institutions.

The late Soviet historian Robert Conquest formulated three laws of politics, the last of which was: “The best way to understand the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies”.¹ The British criminal justice is an advanced case, even by the competitive modern standards, and Daniels is an excellent guide through this thicket, conveying his experiences with great economy, an eye for telling details, and at-times-jarring honesty—about himself, the motives for certain actions and his thinking, and on sensitive subjects where it would have been easier to tailor his interpretation to the currently fashionable view or omit the case entirely.

Unexpectedly, given the grim subject matter, the book is also very funny. Daniels does not make light of the horrors nor hold up those involved for ridicule, but Daniels does not pretend not to notice the surrealness of some of the situations he ended up in and the basic absurdity of humans, especially when they staff bureaucracies or are trying to avoid the consequences of their actions.

THE DECLINE OF THE BRITISH MURDER

Early in the book, Daniels describes the case of an unemployed man murdered by four people, one of them a woman, with whom he had formed a sort of drinking club—they staggered the days on which they received their benefit payments so that there was always money for alcohol. The man had borrowed £10 and said he was unable to pay it back. His comrades did not believe him and went to his flat:

The victim … was disabled, close to heart failure, and able to move to and from his electrically-reclining chair only with difficulty. That made it easier to torture him. They broke his legs, they broke his ribs (all of them), they fractured his skull. They boiled kettles and poured the water over him. … Eventually, they concluded that he really didn’t have the money … and the four left the flat together to go for a drink, having already consumed what was in his flat. … He must have died within the hour.

The woman said she was a bystander, too afraid to intervene during the torture—or refuse to accompany the men for a drink afterwards. Her defence suggested she might be cognitively impaired and unable to follow a trial. Daniels administered the intelligence test. Part of this was asking the woman if she could remember anything recent from the news. She could: a woman had stabbed three men to death. The woman was struck by the incongruity, since men usually commit such crimes. “I don’t know what this world’s coming to”, she remarked.

In microcosm here one can see the squalid nature of most of the cases Daniels dealt with. Hannibal Lecter these people are not, nor are they the “respectable” killers chronicled by George Orwell in ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ (1946). The nearest Daniels got to those middle-class, profit- or status-seeking murders was two cases where the motive was collecting on a life-insurance policy, and the murderers were so unimaginative that in neither case did they wait more than a fortnight “after the sum assured was increased dramatically before disposing of their victims”.

The criminals Daniels worked with came from what we would once have called the lower orders. That there are people in Britain who end lives over £10 can seem impossible to those in the British middle- and upper-classes, but I can say from experience of growing up in a “rough” or “under-class” neighbourhood that alarming brutality for baffling trivial reasons is disturbingly common, and Daniels captures the atmospherics, habits, and thought processes of these areas very well. Anyone who has lived in such a place will immediately be struck with recognition at Daniels’ remark that it is a “radically loveless world”, where “human relationships [are] struggles for power, control, and advantage”.

One can tell how immersed Daniels became in these areas because he picks up on the turns of phrase and the connotations that go with them. For instance, the men who would say, “My [usually pronounced ‘me’] head’s gone”, and their female victims who would attest that their partners had “gone into one” preceding some violent episode. Gone where and what “one” was were never specified, but the imputation is that the man had no control over what had happened; he had “lost it”. Daniels was able to cut through this by asking the women so victimised if their boyfriends would behave this way in his presence: the answer was “no”, and most were able immediately to see that the violence was a deliberate control mechanism, not an impulse problem.

A conclusion Daniels stresses from cases like this is that those in this milieu are not stupid. He notes that he rarely had to alter the way spoke to be understood. When faced with those who claimed their criminality resulted from having “fell in with the wrong crowd”, Daniels would note how curious it was that he met so many such people and never any of the crowd itself. His interlocuter would always see the point and laugh. One prisoner asked Daniels if he burgled houses because of his (admittedly awful) childhood. Daniels said there was no connection whatsoever. When the man asked why he did it, then, Daniels replied, “Because you’re lazy … and want things that you won’t work for”. Laughter was again the reaction: the man knew it was true and was more relieved than anything else, “as if he had no longer to play a difficult assigned role”.

