Lock 'em up! Throw away the key! Hang the lot of 'em!

This month, another depressingly vile story about Jon Venables, one of the killers of James Bulger, broke, along with news that the equally vile Michael Adebowale, one of the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby, will be moved from a high-security prison to the apparently "luxurious" Broadmoor. Then, a few weeks ago, there was a minor outcry because Tristen Asllani, an Albanian man locked up in the UK on a 25-year sentence for drugs and weapons offences, boasted online about how much fun he was having in the amusement parlour that is Wandsworth prison. 

Yet it is absolutely worth having an intelligent conversation about prison reform because the current system is not working and passing blanket laws on the basis of extreme examples is never a good idea.

When I studied legal studies for my Higher School Certificate, the equivalent in my Australian home state of New South Wales to the A-Levels, we were taught that criminal punishment has four aims: retribution, protection of society, deterrence and rehabilitation. With prisons overcrowded to the point of being dangerous for staff and inmates, the only aim that is even close to being met is retribution, a satisfaction of our base need to punish the bastards, even if the punishment is ultimately ineffective or expensive or both.

Sure, society is protected from genuinely dangerous people, such as Venables, Adebowale and Asllani by locking them up - but what about the prisoners who have served their time and come out of the prison system learning little more than how to be a better criminal? How is that outcome improving either the life of the ex-prisoner or society as a whole?

And prison is clearly not working as a deterrent - in August 2017, prisoner numbers stood at 86,413, an increase of 1,200 since May 2017. In the past 30 years, the prison population has risen by 82%. The most recent recidivism stats released by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) in January 2018 come from the first quarter of 2016 - these showed the overall reoffending rate was at 29.6%, a figure that tends to fluctuate between 29% and 32%. In adult prisoners, the rate is 28.7% and in juvenile offenders 42.3%. None of this is good news.

One of the big reasons for overcrowded prisons is the over-reliance on custodial sentences for non-violent offences - MoJ figures reveal that 71% of prisoners in the UK are locked up for non-violent offences, and the use of the more effective community sentences has almost halved since 2006. Short prison sentences, instead of community sentences, are especially useless as a deterrent - according to the MoJ, almost 8,000 people serving a sentence of less than 12 months were recalled back to custody in the year to December 2016.

Whenever I think of the sheer futility and awfulness of custodial sentences for non-violent crimes, I am reminded of the dreadful case in Australia of Jamie Partlic. In 1987, the 19-year-old went to the notorious Long Bay jail, a prison that is home to some of New South Wales' most horrific and violent criminals. Partlic's crime was unpaid parking fines. After just four days in prison, he was beaten up so badly, he spent the next six months in a coma, sustaining permanent brain damage.

Perhaps we need to look to the example of the Netherlands where 19 prisons closed in 2013 because there weren't enough inmates to fill them. Instead of rushing to lock people up, particularly non-violent offenders, the Netherlands takes a far more level-headed approach. The ankle-monitoring system is heavily used to reduce reoffending rates with a 2008 study finding this cut recidivism by up to half compared to custodial sentences. It means that convicted criminals are still able to go to work and be productive members of society while still being monitored by the justice system.

Of course, whenever anyone dares raise their head over the parapet to call for improved, more humane prison conditions, there is the inevitable, moronic cry from the peanut gallery that "prison isn't meant to be a holiday camp". Everyone could debate for all time about the merits of allowing prisoners access to such things as TV sets in cells, internet access and recreational facilities, whether these should be for all inmates or whether they are only appropriate as a privilege for good behaviour, or whether they should only be for non-violent offenders in minimum security institutions, or not at all.

But to get bogged down in a mindless shouting match because someone read a fact-lite article  implying that all prisoners lead the life of Riley is to miss the point badly.

Nobody is seriously arguing that a stint in jail should be the equivalent of a holiday at an all-inclusive resort but nobody should seriously argue that it's perfectly fine for jails to be dirty, overcrowded shitholes with bad food. An unhygienic prison full of undernourished, often angry men (for it is men who are way more likely to be incarcerated than women) at risk of constantly getting physically and mentally ill, living cheek-by-jowl in conditions that are conducive to lost tempers bubbling over into full-blown riots, has no place in any country that purports to be civilised.

