 Rwy'n meddwl, mae'n meddwl i'r cymdeithasol i gael y cymdeithasol i'r Llywodraeth Cymru. Mae'r ddweud i'r Llorraine Gelsorth, mae'n dyrector i'r ddeithasol. Ond rwy'n meddwl yw'n meddwl i'r gweithredol. Rwy'n meddwl i'r grwp sy'n meddwl i'r byw'r byw'r Llywodraeth Cymru. 21 yr ysgol, rwy'n meddwl i'r byw'r byw'r byw'r gweithredol, Rwy'n meddwl i'r byw'r byw'r byw'r byw, rwy'n meddwl i'r byw'r byw'r byw'r byw. Rwy'n meddwl i'r byw'r byw, rwy'n meddwl i'r byw'r byw yn 1997, i ddim yn fany o'r cystigio yr cyrraedd cymdeithasol i'r byw'r byw'r byw, a'r byw'r byw'r byw, a'r byw'r byw, yn ymgyrchio, byw'r byw yn y gyfaloedd o yr argyflwyd ymgyrch ar gyfer y dyfodol, ac mae'r cyfnod o'r ddau o'r pwnysydd yn ymgyrch. O'r cyfnod o'r ddau o'r ddau, fel y cyfnod o'r ddau, mae'n ddau i'n gwneud i'r ddau, mae'n ddigonio i'r ddweud i'r Alistair Macintylau nad yw'r ffordd o'r cyfnod o'r ffordd o'r cyfnod o'r wrthigol gyda'w ffyrtu'r ysgolwyddiadau ac yn ystod o'r wahanol yma i ddweud i gyda'i cyfryddiadau, ac yn ystod o'r lleion o'r mawr. Mae'r ystod o'r ystyried yn ddifigol o'r mawr, ac mae'r ystod o'r lleion o'r ffyrtu'r ysgolwyddiadau yn unig o'r ffyrtu'r yr ysgolwyddiadau yn gwybod i mewn gwirionedd panfelly, ac yn fawr, yn ystod o'r ysgolwyddiadau, Felly, mae'r bynnigol yw'r ysgolio'r ysgolio'r ysgolio'r ysgolio'r ysgolio'r ysgolio'r llwyddo. Mae'n ddod am ddod i gael ei ffordd o'r hyn oedd gan tynnu i gael, ond mae'n ddod i'n meddwl o'r hyn o wneud i gael'r ffordd, ac yn meddwl o'r hyn o'r adegiau o'r ddiddordeb o'r wneud o'r bynnig o'r rhai pwysig. Therefore, the importance of virtues or values encourages a return to fundamental questions. What is criminal justice all about? What are we trying to do? What do we think we can do? What is the rationale for punishment? What principles and values inform sentencing and responses to people who are in conflict with the law? Well, Rob Canton, our main speaker today, poses such questions in his new book by Punish and he will turn his attention to such issues in a moment. Growing a very successful career as a probation practitioner, Rob Canton is professor of community and criminal justice in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, the School of Social Sciences at De Montfort University in Leicester. He's produced several books as well as over 40, 50 articles and chapters in books on matters ranging from social justice, human rights and the values of probation to the precarious rights of mentally disordered offenders and censure, dialogues and reparation, for example. Indeed, I think there's a parallel with Gilmour Williams, moving from practice to academia, but as with Bill it was not a move to an ivory tower, rather Rob has maintained engagement in concerns for real world justice. I also want to add that it's about this time last year that Rob became just the fourth person from England Wales to be made an honorary member of a very distinguished group, a distinguished European organisation dedicated to enhancing the work of probation. Rob received the honour from the Confederation of European Probation, CEP, joining only 25 other people worldwide to get such a title in the organisation's 36 year old history. The CEP, which is based in the Netherlands, aims to promote the social inclusion of offenders through community sanctions and measures such as probation, community service, mediation and conciliation. The nomination for that honour stated, you've done an astonishing amount during the long time that you've been involved with CEP contributing to our work and conferences. You've played an invaluable role in developing the Council of Europe regulations and guidelines on community measures and the European probation rules. I mentioned that because it signifies really the very valuable contribution that Rob has made to probation, not only in the UK but in Europe too. Rob poses the question, why punish, in his most recent book, available from all good booksellers and Amazon, and why punish attempts to bring the somewhat rarefied reflections of philosophy to the practical problems faced by those responsible for framing policy and delivering policy, housing sentence and then putting criminal punishment into effect. And the book argues that we could and should punish less without letting down victims or endangering our society. So, we look forward to hearing from you, Rob. I also want to introduce Professor Nicky Cuddfield, Ommur QC, who is from the Faculty of Law here in Cambridge. Nicky is Professor of Criminal Penal Justice, closely involved with the work of the Institute, a great friend of the Institute. Sometime a judge, a recorder working in the Crown Court, she is an international, leading international researcher on matters relating to sentencing, sentencing law, socio-legal aspects of getting out of prison in particular, parole and issues relating to recall. And Nicky is also Master of Fitzwilliam College. So, the deal this afternoon is Rob will talk for about 40 minutes. Nicky will offer a brief response to get us going. We, collectively, will then ask intelligent and thoughtful questions. The steering group, a representative from the steering group on spot, will then say a final few words and then we'll all have tea. So, welcome to Rob and welcome to Nicky and over to you, Rob. Lorraine, thank you so much for such a warm and generous introduction. I really am very honoured to be here. As Lorraine mentioned, the very first Billwood Williams memorial lecture took place in 1998, and it was delivered by Professor Ken Pease, and it was delivered at Devonford University. I didn't work there in those days, but I did attend that lecture. And although over the years I have missed some, I've attended a great number, so I'm very proud to be the latest in a series of extremely thoughtful, wise-headed people who have stood at this podium in years gone by. I never met Bill. Many people who have given this lecture have begun by reflecting on their own recollections. But although I didn't know him, I have met a number of people who knew him well. And recently I have an anonymous informant whose name is Jim and is here. And this anonymous informant remembered him from Wilson House in the early 1970s. Wilson House was a probation office in the shadow of Nottingham Cathedral. A bit of a delinquent outfit they were at Wilson House. They did their own thing, but that was after Bill's time. And my informant remembers him as a very supportive senior probation officer who invited him to his and Brenda's home in Mappley on many occasions. And indeed this informant used to walk the dog Rufus, about which there are some many hairy stories. Rufus would sometimes attend the office and intimidate the service