CRIME AND RESPONSIBILITY

This brings us to what might count as a thread that does run through the book: The question of where responsibility lies for criminality. In the last century, academic and liberal consensus was that society was to blame—this was a pillar of Marxist theology, hence the refusal of the Soviet Union to recognise it had any serial killers; there could be no demons in the Garden of Eden. Of late, the tendency is to medicalise criminality. There are survey figures in circulation purporting to show that 70% of prisoners have “mental health needs”. Daniels pours scorn on these claims as “not only mistaken but bogus and intended to mislead”:

The figures are intended to suggest that most prisoners are ill and ought to be in hospital—or that prison itself ought to be a kind of hospital. They insinuate both that current … imprisonment is unjust, as well as that the psychiatric services ought to be almost indefinitely expanded to meet the needs for the poor criminals. They express an implicit deep belief in the efficacy of such services.

By comparison, the belief in the efficacy of miracle-working statues of the virgin is rational and well-founded. Is it really the case that for every human failing there is an equal and opposite therapy available as there is a Saint in the Catholic Church?

Such surveys of prisoners fail to notice that psychiatric diagnosis has become so loose and all-encompassing, and the notion of mental health issues so limitless, that it would be possible to interpret the figure of seventy per cent as proving that prisoners are healthier than the general population.

Daniels does not deny that people have mental illnesses that impact their behaviour, obviously. Take this:

The young man [on the block] who thought he was Jesus was quite excitable, and he was frustrated that no one would believe him. His imprisonment, to him, was part of his martyrdom.

“How do you know you’re Jesus?” I asked him.

“My father, which art in Heaven, hath told me,” he said … He banged the table with his fist …

“And your mother?”, I asked.

“Oh, she lives in South Shields.”

Daniels says he kept a straight face. How he managed that, I will never know. It is interesting, too, that even in cases this extreme the social dynamics are visible: religious delusions have drastically decreased as Christian belief in Britain has collapsed.

Many other cases were far more hair-raising—a man who tried to eat a lightbulb and attach himself to the mains, another who kept cutting his abdomen to expose his entrails, the prisoner who fouled his own cell and attacked anyone who spoke to him because he was interpreting words directed towards him as threats. A similar incident involved an illegal Chinese immigrant, who stabbed his roommate to death in what he believed was self-defence. After an arduous legal process, made all the worse by the isolating language barrier, the complete absence of other Chinese inmates among the 1,400 he was imprisoned with, and the expectation he would be shot after a show trial, the man received a relatively light sentence since it was apparent his was a psychotic episode not of his own making and he was cooperative in taking the medication that quickly returned him to sanity.

In these cases, Daniels plainly says the people involved are “mad” or “insane”, words that have passed out of use as too crude and simplistic, if not offensive, but which describe something very real when confronted with (or labouring under) it. What Daniels insists on is a distinction between true madness of this type, and the modern schema of “personality disorders”, which up to 40% of prisoners are said to suffer from.

Where things get murky between these two poles are with people who are “morally insane”, those later called “psychopaths” and now designated as sufferers of—what else?—“antisocial personality disorder”.² There is no brain scan or scientific test that can find biological markers of psychopathy. Those who have tried to scientise psychopathy as a “lack of appropriate empathy” are, Daniels documents, ultimately reduced to the language of morality: levels of “appropriateness” are determined a priori, based on the moral assumptions of the culture where the findings are made. The studies end up saying little more than that they have found someone whose value system departs significantly from the majority’s.

Nevertheless, Daniels argues there is a genuine phenomenon of people who kill animals as children, cheat and rob those who are best to them, lie as a matter of principle, feel entitled to rape and kill, and generally regard all moral-social norms and laws as curious customs others follow—at least until some perceived slight or injustice is done to them, at which point they can become exquisitely sensitive indeed about the courtesies humans owe to one-another, and highly legalistic about the State’s obligations to them. Psychopaths are unlikely to be deterred, let alone cured.

Daniels contends that there are relatively few genuine psychopaths. Regardless, psychopathy is frequently offered by the defence as a mitigating factor when their client cannot outright deny responsibility for murder. It does not always work.³ But judges are rather credulous if presented with a psychological test—the graphs and standard deviations provoke “the reverence afforded the Golden Calf”, Daniels writes. This is not limited to psychopaths.