Oscar Wilde's account of prison life, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, should not be treated as a manifesto.

The deprivation of freedom is a major reason why prison is not a barrel of laughs, but this deprivation of freedom should not take place in an unhealthy environment where diseases spread easily. The risk of violence should be minimised wherever possible. Even if you genuinely don't give a damn about the wellbeing of any of the prisoners, think for a moment about the men and women who work in our prisons. They are as entitled to a safe working environment as anyone else.

And this brings me to rehabilitation - overcrowded prisons full of people susceptible to illness and on constant alert in case violence breaks out are useless for rehabilitation. The desire for retribution, for waving of metaphorical pitchforks, as if we are still living in an era of public executions, seems to far outweigh the importance of rehabilitation in conversations on prison conditions.

But to talk of the value of rehabilitation is not to be a soft touch or a liberal snowflake. It is to talk about ensuring that for the majority of prisoners, their time in prison is not a waste of life, a punitive means of passing time until the sentence is over and they are unleashed on the community again. Prisons should absolutely be used to equip inmates with skills for employability. Illiterate prisoners should absolutely have the opportunity to learn to read and write. Mental health issues should be as much of a priority for prison medical facilities as the patching up of shank wounds.

Rehabilitation - and a reduced reliance on jail sentences - is about getting serious about reducing reoffending rates, about ensuring that those who have served their time can be productive members of society when they are come out of prison, about making society better for everyone.

Yes, there will always be a minority of horrific criminals, such as Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, Fred and Rose West, Jon Venables and Michael Adebowale, where rehabilitation seems unlikely. But that does not mean that as a society we should simply give up all hope when it comes to the people who have ended up as convicted criminals for all manner of reasons. A focus on rehabilitation and not on simply locking people away at an ever-increasing rate have been shown to reduce crime rates and recidivism. If you have ever whined about your taxes being spent on prisons, if you have any desire for a safer society, you should support this.




Photography by George Hodan

Before tonight's broadcast, after the awful events in Manchester

Tonight, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn will be interviewed separately by Jeremy Paxman on Sky News and Channel 4. The interviews will take place in front of a live studio audience and the party leaders will take questions.

Will tonight be the real turning point, one way or another, in this sorry excuse for an election campaign?

During the TV debate before last year's EU referendum, the turning point was Boris Johnson's barn-storming pro-Brexit speech. It was reckless, it was dishonest, and he probably didn't believe half of what he was saying, but it worked. When the massive cheer went up at the end of his disingenuous word salad, when he yelled: "INDEPENDENCE DAY!" like he was leading a feral pep rally, I got that sinking feeling that he'd convinced enough people to vote leave. As a militant and unrepentant remainer, I felt a bit ill when I woke up after four hours' sleep on 24 June 2016 and discovered I'd been proven right.

On Monday night, the election campaign was suspended in the wake of the hideous, vile murders of innocent people in Manchester. To take a day off campaigning was the right and respectful thing to do. However, as long as Theresa May upheld the suspension, a vacuum was created and this was filled with stupidity from across the board.

There were the inevitable false flag-obsessed conspiracy theories. People actually thought Theresa May somehow orchestrated the terror attack because Labour was creeping up in the polls. That is a thoroughly despicable accusation to make, especially without any evidence of any sort to back it up. I still think Theresa May is a terrible, incompetent Prime Minister who arrogantly thought she could run a seamless campaign, but I do not for a second believe she is behind the attack.

But her suspension of the campaign for more than a day caused this vicious nonsense to grow a life of its own.

That said, there should be a constructive, national conversation on whether police cuts, which started in 2010, and continued apace ever since, might contribute to terror attacks not being foiled or the spread of radicalisation. Theresa May needs to be pressed on this tonight by Jeremy Paxman.

When Theresa May announced that the terror threat was upgraded to "critical" and that we could expect to see more armed police officers as well as more soldiers on the streets of the UK, the election campaign was still suspended. This did not strike me as reassuring. It struck me as authoritarian. The sight of a spectre-like Mother Theresa commanding the podium to tell us what was best for us - and during a suspended campaign in which debate was therefore stifled - was chilling.

