In praise of the unusual suspects
The annual Longford Lecture, now in its 21st year, has become something of a fixture in the criminal justice reformer’s calendar.
I hadn’t been for several years until this year’s lecture, given by the former prisons minister Rory Stewart. Diary clashes and the small matter of the Covid lockdown had conspired against attendance.
Rory Stewart is an unlikely pin-up boy for criminal justice reform. Best known these days for the Rest is Politics podcast he co-hosts with former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, Stewart has a background in the military and diplomatic service. He was the prisons minister for little over a year, during the dying days Theresa May’s premiership.
He did, though, bring a freshness and passion to the role of prisons minister – generally considered a stopgap role by ambitious ministers hoping for something more interesting in the next reshuffle – and he clearly cared about the state of prisons and the importance of decent, safe regimes.
Unsurprisingly, his message that the current state of our politics has left it ‘particularly ill-suited to address the problems in prison’, and his criticism of a naive belief in panaceas and easy answers, went down well with the audience.
Prior to Rory Stewart’s speech, it was lovely to see the fierce and inspiring campaigners from JENGbA receive this year’s Longford Prize for their work challenging the injustices of joint enterprise convictions.
Jan Cunliffe and Gloria Morrison, and the network of activists they have organised, are some of the most effective campaigners currently working in criminal justice reform. The Longford Prize is well-deserved and I am thrilled for them.
Jan and Gloria were recently praised by Raymond Smith in an Inside Time article; two of four women ‘fighting... key injustices in Britain today’. The other two women he praised were Donna Mooney of UNGRIPP and Shirley Debono of IPP Committee in Action.
Donna and Shirley have been at the forefront of the campaign to resolve the outstanding injustice of the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence. In a few short years they and their network of activists have accomplished what many campaigners would be happy to have achieved in a decade or two of graft.
Jan Cunliffe, Gloria Morrison, Donna Mooney, Shirley De Bono and Rory Stewart. Outsiders to criminal justice reform, until circumstances not of their making made them insiders, of sorts.
I have previously written about escaping the monotony of repeated policy failure, and there still remains much by way of monotonous policy failure in relations to prisons, joint enterprise and the IPP sentence, among other areas.
But I don’t think its a coincidence that some of the most inspiring campaigning, some of the clearest thinking, on criminal justice is currently coming from the relative outsiders.
There are lessons here for the criminal justice insiders and established organisations, including the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.
So let’s hear it for the unusual suspects. Let’s learn from them, and others like them, on how to shake up and challenge what Rory Stewart described in his lecture as the ‘institutional sclerosis’ of rigid and decaying institutions.