users, punishment in the community. Rufus sounds to me like a candidate for an offending behaviour programme with the greatest of respect. But anyway, that was one particular memory. And my informant also recalls Bill as a smart dresser who took me out one lunchtime to buy some new trousers as he said I needed smartening up. And I'm too diplomatic to comment on the extent to which Bill was successful in that particular project. Bill's scholarship had three particular hallmarks and Lorraine has already touched on them. And I think they are models for us all. And they are principles to which I've tried to emulate, not as well as Bill, but I've done my best. And the first of these is his commitment to moral thinking about probation and about criminal justice more widely. Probation has always been an activity of moral and political significance. It's never just reducible to methods and claims about effectiveness about what it can do. It's much more than the meeting of performance targets and even more than the most important instrumental objectives that it sets for itself like reducing re-offending. A second hallmark of Bill's scholarship is his sensitivity to history and again Lorraine has touched upon this. His famous quartet of articles that looked at what was then known as social inquiry practice. And for me the important thing in history is a reminder of the way in which things change. And how the preoccupations of today weren't necessarily the preoccupations of earlier periods and things may again change. Not things do change. We shouldn't assume they'll persist. And perhaps the better we understand the past, the more we're able to influence the present and maybe contribute to a shaping of the future. And thirdly and related to this is Bill's recognition of the importance of reflection. Without reflection we run the risk of simply hardening our practices so that they ossify into mere habits. Why do you do this? Well it's what we've always done. And that's a dangerous place to be when you are dealing with the lives of people, very vulnerable people and doing a practice which I've already characterised as politically and morally significant. So those are virtues that I think mark Bill's work and are among those that I've tried to keep in mind in my own work. Lorraine referred to this book earlier. This came out, in fact it's about one year old this week I think. And among my reasons for trying to write this was a frustration that the search for a justification of punishment, which is one of the things that philosophers are always turning to, has become rather abstract and remote. Lorraine aptly used the word rarefied. Distance from the concerns of policy makers, sentences and practitioners who have a responsibility of putting a court sentence into effect. So my feeling is strongly that the philosophy of punishment should try to raise standards of practice. It should as well as thinking in these terms and contribute towards making better decisions. And most books on this topic I think don't really contribute in that way at all. They ask sharp and pertinent questions but they don't really help us to do better practices than we do. And for this reason the book includes a number of case examples to try to keep us anchored in a world of reality. And for this reason I'm going to introduce to you a person who most of you have recognised. Many of you are involved in one way or another in criminal justice and you have probably come across somebody rather like Rita. Rita's offered in the book as an example of someone who has a long record. She's described in court by the prosecution as a professional thief. We know that she's had a deeply troubled upbringing and a history of abusive relationships particularly at the hands of men who have wanted to take advantage of her and exploit her in all kinds of ways. And indeed on this occasion the prosecution and the defence to some extent though the defence is circumspect, the prosecution say that they believe that her partner has more to do with this offence than she's willing to disclose. And there's a suspicion that he bullies her, he's violent towards her and may very well take away from her what it is that she's stolen. The pre-sentence report comments on the high likelihood of further offending of this type. That will be based, as many of you will know, substantially on her record of previous convictions. A record weighs a lot in judgments about risk of that kind. And the report concludes by suggesting that a community order should be made. There should be some rehabilitation activity, a programme to enhance her thinking skills. And also the possibility of an electronically monitored curfew is mooted in the report at the conclusion. Now in the book I ask the reader to consider a number of things. For example, is a deficiency in her thinking skills the best way of understanding reader's behaviour? What might be the consequence of confining her to her home at set times with her partner given what we know about him? To what extent has her past explained her present conduct? Does it excuse or mitigate her present offending? I'd like you to keep reader in mind and I'll be returning to her from time to time as we proceed. Reasoning about punishment ought to help us how to approach defendants in her position, whether with policy makers or sentences or practitioners, or trying to do the right thing. And any philosophical account of punishment that doesn't help us in that, you might wonder, well what is it really for? I want to leave reader in peace for a moment and just move on to say that in the book I identify three kinds of ways of approaching the endlessly complex question why punish. And the first of these is to reflect that societies have always punished people rather like reader. At all times and in almost all places. And the early part of the book tries to begin to engage with the terribly difficult question of why it is that human beings do this to one another. And those of you who have studied criminology at any level will be familiar with some of the arguments. Do we do this in order to defend and uphold the social order? Does this give us an opportunity to affirm the values that make us a community rather than just a load of folk all living together? We want to say no stealing is not what we do. Does it somehow express our own psychological needs and our insecurities? Does it speak to our emotions? I'm not going to say much more about that, but I think that it's an escapable question. If we want to bring about change in penal practice or engaged in penal reform at all, we need to have a conception of what an improvement would be like, what good reform is, what direction we should be moving in. But we also