Daniels recounts an amusing case where a man tried to defraud a company by claiming to have suffered a psychological injury because of their negligence that left him unable to concentrate, then, in front of the judge, demonstrated over several days of ferocious cross-examination an absolute mastery of thousands of pages of detail, his memory faltering only when a truthful answer would be damaging to his case. The judge believed the psychological test and awarded him compensation.

When one tries to find the foundation of “personality disorders”, Daniels argues, one discovers they are a synonym for “bad character”. He is not much impressed with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (we are up to DSM-5), but even playing by its terms diagnosing personality disorders is spongy and subjective, and when used as a defence in court it tends to be even thinner gruel—barristers arguing their clients have the “risk factors” for “developing the condition”. Which they might do, but a diagnosis from that is like seeing someone smoking and concluding they have lung cancer.

The “personality disorders” defence also has a sinister logic to it:

The argument seems to be this: a person with a congenitally weak or bad character, such as this woman [who had murdered her baby] was said to have had, was less morally responsible for her act than would have been a woman of strong or good character. In other words, she was held to a lower standard of conduct than even a normal person, let alone a paragon. … On this view of the matter, a person who has led a life of crime is less to be reprehended than a person who has given way to a momentary temptation of passion.

“Psychiatrists … regard character as something one has rather than as something that one is”, Daniels writes, leading to the “psychiatrisation of the human condition”. The language used, and the shoddy philosophy underlying it, allow a man “to preserve a favourable, indeed immaculate, view of himself despite his repeated despicable behaviour”. This “Original Virtue” is taken as axiomatic, and actions judged—or even flatly denied—on its basis. One prisoner who had already thrown ammonia in the face of one girlfriend denied he was responsible for throwing acid in the face of his latest girlfriend—despite not being able to remember what he was doing at the time the attack happened—“because I don’t do them things”. He was not taking refuge behind the technicality of the chemical, nor straightforwardly lying. He just felt his actions should be judged by his (self-created) reputation, rather than the other way around. It is a quasi-gnostic paradigm in which people have an essence—a soul—that remains innocent and unblemished no matter what they actually do.

An irony is that the psychiatric profession, while working overtime to provide nebulous mental illness defences for criminals, can be strangely imperceptive to blatant madness. The most serious case Daniels reports was a man of Jamaican background, who had spent his pre-trial detention talking angrily to the television in his cell, and then took no interest at all in his trial for murder, pacing in the box behind bullet-proof glass and muttering to himself. The court psychiatrist insisted this was quite normal for someone of his “cultural background”. The judge was ultimately able to wring sense from the psychiatrist. In fairness, the problem here was cowardice not incompetence, but it only restates the issue since politics looms so large in psychiatry.

It was to satirise the medicalisation of human nature that Thomas Szasz, the Hungarian-born American psychiatrist perhaps most famous for The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), wrote a paper arguing, as Daniels summarises, “that happiness be henceforth considered as a psychiatric condition because it was rare, often led to bad decisions, and was rarely justified by objective conditions. It was therefore delusory.” While Szasz’s strangest ideas caught on, at least from a policy perspective,⁴ this aspect of his thinking did not. Rather to the contrary. In one of many cases where Daniels hits on a detail, apparently small but which will stay with the reader and sheds light on the whole societal landscape, he draws attention to the disappearance of the word “unhappy” and its replacement with “depressed”. Bliss is now considered the default state and deviations from it require chemical remedies.

DRUGS AND POVERTY

Speaking of which: many will doubtless wonder about the role of drugs in all this, and Daniels writes quite a lot on the topic. The observations Daniels made of prisoners do not accord with the current official position that drug “addiction” is a disease, specifically “a chronic relapsing brain disease”.

When it came to habitual users of heroin, the first thing of note was that most were criminals before they took it—they did not commit crime to “feed their habit”. Second, to take heroin requires learning how to inject it, overcoming the natural disinclination to stick a needle in themselves, and taking it for roughly eighteen months before signs of physical dependence manifest. If there was “hooking” going on here, the men and women were hooking the drug, not vice versa. Third, heroin users would try to “score” from the doctor on the way into prison, inventing some ailment and showing considerable acting talents. When refused, as often as not they would take it in good humour (“it was worth a try”). Heroin was clearly a source of pleasure, not a crippling “demon”. Daniels adds: “I never saw any serious consequences of heroin withdrawal—not one in hundreds of cases.” The depictions of going “cold turkey” from heroin in books and films are “gross exaggerations”, says Daniels, though concedes they have shaped the popular imagination and the view is likely too deeply rooted to be corrected.