When the terror alert was dropped back from "critical" to "severe" just a few days later, the whole sorry situation became a dark farce.

It is not inappropriate to ask if police cuts are hampering anti-terror and anti-radicalisation efforts. When reports are emerging of British Muslims doing the right and patriotic thing by reporting their suspicions to the police, but then nothing is really done about it, it is proper that we examine whether we have enough police officers and whether resources are being deployed in the best way possible.

When Amber Rudd, the useless Home Secretary, was interviewed by Andrew Marr yesterday, she appeared to have no idea whether the Manchester murderer was on a watchlist.

And that brings me to the second form of idiocy that filled the void. Even before members of the Manchester murderer's family were arrested in connection with terror-related offences, there were calls for entire families of terrorists or suspected terrorists to be deported.

On Facebook, a post by Tam Khan, in which he pleads with his fellow Muslims to integrate in Britain, went viral. Overall, it was not an unreasonable post. His frustration with "uneducated" people who kill innocents is shared by any decent human being.

However, the call to deport not just the criminals but their families too was ridiculous. Aside from the obvious injustice of deporting people who have committed no crime because they happen to be related to some arsehole, the whole idea is unworkable and raises more questions than it answers. To what country would you deport people who were born here? Where would the "deport the whole family" policy end? Immediate family only? Cousins? People related by marriage? Innocent children? A senile grandparent? Wouldn't deporting entire families en masse simply lead to further resentment and radicalisation? What if a family member who was guilty of no crime was going to be sent back to a place where they'd be in danger? For example, what if a terrorist had a gay sibling and homosexuality was illegal in their country of origin?

Surely such a policy only serves to move problems elsewhere rather than solve them?

"But it'd be a deterrent to someone thinking of committing terrorism!" come the howls from the peanut gallery. No. It's not a deterrent. Does anyone seriously believe that someone so vile and twisted, someone who is prepared to not just kill children but to blow themselves up with a nail bomb, gives a damn about any family members they would leave behind?

There are now five-and-a-half hours to go before Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are grilled by Jeremy Paxman and audience members on live TV. I do not expect Paxman to give either party leader an easy ride and nor should he. I do not expect either party leader to come out with any truly courageous or effective solutions to any of the issues outlined in this blog post.

However, I would not be surprised if one of the leaders has their Boris Johnson TV moment this evening. It just remains to be seen which one it will be.




Photography by Matt Brown/Flickr

Kim Kardashian bound and robbed at gunpoint. The hilarity.

It is one thing to be nonplussed by the story this week that reality TV star Kim Kardashian was bound and robbed at gunpoint in Paris. But it is quite another to be openly gleeful about this turn of events and to publicly express one's joy at a wife and mother of two young children becoming the victim of violent crime.

"But she was asking for it, tweeting all those photos of her jewellery, flashing her wealth around like that..."

People who wouldn't dream of blaming rape victims for their own rape have blamed Kim Kardashian for her own robbery. But the most she is guilty of is bad taste and ostentation when she tweets another fabulous gemstone. You may find this obscene when there are people starving, but it's not justification for violent crime. Hell, people who wouldn't know one end of Twitter from the other get robbed of their valuables. Quiet people get robbed. Discreet people get robbed. Anyone who an opportunistic thief might suspect as having stuff they want can get robbed.

Jodi Foster, for example, would probably sooner drive a clown car to Mars than tweet a picture of her jewellery but it is well-known that she is a wealthy woman. Yet if she was bound and robbed at gunpoint, she would probably elicit more sympathy than a Kardashian.

My husband has expressed concern for me when I wear my engagement ring on public transport. The ring is not necessarily worth much financially but sentimentally, it is priceless. It is my grandmother's ruby and it is not a subtle ring. If some lunatic cut my ruby-clad ring finger off or made me hand it over at gunpoint while I was minding my own business on the tube, people would probably have plenty of sympathy for me. I've tweeted pictures of this ring. I wear it in public most days. Would I too be asking for it?

"She is just another useless reality TV star. Who cares?"

Welcome to fame in the modern world. This is a world where high school students view "reality TV star" or "YouTube sensation" as valid career choices. We have fed the beast by watching the TV shows, clicking on the YouTube link, reading about these people in newspapers and magazines and online, talking about them as if we know them personally. We have created the public interest for this sort of thing.