need to understand better what the obstacles might be, what gets in the way of bringing about change that seems to many of us penal reformers to be self-evident. Why are we punishing this way? We can do much better than that, but politically we know it's a great deal or complicated than that. And we need to understand better what those sources of resistance and particularly the emotional and political salience of the phenomenon of punishment. A second way of approaching the question why punish is to talk about the purposes of punishment. I put it in inverted commas on this slide because if you think about it, punishment hasn't got a purpose. It's not the kind of thing abstract nouns can't have purposes. It's better to talk about the purposes that people set for punishment. The lawmaker may have a particular purpose and the judge may have a particular purpose. People putting the sentence into effect, they may have other priorities and agendas and of course the individual subject to punishment may be able to take some control of that and begin to try to work out what they might gain from them, the sense that they make of the experiences they're undergoing. But in the political domain these are three particular accounts of punishment that are often articulated. Sometimes they are considered to be so self-evident that people just take those for granted and very often people will leap from anxieties about crime or concern about victims straight into requirements for tougher punishments and so forth without making these explicit. And these three accounts are that punishment somehow makes it safer because it reduces crime, that it writes a wrong because crimes are not only harms to be repaired but they're wrongs in some way to be vindicated. We feel that some courses of action are so reprehensible that even when there is nobody really to whom a mens can fittingly be made we need nevertheless to acknowledge that wrong. An unpunished wrong is somehow stays and hoffers over us, maybe corrupts us. And in the book I give some examples of that being a theme in a number of cultures. And we also think that punishment is the way to honour the experience of victims so that anyone who challenges these propositions is likely to be accused of saying well you're putting us at risk. If you reduce punishment then we'll all be in more danger or maybe you think this isn't a wrong enough thing and people will tell you at length about have you any idea what a dreadful thing that this crime represented? And or and or some reforms let down the victim. So many of you who've perhaps had arguments with people whose views may be different from your own about punishment may have encountered those who will tell you at length about the appalling experiences of victims and the heinous things that people have done. All of which is true but from which it does not follow I think that we ought to respond to that by enhancing the levels of punishment. A big part of the book probably most of the book is concerned with what I've called in that title the ethical inquiry. How should we punish what's permissible what's obliged to us? And the accounts that I've just set out of punishment are also part of those justifications because we all want to live in a safer society. Nobody wants to let down victims so these are all legitimate political aspirations but some of us doubt that punishment is the best way of achieving them. An aim is not the same as a justification and I think in some texts those things are muddled up so you might have an aim but it doesn't follow a tool that it is an ethically appropriate way of achieving it. But of course if punishment cannot in fact achieve the purposes set for it then that clearly undermines the justification so if somebody says to you well the justification for punishment is deterrence people will be frightened away from committing crimes if punishment does no such thing where does that justify what's left of that justification it's had the rug pulled from underneath it. Jeremy Bentham said that with reducing re-offending there are three ways of doing this we can do it by taking away the physical power taking away the desire of making someone afraid to offend and in the literature these are the familiar trio of incapacitation, rehabilitation and deterrence. I'm not going to say much about deterrence and incapacitation but I am so hostile to the idea of deterrence that I can't stand here without taking a swipe at it. When people talk about deterrence and about how that will make us all safer than we are the first distinction that's been made by Anthony Bottoms and others is the distinction between the seriousness of the crime and the likelihood of getting punished. If you think that you're not likely to get caught then why would you worry about the weight of the penalty and I think that the evidence by now is pretty overwhelming that certainty making it likely that people will be caught made it to some people from some things in some circumstances but the weight of the penalty isn't going to make any additional benefit to that. I think it's psychologically naive and overgeneralised and I think it works best for those who need it least so the law may threaten me with all kinds of dire things for doing things that I have no desire whatsoever to do. It also, and I think this is for me another serious indictment it doesn't give you any reason to refrain from bad behaviour it just suggests that you don't get caught. It's a very self-centred and prudential way of looking because it's an abdication of what I believe is the ethical boundaries that should guide us in these decisions and it gives no guidance at all for levels of sentencing. So you'll see in the newspapers, oh gosh, knife crime, sentence at the moment is two years, let's make it three. Nobody thinks like that, nobody reasons in that particular way so I think very often we just heap up stuff and do silly things out of the mistaken belief that deterrence is going to help us here. I've even less to say about incapacitation except to say that it may be for the gravest offenders there's a possibility that you could make a case for saying that some people at some time in their lives pose such a risk to the well-being of others that they need to be restrained from doing that. In the great majority of cases we're talking much more about postponement than prevention. Earlier texts on incapacitation very often are preoccupied with the decision about whether or not to release somebody but we have developed, we know how to manage risk in the community much more efficiently than we used to and sometimes I think that risk language can conceal the real resistance and I'm going to take a risk here myself