The contrast Daniels noticed with alcoholics is striking. The alcoholics themselves “never tried to inveigle medication”, despite withdrawal symptoms from alcohol being very serious: 5% to 10% of people with delirium tremens die. Alcohol dependence really did seem to have an association with misery in prisoners’ minds. But—another contrast—the Prison Service and Home Office seemed much less interested in the fate of alcoholics as against drug-users.

A final aspect some are no-doubt wondering about is “poverty”, an excuse in the modern world for everything from shoplifting to terrorism. The leap in logic here is profound: the majority of criminals being poor does not mean poverty is the cause of crime. And when one steps out of the realm of ideology, into the world as it actually is, any causality seems to be the inverse to that commonly supposed.

The poverty in Britain, after all, is distinctly relative. It was not all that long ago that British people in far worse material circumstances went out without locking their front doors. As Daniels notes, anything stolen in such circumstances had a greater marginal value, yet few stole. The exponential increase in crime through the second half of the twentieth century occurred as prosperity increased, though the number of criminologists concluding that increased wealth is the cause of crime remains small. It can be added that where poverty remains most stubborn in Britain, crime is one of the causes, not the consequences. In Africa, amid genuine, food-insecure deprivation, Daniels found people living respectably: “poverty is not the same as degradation”. This is clearly recognised in many places in Britain even now; if it was not so, given the relative poverty rates, the whole country would be a warzone. The underclass in Britain is better thought of as a cultural milieu than an economic class and it is more productive to look for the causes of crime in the ideas governing the norms in these areas, rather than the income levels—the subject of another of Daniels’ books.

There is also a glaring fact that is almost always absent from this discussion: “if the majority of criminals are poor, the great majority of their victims are likewise poor. Since the class of victim is very much larger than that of perpetrator, each perpetrator committing on average many crimes a year, lenience towards criminals is not tantamount to tenderness towards the poor.”

POLITICS AND THE POLICE

One reason for the staggering rise in crime in Britain, especially over the last half-century, is the increased opportunities. There is simply far less effort in Britain in the twenty-first century to repress crime than there was in the past.

Sir Robert Peel’s intention in creating the Metropolitan Police in 1829 was primarily to prevent crime, not only to protect persons and property, but to minimise the need to infringe anyone’s rights—less crime would mean less people punished and deprived of their liberty. The centrepiece of this was visible police foot patrols by single constables armed with a whistle and a truncheon,⁵ which remained in place through the crisis of Fenian and anarchist terrorism and two world wars, but could not survive the Sixties Revolution, which had no patience for authority of any kind. The replacement of patrolling policemen with CCTV cameras since then has produced endemic violence in British society on a scale that makes the restoration of such patrols unthinkable: to protect themselves, never mind the public, it would require police officers to at least be in pairs and likely be equipped with firearms.

Thus, the police’s prevention mission has completely collapsed, and in practice so has punishment, albeit political necessity mandates the maintenance of the pretence, since most of the public still believes criminals deserve to be punished. The people who actually matter, however, believe crime results from mental illness or socio-economic deprivation, and punishing individuals swept up by these immovable forces is senseless and downright cruel. Under this outlook, criminals are victims in need of treatment and rehabilitation.⁶

The problem, of course, is that even if one grants the rehabilitationist premise, nobody has figured out how to rehabilitate criminals.⁷ There is a form of “rehabilitation” that works fairly reliably, but it is not one the State can administer.

“The fact is that prisoners mature and by the time they are in their late thirties very few of them continue their life of crime, irrespective of what is done, or not done, for them”, writes Daniels.⁸ The implications of this are not friendly to penological liberals. Daniels does not get into this, but it strongly suggests a biological component to people’s predisposition to criminality, which will not be ameliorated by finger painting or group therapy. And in policy terms, it suggests imposing longer prison sentences on people with a demonstrated propensity to criminal activity to keep them off the streets as much as possible until they are nearing forty-years-of-age, when they will likely spontaneously give up crime. Needless to say, this is not the view of the British criminal justice system and its operations reflect that.