"But people get robbed all the time and it isn't front page news!"

Do you even understand how the media works? Stories that are considered to be of interest to the readers, viewers and listeners will get airplay. See the above point for why Kim Kardashian's robbery is more newsworthy than the bloke down the pub who had his mower nicked from the garden shed.

There are limits to how many stories any given news outlet can cover and it is up to news editors worldwide to make judgement calls on what will be published or broadcast, what gets priority, what the balance of subjects will be on any given day. Naturally people get upset if their pet cause doesn't get the attention they think it deserves but these people don't work as news editors and have no idea what the job entails or the competing pressures that are involved.

And the onus is also on everyone else, the consumers, to choose what media outlets we go to for our information. Don't want to read about Kim Kardashian? There are plenty of places to go where you will never see a Kardashian story. And guess what? Thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can usually share stories you deem more worthwhile really easily.

Take some responsibility for your choices rather than passively whining about "the mainstream media".

And the Kim Kardashian robbery is newsworthy, especially if you live in Paris. If I lived in Paris, I might want to know that there is a gang of audaciously violent thieves out there.

Yes, there are people out there suffering more than Kim Kardashian probably ever will. But the outpouring of joy over an incident that could have ended in her death is gross. It has degenerated into people publicly wishing she was raped or murdered. Where the hell is our basic humanity?

Sometimes I wonder if we have evolved that much from the days of throwing Christians to the lions for entertainment.


Photography by George Hodan

Capital punishment and the abandonment of hope

When it comes to opposition to capital punishment, I am an absolutist. There are no ifs, no buts, no exceptions, no whataboutery. I believe it is wrong and has no place in a civilised world. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime but I would love to see a world free of capital punishment. It is barbaric, it has been used in cases where there is doubt, it has been used on the mentally incapacitated, on people who were underage at the time of the crime, and it is not even a particularly effective deterrent. Any one of these reasons is enough to reject the notion of capital punishment.

Even if a member of my family was murdered, I would not call for Deuteronomy's eye-for-an-eye punishment because it would not bring them back, it would not make anything better.

On Monday this week, an Indonesian court rejected a challenge by two convicted Australian drug smugglers who are facing the firing squad. The Indonesian president has also denied clemency. Things are looking bleak for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. The Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott has appealed for their lives. Perhaps if Abbott hadn't been such an appalling diplomat, his pleas may have been taken more seriously. Perhaps if the Australian Federal Police hadn't tipped off their counterparts in Indonesia and instead intercepted Scott Rush, also accused with Chan and Sukumaran, we'd never have heard of the Bali Nine. Their only sliver of hope appears to be a plan by their lawyers to take the case to a constitutional court.

Chan and Sukumaran will probably live until at least April 24 because the government has decided to delay the executions until after the Asia-Africa Conferences, which started yesterday. The Attorney-General, HM Presetyo, said: "There is no fear involved in this decision, but you wouldn't execute people during a high-profile government event with lots of visitors."

Yes, heaven forbid a country shoots people while there are guests in the house...

I completely agree that smuggling heroin is a ridiculous, destructive, dreadful thing to do. I also agree that heroin is an insidious, destructive drug. However, I also think that extreme prohibition drug laws are ineffective. The people who end up on death row in countries like Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia are rarely the kingpins. Bali, even after the tragic terror attack of 2002, is renowned as a place to go and party hard, it is still a place where people go to take drugs. And it is still a busy transit point for the international drug market.

A CNN report found that according to local drug dealers, no more than 10% of traffickers get busted in Indonesia. Even if you know the penalty for being caught with drugs in Indonesia is death, there is still probably still a 90% chance you will be a successful mule. So that, in a nutshell, explains why people take the risk even when they are aware of the strict laws.

Or they are in a desperate, no-win situation such as the awful case of Nguyen Tuong Van, an Australian who was hanged in Singapore in 2005 at the age of 25. I was working at FHM in Sydney at the time and I will never forget the sad silence that swept across the usually noisy office when everyone's computer screen clocks clicked over to 9am and we realised his 6am Singapore time hanging had taken place.