and say to you that when we have debates for example John Warboys, there are a Hindley in earlier times Colin Pitchfork and people say no no these people can't come out they pose a danger to the public we can have a debate about whether they do but what's really animating the opposition is a disgust. These are people who are not fit to live among us because the behaviour that they have done is just so repellent and I think that the language of risk is often a polite way of articulating a resistance an opposition that really comes from a quite different source I know that's controversial and somebody may want to challenge me on it later So having dealt with those in a very perfunctory and very unsatisfactory manner I'd like to look in rehabilitation in a great deal more detail because rehabilitation is particularly associated with the work of probation to which many of us in this room are committed and Fergus McNeill who delivered this lecture just last year and wrote me a very nice message this morning to apologise for not attending this year wrote a tremendously interesting paper a couple of years ago in which he distinguished four forms of rehabilitation and there they are set out Correctional rehabilitation is what probation is often taken to specialise in the opportunities for personal improvement for maybe working with people in ways that begins to adjust the ways in which they think we lack also the ways in which they subsequently behave it involves human capital the development of their own potential and personal capacity and in modern forms with an increasingly encouraging emphasis on centring on their strengths and their aspirations to lead what would be for them a good life a life in which offending no longer has any place separate from that is legal rehabilitation I'm going to come back to all of these by the way so I'll just trot through these now social rehabilitation and then moral rehabilitation and I don't know what that involves and I'm going to say a little bit more about it but be interested in your views about what that amounts to so first of all correctional rehabilitation and some of the older books about the purposes and priorities of punishment the ethics of punishment are concerned with this correctional rehabilitation and there've been times when it's been closely associated with an idea that maybe people who commit crimes have something in their past or something in their head that needs some sort of tweaking or adjustment that they need to, their thinking needs to be varied in some way how we do that I think seems to me to make the whole difference and Christopher Bennett sorts out that if we want to take what's right as the prior question before we look at what works we need to look at what it is we're trying to do how we do it the role of consent and compulsion and its relationship to fair punishment so trying to change people's attitudes and behaviour for the sake of a wider public good without regard to the individual's own interests and participation in that process is something that we might want to call into question and I hope that most of us would be profoundly uncomfortable and want to rule out deception, manipulation or excessively intrusive techniques legal rehabilitation is quite distinct this is the sense of the word rehabilitation and in fact, Bill McWilliams wrote a very good paper on this with, if I'm not mistaken, Ken Pease on the topic about how there's an even earlier of a sense of rehabilitation which doesn't mean changing people it's really to do with restoring people to their citizens rights after the fulfilment of the proper sentence and this is the sense of the word that is to be found in the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act whether you are affected and whether you can benefit from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act doesn't depend on any changes that may have taken place in your head or in your conduct it simply depends on the amount of time that has passed since you committed an offence and at times, recent times I think there has been some real progress in this in my little world and we never know do we whether we're picking up on the changes in broader social trends but I think there is certainly some momentum towards improvement in this so this notion of banning the box so you shouldn't ask people at the point of application you should judge people on the merits of their application and then maybe take up the question in a character reference if you have found that they're the best person to do the job so this box that appears on many application forms and the giveaway here is the word offence spelled with an S which betrays that this comes from the United States so the ban the box campaign is particularly associated with that country but there's been another more heartening headline that the High Court has ruled that in certain circumstances some kinds of criminal record don't have to be disclosed to potential employers and just to go off script for a moment I have to mention that my football team that I have the variable fortune to follow Nottingham Forest has recently gone into partnership with an organisation called Clean Sheet which is committed to precisely this and let's hope that some of the Clean Sheet aspirations can rub off on the performance of the team but this is still around and here we have Chris Stacy who's done some excellent work here a couple of tweets that he's threw to our attention on Twitter a conviction of mine for when I was 18 followed me my entire career he's someone who is 59 and it's held against that person pretty much their entire life and here my student recently attempted suicide she doesn't see a future with her childhood criminal record she's now 40 and her records are very minor I thought there was a glimmer of hope after all the TV courage and the recommendations so we are a long way from being able to achieve what some of us would like to achieve in terms of legal rehabilitation social rehabilitation is another thing again it may be that there is no legal obstacle to people taking up some of the resources that they might need in order to live a life that would help them not to become involved in crime and here this is a very very well known list many of you will have come across this before legal rehabilitation doesn't guarantee fair access to all of those things by any means people who've been in prison in fact all kinds of additional obstacles that might interfere with that and again I spent too much time on Twitter but those of you who follow Twitter forms of social media may have seen something this week where one of the states in the United States of America has come up with a brighter idea that