Anyone who lives in London will know there is no point reporting property theft. The police do not even go through the motions of trying to recover stolen items and prosecute thieves. These crimes are only recorded when somebody needs a “crime number” for the insurance.⁹ The same is true with lots of crimes against persons. In speaking to prisoners over fifteen years, Daniels’ finding was consistent: they had been convicted of five to ten crimes before they were ever imprisoned, and they would confess in the sanctity of the doctor’s office that they had committed five to twenty times more crimes that they were never caught and charged for. Getting into prison is damnably difficult in Britain and most criminals who manage it are not there for long. Sentences are a “fraud perpetrated on the public”, as Daniels correctly puts it: the real sentence is half of that nominally handed down.

The issue of crime-related numbers as a whole is a thorny one in Britain. “A lot of mental effort … goes into manipulating the statistics, mainly downwards”, as Daniels documents. This takes various forms. One method (see above) is for the police to simply avoid arresting and prosecuting criminals, so the crimes are never recorded—and over time this has the “positive” feedback effect of the public ceasing to report crimes. Another method is to define down the most serious crimes, above all murder, which is generally prosecuted as manslaughter. These methods implemented before the recording of crimes are supplemented by presentational trickery afterwards, such as changes to the intervals between the release of crime stats—the irregularity confounds comparisons (a statistical batch covering two years is difficult to compare with one covering three months)—and/or the government carefully selecting the start date for the comparison with current crime levels to show an apparent decline.¹⁰

These statistical shenanigans are the cause of the radical disconnect between the Britain of official data about crime and the country Britons actually live in. This is not to say all Britons. In so many ways, the mystery in modern Britain is that there is not more crime. The habits of decency, self-restraint, and honesty that ruled in a previous age have had a long enough afterlife that an extraordinary proportion of the population follows the law even though there is little chance of punishment for breaking it. The underclass areas where crime is disruptive of day-to-day life are generally quite geographically isolated—out of sight (and mind) for the middle-classes that provide most of the civil servants and journalists, who compile and disseminate the official crime stats, and their own experiences doubtless give little reason to question them. It is only when crime breaks into the middle-class bubble that some begin to see how hopeless their world would be if they were regularly menaced by people of predatory intent and truly needed the British police to protect them.

The well-meaning middle-class staff at the hospital where Daniels worked proved to be in far more danger than the working-class prison guards. Daniels had written several times to the Chief Constable about the need for a police presence after a series of assaults on nurses. After a nurse was punched in the face, and Daniels complained that the policeman who happened to be standing six feet away did nothing, the police finally reacted—putting up posters saying that violence against staff in the hospital would be prosecuted. Non-staff on hospital premises and staff once off hospital premises were apparently fair game. Daniels’ equitable tone is briefly disrupted by his reference to the Chief Constable as an “unscrupulous liar, more a politician than a policeman”, whose priority was protecting the government from criticism rather than protecting the public. The incentives created by this kind of leadership filter down.

Daniels records an remarkable episode where a lunatic was apprehended after he had attacked and nearly killed a woman at a bus stop with a meat cleaver while shouting: “Mary, Queen of Scots, was innocent, so you have to die as well.” Daniels arrived—and his car was promptly broken into and his radio stolen. When Daniels told the desk sergeant, he said this happened a lot outside a police station, named the family responsible, and shrugged at any suggestion he should do anything about this. Examining the detainee, Daniels confirmed he was mad and said he should be charged with attempted murder—not because of any expectation of conviction, but to ensure the crime stats were correct, and to allow a trial where the victim could see a resolution, which would surely be a verdict of insanity that had the man placed somewhere secure. The police officer was having none of that: the targets issued from above were to keep the stats down, so he refused to record the crime and blackmailed Daniels into finding a hospital for the man, threatening to release him “and even give him back his cleaver, as it was his property”, since there was no charge to hold him under.