Until the end, Nguyen maintained that he smuggled the drugs to pay off a debt owed by his twin brother, a heroin addict. But the people at the top of the pile in the drugs underworld wouldn't give a shit about this. Lives are expendable all the way down the chain, right down to the addict in the gutter.

And it is this cheap attitude to people that pervades the mentality that supports capital punishment. It is the abandonment of hope, the rejection of any chance of rehabilitation, that makes it such a bleak act.

Chan and Sukumaran are examples of how people can be rehabilitated and how getting caught should have been the best thing for them. Before being caught, they were not using their lives wisely at all and did terrible things. Sure, they could have continued smuggling drugs, and they probably would have done so, but instead, they have used their time in prison wisely, and were rehabilitated within the Indonesian prison system, and are now better people. This is how to deal with drug smugglers. Shooting them dead on a beach won't fix a damn thing.



Photography by George Hodan

An open letter to the Prime Minister of Thailand

Dear General Prayuth,

Thank you for your helpful travel advice to women planning a trip to your beautiful country. I have visited Thailand in the past and I would love to do so again so it is reassuring to know you are concerned about the safety of female travellers.

It is handy to know that I will not be safe in a bikini in Thailand unless I am, to quote your words, "not beautiful." This may explain an incident that happened to me last time I was in your country.

Let me elaborate. I was in Phuket for a week on my own when a man who was also staying at my hotel broke into my room in the middle of the night, crawled into my bed and pressed his erection against my back. I had been out with him and his friend at a bar that evening but I decided to go home early - the combination of cheap whisky and a bad Bon Jovi cover band wasn't really doing it for me, so I put myself in a tuk-tuk and returned to my hotel room - although not before the tuk-tuk driver grabbed my face and tried to kiss me as I paid, and not before the bellboy with the suspiciously long little fingernail asked me to join him on "motorbike to go to discotheque". 

The tuk-tuk driver was told where to go in no uncertain terms and the bellboy's offer was politely declined. I went to bed alone only to wake up a few hours later with the aforementioned penis rubbing against me. I said: "If you don't get out of my room right now, I will scream so fucking loud, the whole hotel will hear me." He left swiftly and went back to his own room. 

The worst consequence of all this was much awkwardness over the hotel breakfast buffet for the rest of the week. I did not end up being raped or murdered and I appreciate that the situation could have been far more terrible. But I still wasn't safe in your country. I realise that I am not 100% safe from violence in any country but at least you have offered me an explanation as to why this might have happened to me in Thailand.

Clearly, I am beautiful. 

And I wore a bikini by the pool and on the beach in Phuket. 

This powerful combination of my beauty and my bikini - even though it was one of those more modest ones with the big pants - made me a clear target for my fellow hotel guest and the halitosis-ridden tuk-tuk driver.

In order for me to ascertain whether I'd be safe in your country today, General Prayuth, I have included a recent photo of myself in a bikini. My holiday in Thailand was 16 years and a few kilograms ago so it could be that these days I fall short of your standards of assault-causing beauty.

Can I come to your country and wear a bikini with impunity at the ripe old age of 38 or will I still risk being attacked? Am I still looking OK for someone pushing 40? Your opinion on this matter is very important to me. 

Perhaps you can start posting notices at beaches and by hotel pools to specify the maximum standard of beauty a woman can possess before she must put on a neck-to-knee swimsuit and shield her gorgeous face with a large parasol. On what criteria will you create these standards? After all, ideals of beauty vary between cultures, vary over time, vary according to individual opinion, and are not universal. You may have to create a whole new government department to work on this one or a new branch of the police department at the very least. 

Alternatively, General Prayuth, you could give the victim-blaming horseshit a rest and acknowledge that acts of sexual violence can happen to any woman, regardless of whose standard of beauty she does or does not meet. You could show some respect to Hannah Witheridge, who died along with David Miller this week (who has not been accused of being handsome while wearing swimming trunks), and do whatever you can to ensure whoever is responsible is caught. For the person or people who attacked Ms Witheridge and Mr Miller are the ones to blame for these terrible crimes, not bikinis or pulchritude. 

Yours sincerely,

Georgia Lewis