they won't be allowing people to have access to food stamps if their families have got a criminal record well what a spiteful and self-defeating strategy that seems to me to be so anyway social rehabilitation I think what that amounts to is self-evident nobody's asking here for special favours for people to have fair access to the resources of civil society that everybody else is supposed to be able to enjoy tricky thing by the way in other countries Lorraine was good enough to mention my work in other countries it can be quite difficult to go to a country and say your prisoners in your prison they don't have a nutritious diet and you get laughed at this half the population don't have that anyway that's a bit off the script Moral rehabilitation I asked earlier about what that might amount to so you can imagine this is distinct you might have someone who's committed herself to personal change the correctional thing found due legal recognition the law isn't an obstacle she may have full and fair access to the resources of civil society but still be viewed with suspicion or active mistrust because that burden is one that many people I think can carry for a very very long time the gaining of trust I think is central here and judgments of character can be exceptionally difficult to change so in some sense I think this form of rehabilitation can be the hardest to achieve I think it entails remorse if somebody is not in any sense repudiating or retreating from the conduct that caused such their convictions in the first place it's difficult to think about them having been somehow reconciled with the rest of their community and maybe saying sorry is just too easy maybe there are other things that they need to do some way of making active amends and maybe we need to have some settled and consistent law-abiding behaviour before we can begin to move towards a different way in which we respond towards them but we have to accept that that change is possible and for civil society here this is not just about forbearance it involves active duties and responsibilities to enable those things to take place and Linda Radzic who's written a very good book called Making Amends she puts it like this we need some way of talking about an end state a point at which we can describe that the wrongful act has been having been successfully resolved I don't like the word closure but it's something like that that I think she's talking about that's finished, that's complete and I've sometimes wondered whether rather than talking about a philosophy of punishment we would do better to talk about a philosophy of responding to wrongdoing which would incorporate not just the imposition of a punishment, a just sentence but the duties that we all have to bring about some sort of meaningful reconciliation so there's some kind of conclusion and a restoration to previous standing so Rita's been waiting patiently for us and maybe I can now apply some of this how do the philosophies of punishment that we've been looking at help us at all to think well or differently about Rita what would rehabilitation in any and all of its forms be like for Rita do we think that we need to improve her thinking skills do we think that sobriety is legal rehabilitation sorry as correctional rehabilitation would encourage us to think what might the contribution be of the criminal justice system in general can they contribute much to bringing about to responding in a just and proper manner to Rita and might some interventions make things worse so those are some questions we may want to return to but to park for now generally the idea that punishment makes us safer I think people have commented on very well David Garland here has a long quotation so if you'll bear with me I will read it just or skip through it it's only the mainstream processes of socialisation and the things he puts in brackets these are things that can promote proper conduct on a consistent and regular basis punishment's never going to succeed to any great degree because the conditions which do most to induce conformity lie outside the jurisdiction of penal institutions so choosing your parents with care being well brought up having a good education having access to job opportunities and all those things that make for a rich and fulfilling life are nothing to do with criminal justice and if we think that they are we'll end up as Hyman Gross nicely put it we're tempted to adopt barbarous measures out of disappointment or foolish ones out of despair simply because we've failed to achieve what we've no right to hope for in the first place and I think punishment does have its perils it's bad for a society to get over enthusiastic about punishment in all kinds of ways it undermines other mechanisms good societies depend upon trust a sense of reciprocity and dignity and mutual respect these are things that have a sound ethical foundation and they do much more than the institutions and practices of punishment to reduce crime and bad behaviour that's what I'd like to say about the story that punishment makes us safer but of course that's just one of the stories and there are two others and one of these is that we need somehow to acknowledge and respect the wrong-doer in the process of writing the wrong and when people come to work out what is a fair punishment for the wrong that has been done they often think about harm they think about culpability and they think about the impact of the offence and a lot of this crystallises around the idea of censure if someone in any group has done wrong we feel it's important and respectful to communicate to them that what they have done is a wrong thing somehow how you do that is another matter but it needs that kind of acknowledgement and some philosophers of punishment would say that the sole value of hard treatment all the stern stuff the burdensome stuff that we do to offenders its sole value is that it is the best way to communicate the censure which is essential but Lord Walgraif has argued that the punishment that we have at the moment prisons and things like that are communicatively arid they don't actually convey that very well at all so it's all very well to say that yes we need to have a communication that the communications that we convey are blunt, inept and sometimes oppressive and Anthony Duff has urged by contrast the potential of community sanctions which of course has implications to the way in which probation goes about its work let's again apply that to Rita how much harm do we think that Rita has done how culpable is she what would be the impact of the sentence that we are planning for the impact by the way of an electronic monitoring curfewd requirement on Rob Canton would be minimal