Just sometimes, the police’s “struggle to do nothing” can be overcome by turning the careerist imperatives back on them. Prostitutes had begun lining the pavement of a middle-class neighbourhood, and the police response was that these “sex workers” were “victims”, so there was no sense in “victimising” them any further by prosecuting them. A lady in her seventies, of that (literally) dying breed who were sturdied through world war and are still imbued with the spirit of the old world, banged on the senior policeman’s desk and told him, “That is not the law”. This was after the lady had started writing down the license plates of the prostitutes’ “customers” and had a pistol brandished at her by the pimp whose business was being depressed by her activities.¹¹ (“Don’t be silly. Put that thing away”, she had told him, and he meekly complied.) The senior policeman recognised she would not let this drop and could cause him real trouble; he could not intimidate her—as a policeman did to Daniels’ wife by suggesting he would prosecute her for wasting police time when she reported their skip being set on fire—and she could not be bamboozled with legalise and bureaucratic buck-passing, as so many less educated and less verbally fluent people are in Britain. The police soon shooed the prostitutes on to a neighbourhood lacking such a brave and persistent woman.

BUREAUCRACY DOES ITS THING

Individual policemen recorded in Daniels’ vignettes are brave and devoted to duty, but the police “as a corporate body” have been “emasculated”. The fundamental problem is that the relationship between the police’s purpose (suppressing crime) and the paperwork to record this has become inverted. Ensuring that the paperwork shows (or does not show) certain things has become the purpose of the police; what happens to crime itself is a sideshow. Administrative procedures conspire in Britain to be “simultaneously a means of work-creation and work-avoidance … The procedures require the expenditure of time and effort while preventing or obstructing the pursuit of the ostensible goal of the whole organisation.” Add in the ever-expanding regulations to counter an increasingly litigious culture that have shrunk the space for discretion and common sense, and doing nothing becomes by far the most reasonable path for ambitious individuals.

The same pattern is seen in the prison service and the State medical system. An example from each.

At one point in the 1990s, bad publicity about prison suicides made it an “issue” for the government. The existing forms that had been a practical warning system for staff were replaced with new forms, designed as devices for deflecting political criticism. The incentives meant a vast increase in the number of prisoners “on the book”: no blame attached to opening a book, but the consequences could be serious for failing to open a book or closing one. Vast amounts of time were now expended filling in the new forms, usually incorrectly since they were so intricate, and the original purpose was lost: if everyone is a suicide risk, there is no prioritisation. At one inquest after a suicide, the representative of the deceased’s family alighted on the new form being incorrectly filled in, with the apparent implication that the suicide would not have happened if the form was filled in correctly. Absurd as this was, Daniels shut down this line of inquiry by pointing out that suicides had increased since the new form was introduced.

The example from the psychiatric services is, unsurprisingly, also form-related. A man murdered his wife and burned himself to death a day after being discharged. The “Risk Assessment Form” had been filled out: the man’s repeated statements that he intended to kill himself were diligently recorded, as was his patient history, but the nurse “ignored its obvious import completely. It was as though she thought that the recording of the history was an end in itself, a religious ceremony propitiating goodness knows what god.” Daniels was brought in to oversee the investigation afterwards. It transpired that patient histories—“the most fundamental task in all clinical work”—were not usually taken. But that was only the beginning. The Risk Assessment Forms showed no consistency in usage; the box for violent tendencies could be marked “yes” on one day and “no” the next day without any explanation or follow-up. After reading hundreds of pages on a patient it “was impossible to form any impression of the patient or what, if anything, was wrong with him, or even why he was a patient at all”.

What had gone wrong was plain as day:

[T]he staff was … stupefied by the meaningless, dull, repetitious, and time-consuming procedures that they were obliged to carry out. These obscured from them the real purpose of their work. Completing forms was not an aid to their work, but had become the work itself. The nurses and others thought they were working merely because they were performing tasks laid down for them by their superiors. When they had filed a form they felt that sense of accomplishment that one experiences on completing a task. That the information contained on the form they had just filled was either useless or contradictory did not occur to or worry them. … The responsibility for this lamentable state of affairs was that of the administration which was itself, no doubt, under pressure to conform to higher levels of procedure.

The meta-coda to this was Daniels’ discovery that he was not meant to actually investigate what had gone wrong. His report was meant to be part of the active inertia of the bureaucracy, a box-checking exercise that could be held up to say the matter had been looked into and, save for the odd slight mistake, it had found that “all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds”. The report he submitted and his conclusions were “diluted down to the last homeopathic strength”, and to ensure nobody could accidentally get anything from the report it was published in impenetrable prose.

