what my work over thirty years has taught me is that the prison system is not fit for purpose, it fails, it harms, and ultimately it doesn’t prevent crime, it doesn’t protect victims, it doesn’t do the things that governments constantly tell us that it does.
And the amount of public money that we pump into failing prisons, which of course are designed by their very nature to fail, it’s a, you know, it’s a system in my view that’s incapable of reform, because I’ve watched over my thirty year history, the relentless number of needless deaths that have occurred and continue to occur, and reforms have failed and, you know, my view is that we could far better use that money by addressing the reasons why people have ended up in prison in the first place and invest in communities and in community services, many of which have failed the very people who’ve ended up in the prison system. And my point there is about the fact that there’s always been that kind of slight tension between on the one hand, arguing for more accountability and sanctions of those who are responsible for the deaths that we see, but on the other hand, recognising that the limitations of the justice system that we’ve got and that, you know, putting somebody in, putting a couple of individuals in a prison won’t change that structural kind of, you know, those big structural issues that we know need to be, you know, need to be addressed. And, you know, I mean I think one of the things that, you know, from the corporate account, from the Corporate Manslaughter bill, one of, you know, jumping forward to one of the campaigns that we’re working on now, Hillsborough Law, you know, and of course that’s got a kind of added, I suppose, impetus for that now when we’ve looked at the Horizon Post Office scandal, is about what, you know, what we see so often after, you know, after disasters like Grenfell, like Hillsborough, but also, you know, other areas like the Infected Blood Inquiry, the Child Abuse Inquiry, you know, you look at all these structures and systems and the kind of, you know, the cultures of denial, of defensiveness, the delays, you know, the delays that are put in the way of families accessing truth and justice and accountability and, you know, the delays that go on as we saw with, you know, Hillsborough, that go on decades, and the very legal processes that just obfuscate the lack of candour, the lack of, the lack of sanctions, you know, for those who don’t tell the truth, you know, who conceal, who cover up, you know. I mean the shocking kind of miscarriages of justice that we’ve seen over the decades I’ve been doing this work and that are still continuing and you, you know, you, I think we’ve been accused in the past of, you know, overplaying or, you know, emphasising the kind of, the corruption, if you like, you know, that we’ve seen in the system, but we see it on a day-to-day basis