given my preference for turning in very early at night the impact in a safe household where the greatest source of danger is probably an irasable cat in another household to be pinned in and prevented from doing this is a burdensome thing and we are putting Rita at risk maybe by confining her to houses with a petulant bully of a boyfriend and I should have said I lost one of my best lines last year so I'm going to go back and just say if we're talking about deterrence do we really want to enter into an arms race of intimidation with a violent bully to see who can frighten Rita more is that a proper way is that the effectiveness is that something that we want to do as a society or does that actually rather shame us should we expect her to be remorseful what forms of punishment would best communicate the censure that we might want to communicate and if censure is more than scolding what might Rita want to say back to us because some people have built upon ideas of censure to talk about the idea of dialogue and communication and I think there's something important embedded in that the emotional is something I've already touched upon and I don't think that we can understand punishment or begin to realise how we might change attitudes and practices of punishment without sufficient understanding of emotion and someone who isn't in the book only because I didn't come across her work until I had finished the book is the excellent scholar Martha Nusbon and she argues that the desire for revenge the repayment of harm for harm is most typically fuelled by anger and if you read newspapers and the comments that people put up in response to awful cases anger is absolutely salient isn't it it's really prominent but she goes further I think really interestingly by saying that anger entails a wish for payback so that if you are angry but you always have no wish for payback whatsoever the emotion that you are feeling is probably not anger at all but something much closer to grief and we live in a society in which blaming and punishing the wrong doer brings about what Nusbon argues is a wholly illusory sense of control a response to grief and appalling things that have happened is often a sense of helplessness and we feel as if somehow we are able to do something if we can get cross enough if we can indulge in blame and if we can indulge in punishment and Martha Nusbon goes so far as to say that anger is always normatively flawed it's often incoherent based on bad values and especially poisonous when people use it to deflect attention from real problems that they feel powerless to solve and we might think of some famous cases in which some people have taken have been encouraged by the newspaper papers to continue to fuel their anger and have been unable to grieve and have never been able to get past that appalling frustration and it's particularly ironic that the newspapers who encourage this are very often purported to be their champions Now Martha Nusbon would say that although anger is never justifiable and isn't that an interesting proposition anger is never justifiable Read her book but it is often well grounded and by well grounded she means that it's directed at the right person who has indeed done a wrong thing and it's they who are responsible for that but what she urges is a transition we begin by saying this is outrageous someone must pay but move towards saying instead this is outrageous it mustn't happen again that becomes the priority and as it says at the bottom of the slide there are a number of scholars who found that this is quite a common trajectory in restorative justice encounters people who have been victims of crime are initially very hostile, very angry but as the conference proceeds and as there begins to open up a degree of dialogue then they begin to focus on the priority of it not happening again so what at the moment we think we should do is by honouring victims we feel outrage on their behalf we feel a sense of shock what's happened is enormous and it's dreadful we then translate that into anger and our anger gives expression to retribution but there are at least two other paths that we could follow if we choose and one of them is to translate that outrage into a robust determination to prevent any kind of recurrence so that's another option but a third option also as victim support movements do is to turn our outrage into compassion and channel that into supporting the victim and the single most important thing to notice here I think is that there are three issues and not just one giving somebody whatever we take to be their just desserts trying to bring it about that things like this happen less often in the future and offering help to the victim they may be bound up and restorative justice sometimes seeks to bind them up but nevertheless they conceptually distinct and in particular they're not all well achieved or vindicated by anger and weighty punishment and it's terribly important to recognise that the outrage is no less we shouldn't have to compromise our feeling and somehow say well what's happened to this person is not so very bad we should look that badness in the face and refuse to follow the consequence that is often taken to follow from it and as I've said already in many cultures victims are encouraged to be angry and we join them in the anger and we talk up their anger and sometimes it can block grieving and prolong and aggravate the pains of the crime it can also prevent us from learning from dreadful crimes and distract attention from the specific needs and interests of victims for that matter stern punishment often fails to bring the anticipated satisfaction there's some interesting psychological research about this but it's not the case that victims who think I really want the person who did this to get their comeuppance and if that happens it's not the case that they say oh that's fine I feel okay with that now that doesn't always necessarily work so we need to find and seek and find the better ways of achieving the end and I rather like this quotation which comes from a novel by a man called Nathan Filer people will come on the television and say this happened and this was a sentence what kind of punishment is that that's just not enough and I do feel with Nathan Filer that some things are just too big and that an attempt to try to come up with a punishment that would be so dreadful that it could somehow reflect the enormity of the crime is for lawn because we won't achieve it and if we could we probably shouldn't because it would involve us behaving in a similarly barbarous and cruel way that we are attributing to the offender the rights of victims are not the best affirmed by a weighty punishment and we