When the administrators realised the new suicide form was not bringing the suicide rate down, they sent the staff for “suicide awareness training”—and left the prison so understaffed a prisoner was able to commit suicide. The regulations that excised judgment from the prison officer role created endless administrative busy-work, while doing little towards the perfect justice they sought, though in the compliment that vice pays to virtue, sloppy paperwork—a charge that could be used against almost anyone since the forms are near-impossible to fill out correctly—turned out to be the easiest way to get rid of abusive prison wardens. Certainly easier than getting a dismissal on suspicion of blinding a prisoner past modern employment law.

After a point with a failing bureaucracy, all attempts at improvement will just make things worse, Daniels notes. Reforms to reduce administrators will multiply administration and every cost-cutting measure will increase expenditure. The system becomes so warped away from its original mission, and the idealistic and dutiful are so thoroughly purged and deterred from entry, that there is no way and nobody to right the ship. There are only so many times an officer who drags a prisoner out of a burning cell can be reprimanded, because he did not “follow procedure”, before the only officers left are those who will leave prisoners in burning cells.

THE EFFICACY OF PRISON

A puzzle Daniels noticed was that he would spend his mornings in the hospital, where the victims of home invasions never saw justice done—by that time, few went through the pointless charade of reporting the crime—and would then spend his evenings next door in a prison full of burglars. How can this be?

One answer Daniels found early in his career, which he “had not in the least expected to find”, was that some criminals in effect turned themselves in: “a surprising proportion of the prisoners preferred prison to life ‘on the out’.” When asked why, they would often say prison was “safer”—not just physically. Prison was often the only place where they would be treated for long-standing medical issues, and, in the days before prescription-happy prison doctors and methadone, it was often their only break from drink and drugs. Prisoners also found being freed of obligations like child-rearing (or at least dealing with the children’s mother) and managing bills congenial. It was more than that, though. The imposed discipline and routine—being told what to do and when—was experienced as a form of liberation. Many who had turned to drugs did so to escape reality, with its need to make choices to direct their own life; the prison guards were a less demanding master. They were safer from themselves in prison. Prison having become “the rest-home of the underclass” is not the whole story, of course.

Daniels does not put it like this, but one can draw the conclusion from what he records: the central paradox of a liberal criminal justice regime is that its herculean efforts to keep criminals out of prison incentivises so much crime that the prisons end up much fuller than under a more robust regime. The high number of inmates is then used as “evidence” that the criminal justice system is harsh, and the high levels of crime is used to claim “prison does not work”—therefore the “solution” is to liberalise it even further. One could perhaps admire such an ingeniously hermetic syllogism if so many people were not robbed, raped, and murdered because of it.

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NOTES

1. Conquest’s First Law was, “Everyone is conservative about what they know best”, and the Second was, “Any organisation not explicitly and constitutionally Right-wing will sooner or later become Left-wing”. Most people will have come across examples of (1), the wild-eyed reformists who become suddenly cautious when you suggest their department/discipline/industry could use some radical changes. (2) is self-evident: Conquest gave as examples the Church of England and Amnesty International. (3) was generally meant to refer to the way bureaucracies seem to conspire to produce the opposite outcome(s) to the declared intention(s), but there are examples—like the British intelligence services in the 1940s—where an organisation was literally captured by a secret cabal of its enemies.

2. Daniels is contemptuous of the way “psychiatrists think they are advancing knowledge and understanding when they change terminology”, and suggests the annual Recent Progress in Psychiatry book series would have been much better named Recent Activity in Psychiatry.

3. Daniels recounts seeing an eminent academic of psychopathy, the kind of figure used to environment where either a herd of independent minds agrees with him or he is the source of authority bringing enlightenment to the benighted, demolished in three minutes in the witness box when the only “evidence” he could adduce that the murderer was a psychopath was that the crime he had committed was that of a psychopath. Daniels spent the encounter looking down at his shoes and the second-hand embarrassment just from reading about it is excruciating.

4. Szasz left his homeland before the arrival of the Red Army, but he was understandably sensitive about State overreach, and he ended up arguing against involuntary treatment tout court. Without a demonstrable physical pathology, mental illnesses were only metaphors, said Szasz, therefore to confine someone to a sanitorium was tyrannous. By definition, Szasz did not believe there could be diagnoses of what did not exist, so what psychologists were calling symptoms he believed were really just variations in human behaviour. Where such behaviour led to criminal acts, people should be punished for them the same as anybody else since they were bad, not ill, according to Szasz, but for the medical profession to be engaged in surveilling (during therapy) and on the basis of their subjective judgments about the conduct of others consigning people to mental hospitals was equivalent to imprisoning people for pre-crime. Szasz’s ideas were to gain major mainstream traction, symbolised in the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the deinstitutionalisation movement has only gained strength in the decades since, creating a host of societal problems.

