The Simon Levy case proves some criminals can never be rehabilitated
Prisons aren’t meant to punish or rehabilitate, they’re meant to keep dangerous, evil people away from the rest of us, says Tom Harwood
How many times must a violent sexual predator be arrested, released, arrested, imprisoned, released, re-imprisoned, released, arrested and investigated for murder, released, and re-arrested again before we start to think that this chap might not be particularly good for society?
Simon Levy is a waste of space. Sentenced yesterday for two murders and a violent rape that left a third woman close to death, this murderous drain on society should have stayed behind bars the first time he resided at His Majesty’s pleasure. But he didn’t. He was let back out. Again and again and again.
Our criminal justice system has a remarkably hard time figuring out what it is actually for. “Are our prisons there to rehabilitate or to punish?”, goes the old debate. “Does prison work?” it continues. Well prison doesn’t work if you keep letting the bad guys back out again.
What prisons should be for, in my view, is neither primarily rehabilitation nor punishment – rather simply to keep temperamentally dangerous and evil people separated from the rest of society.
Prisons work insofar as they keep the kind of people who violently assault, rape, and murder away from the rest of us. Prisons stop working in this way only if we become timid about using them.
It is absurd that Simon Levy was let out of prison on licence less than a year after sexually assaulting a female prison officer, inside his prison. It should not come as a surprise to us that 15 months after being released on licence he found himself back in prison, to serve out the rest of his term – after a serious accusation of rape. He was out once again just three months later.
In a liberal society we want to believe that people can change. But this fails to acknowledge that the way we got to our liberal society in the first place was in part through ruthlessly removing those who could not or would not play by the rules.
The English homicide rate is estimated to have sat at around 21 per 100,000 in the 1300s, five per 100,000 in the 1500s, and two per 100,000 by the 1700s. This didn’t happen by accident. The state asserted its monopoly on violence and behaviour changed due to a greater certainty of consequence.
Indeed, historians estimate that by the late Middle Ages Western European countries condemned to death between 0.5 and one per cent of all men of each generation. Across the centuries that followed, homicide fell precipitously. Life became less nasty, brutish, and short.
Now I’m not suggesting that we go back to executing one per cent of every generation. But is it that unreasonable to suggest that one per cent of each generation should probably be kept away from the rest of us?
Squeamish
Roughly 0.14 per cent of the country’s population is in prison today. Now, while the figures are not directly comparable (execution permanently removed someone from society and today’s prison population is a constantly changing stock), we have plainly become far more squeamish about permanently incapacitating dangerous people.
If it is the case that in centuries past we successfully managed to deter, incapacitate, or even select against a propensity to violence, there is no reason why we shouldn’t continue to do so. To achieve this we need not reestablish the death penalty. But we must accept that there are some human beings in this world who have a greater propensity to violence and harm than others. That they cannot be talked out of it. That there exists a small percentage of people who cannot be reformed or changed. That violent rapists should be the last people we let out of our prisons.
The Simon Levy case should be a wake up call – not just of police incompetence and the lack of inter-organisational communication – but about a bigger question: what exactly is our criminal justice system trying to achieve? If the answer includes making society safer, incapacitating the demonstrably dangerous must be the overriding priority.
Tom Harwood is deputy political editor of GB News