shouldn't articulate them in opposition to the rights of offenders the current Mayor of London when he was a Member of Parliament and he said that if you give prisoners the vote it would be a slap in the face of victims no it wouldn't and we shouldn't forget that offenders are a highly victimised group we should be doing this particularly to women offenders and you might think about Rita's experiences here you might also recall the work of our friend Gwyneth Boswell who was unable to be here today but is a staunch supporter of the Williams project who drew attention years ago to the fact that very many young people convicted of grave crimes haven't awfully abused and traumatic past so some people like myself might be tempted to say of course I'm a probation officer I was a probation officer for many years I never worked with victims it's just not true many of the offenders that we work with are certainly have been victims of dreadful crimes and if you are feeling particularly if this isn't a step too far you have sometimes people encouraging probation officers to raise victim awareness when they themselves have not been victims of anything very much but the people who's awareness they're trying to raise are probably the victims of some pretty horrible things so victims and offenders you can apply those terms if you wish to particular crimes but they're not permanent standings they're not sort of separate tribes goodies and baddies and the rhetorical contrast between them such that the more for one the less for the other is profoundly unhelpful and that way of thinking and talking about it hinders the reintegration of people with convictions and the development of strategies for supporting victims what I think we must try to do is to transcend any assumption that the interests of victims and offenders are inherently opposed and seek resolutions that satisfy the legitimate interests of both where does this leave probation well I think probation and these are early thinking about this and Tony Bottoms has helped me to think about it better but I'm still a long way from understanding it but I think that central theory is about has focused too much at the moment on the pronouncement of sentence and has paid insufficient attention to the way in which it's put in to effect how it's implemented but of course the way in which a sentence is implemented is also a communication so a court might say to somebody you need to take more responsibility for what you do but then they bung them in a prison where they can take very little responsibility for what they do their life is wholly organised for them so in a way the manner of implementation undercuts the message of the censure and we need to think instead I think much more about the end state and what that would be and how it might be reached I think probation could be understood as representing the community and its values enforcing the court's order is the censure there's a lovely expression that I associate I think with Mark Drakeford and Morris Vanston who talked about probation being at risk sometimes of becoming a bastardised form of moral scolding people don't come to probation to be scolded it's the implementation the holding people to account to the order of the court that is what constitutes the censure and what constitutes the punishment but censure of the crime is not the only message to convey and there we other things perhaps want to convey to Rita we might want to convey a degree of compassion and understanding and we can do that without any attempt to collude with the crime or in any way approve of her stealing which is probably a bad thing for her and for everybody else and we need to attend the messages that Rita might want to give back to the community whose value she's taken to have flouted if we don't pay that attention to her own perceptions there is a significant risk of our colluding with social injustice isn't it a shame that we haven't got the benefit of Bill's insights into desistence desistence is now a very topical subject in criminology but it wasn't one that Bill particularly spoke about has become much more prominent in more recent years but what Bill and Tony did write about in one of their most influential papers was a non-treatment paradigm repudiating some of the suspiciously intrusive rehabilitative therapies that people mistrusted at that time and offering helping as the foreground of what probation should do and if you think in terms of probation as helping you help people to do something that they are in charge of they're in the forefront and this includes an awareness of the obstacles and a commitment to trying to help them to overcome them and as I've tried to insist earlier social and moral rehabilitation involve the active participation of civil society and not merely but also its forbearance we duties towards people with convictions and not just rights against them if we take seriously this concept of a moral community which many philosophers of punishment advance then clearly we have obligations and not the obligations don't simply rest with them however unfashionable it might be and as Nicola Lacy I think puts it rather splendidly we need to try to respond effectively and even handily to the harms and rights violations represented by criminal conduct without resorting to measures which in effect negate the democratic membership and entitlements of offenders that's my last slide thank you so much for listening to me I don't really know why I'm standing here because I don't want to get in the way of your intelligent responses I feel I'm some kind of intervening moment just while you gather your thoughts so please live with your thoughts and don't necessarily listen to mine at this moment I have to say that I love the talk because you're saying what I want to hear I often say to students that I live in a triangle of which the points are theory, law and practice and Rob and you and Bill McWilliams all live I think in a similar sort of world in many ways one which is influenced by theory but is very much grounded in the real world and clearly you've been much effective Rob by your work as a probation officer your awareness of the vicissitudes of life by your common humanity which makes you respond rather differently to many traditional theoretical philosophers I have to say that I think this book is a great read if I'm standing up here just to try and sell the book I'll happily try and sell the book I think it's a fabulous read and I think it's interesting to think about who should read it certainly all students should read it it's on I hope our summer reading for students if they ever read anything halfway serious in the summer but has the minister of justice read