5. In the narrative retellings of the 1888 “Jack the Ripper” case, whether written or on the screen, one of the sources of tension and mystery is how the killer manages to carry out such elaborately grisly crimes in so short a period of time because a policeman is always so close at hand. These were unarmed lone constables patrolling Whitechapel, a then-notorious slum in London’s East End.

6. There was a cartoon published in the 1970s satirising the liberal view of crime. I can’t find the original, but the gist was two social workers finding a man beaten up in the gutter, stepping over him, and fretting that the person who attacked him must have had a very difficult life.

7. “Rehabilitation” can devolve into near-meaninglessness. Daniels is not the reactionary some might suppose, being quite happy with most of the reforms to inmate conditions he witnessed during his time in the prisons, and insistent “there is an ethical duty to try to do something for the prisoners, even if the efforts prove unsuccessful”, beyond “mere incapacitation”.

A program to help prisoners learn to write was something he supported. The classes started with prisoners writing out their biographies. An interesting side-effect of this narrative task was that most of the prisoners involved dropped the evasions and rationalisations about their crimes: they could see that they came to decision-points and chose wrongly. This was a self-selecting group, presumably more intelligent and inclined to want to better themselves, so perhaps that is what was being reflected here. “Scientific” evidence to prove the program did any “good” would have been impossible, and the cost-cutters shut it down before it ever got that.

Some might consider this writing program to be rehabilitative in nature, and lexicographically they have a point. The rehabilitationists referred to in the body of this article are those who oppose punishing criminals, usually because they are adherents to blank slate theology in one form or another.

8. Sex crimes—overwhelmingly committed by men—are an important exception to the general rule that criminals cease their illegal activities by the age of 40. This does not much affect the debate over punishment and sentencing, however, because rape tends to be exceptional in the liberal imagination—it is the one crime where feminists and radicals frequently directly call for punishment and their complaint against society is that the penalty for perpetrators is not harsh enough.

9. A few months ago, a friend of mine had his mobile telephone stolen out of his hand on the street in London. He initially had no inclination to report it to the police, knowing they would do nothing, but did ultimately need a crime number to secure a replacement from the phone company. The police, as it turned out, were able to tell him that he was the victim of a rather intricate organised criminal scheme with an international dimension whose operations had ramped up lately, yet there was no sense from his interlocuters that this analytical finding had any corollary when it came to police obligations. A dreadful business, to be sure, but the police spoke about it as if it was a weather event. What were they expected to do about it?

10. There is confounding factor when it comes to the murder rate that, while somewhat advantageous to British governmental claims to be tackling crime, is not of their own making: advances in medical technology.

The official statistics show there were about 300 murders per year from 1900 to the early 1960s. There was a steady increase in homicides from the mid-1960s onwards, reaching 600 per year by the late 1970s, 800 per year at the turn of the millennium, peaking at over-1,000 murders in 2002, slowly declining to 600 homicides per year by 2010 and rising back to 700 per year in 2016, where it has more or less remained ever since. Bad enough on its face that the murder rate has doubled and tripled in the period since the death penalty was abolished and the liberal reforms have been implemented, but these figures rather undersell the problem.

Setting aside the issue of how the manslaughter charge has been (mis)used over the last several decades, if Britain in the 2020s had the medical capabilities of the 1960s, the number of murders would be far higher—five times higher, according to one of the few attempts to calculate this. There are caveats, not least that that calculation was in 2002, but suffice it to say there are large numbers of people who routinely survive forms of violent attack at the present time because of medical interventions who would have died if such injuries were inflicted on them half-a-century ago. The understatement of the levels of brutality that results from comparing past and present murder rates is not the fault of the statisticians—the difference between alive and dead is rather clear—but it is something to be kept in mind if one is genuinely interested in the societal history of Britain.

11. Daniels notes we have not yet settled on a “correct” term for pimps, but offers “brief sexual encounter facilitators” in the interim.