it well perhaps I should just send him a copy and see whether he will as you know like the talk which was a great think piece Rob doesn't just write philosophy he wants what he calls a normative action guiding philosophy of punishment which helps us say why we should punish in this way for these reasons and he's given us I think a really powerful message that there isn't a single overriding rational for punishment but overall as he ended there we've got to recognise our duties towards people who have criminal convictions why on earth do we do what we do today and can our punishment system if you can possibly call it a system truly be justified so of course Rob says we can't have make an ethical appraisal of punishment without studying the reality of how sentences are put into effect he's surely absolutely right that too much philosophy has become distanced from the reality of day to day life to me a really interesting message is that he wants to raise ethical standards in sentencing practice first don't focus just on the pronouncements of sentences that has to be very important that the implementation of sentences is crucial and indeed in the book he says it's a message which is likely only to be heard by the offender well I think judges have to think through much more about the implementation the implications of their sentences when they impose them and the second thing I think that Rob said which was very relevant to judges and magistrates is to do with their training he gave a very clear message I think talking about Rita the questions that he asked about Rita is that judges you should think about the ethics the morality of what it is you're about to do to somebody you've got to ask these sorts of questions and not the step by step clinical process that they are encouraged to focus on so in an age where it's so difficult to bring down the prison population I have to say that if I was the minister of justice I would definitely have a key performance target to reduce the prison population to let's say 40,000 half of what it is today and I'm not at all convinced that our current sentencing guidelines do that again as Rob says in his book a penal tariff can generate did generate into nothing less than habit judges get into bad habits and these ethical questions are really interesting to shake us out I think of our bad habits I might tease Rob a little bit that he was a bit unoriginal in the title of his book which he stole from one of my other heroes but it would only be teasing because actually he pays due respect in his book to all the heroes in whose work he builds I deliberately slip in a mention of Nigel Walker but of course today's lecture is to commemorate the memory of Bill McWilliam and he so clearly also is a man who combined this really scholarly approach with moral conviction with a sense of purpose so the essence of Rob's thesis I think he's talked today is a critique of traditional philosophy it ignores the often unintended unwanted consequences of punishment imprisonment of course damages not only individuals but also their families, communities and indeed all of us it decreases people's social economic inclusion it rarely helps people in human capital and we've got to think about what punishing better really means how do you punish better it's difficult to know what better punishment looks like I like a message that you give Rob which tells people who work in prisons people who work in probation that their primary duty is to work towards the betterment of offenders and we have to recognise that so much punishment undermines other reintegrative rehabilitative mechanisms you mentioned trust today or sense of moral responsibility dignity social justice Rob is of course absolutely right to criticise the way that criminal justice policy often backfires again in the book I think he goes a bit further than he went today he goes so far as to conclude that the realisation of policy aspirations in practice is perhaps even more than in any other area of public policy altogether unpredictable wow that's quite something so what is the answer for Rob I think it's locating criminal policy within the domain of wider social policy I hadn't worked out till today actually worked in a faculty of health I think I'll suggest in this university that we move the law faculty into a faculty of health be a brilliant place to have a law faculty so that's great penal policy of course shouldn't be a discreet area detached from understanding how people really live their lives but I think reality is a lot more depressing than even you recognise Rob and I thought I would just wave in front of you not to tell you that I waste paper by printing things or that I've read things that lots of us haven't yet read the Justice Committee this week in its latest paper on transforming rehabilitation it's a fantastic indictment of current probation practice and I think it's really depressing that we rely on a committee of MPs to point out the blindingly obvious that Rob was pointing out and people go on pointing out that problems for released offenders include homelessness shortage of money ill health poor supervision and support I'm really intrigued by your outrage and your anger I'm not an expert on those concepts and I will have to worry about it in our working world should I focus more on the meaning of section 32 of the criminal justice or should I act or should I actually go away and read a book on anger and outrage should we be broad in our scholarship or should we be the world expert on very narrow things I think broad is probably beautiful but I do wonder what we should be doing with our outrage and our anger you've got to do more than just locate criminal policy within wider social policy you've got to fund it properly you've got to organise it properly and how we move things on I honestly don't know it was a great lecture it's a great book I think that we do all have to think about it it's inspirational I think to be reminded that we must restore our thinking the individuality of offenders which is what sentence guidelines are taking out in many ways we've got to get meaning and context into thinking about what we do with offenders of course we've got punitive access all those liberals in this room will agree on that not everybody will agree and you said very interesting things of course about the role in newspapers in fueling anger but cultivating empathy it was interesting you didn't have empathy on your list of buzzwords to think about again I'm not an expert there the bottom line I think is that we've got to do a bit more all of us to rise to the challenge that you point out your challenge is perhaps particularly for academics but also practitioners to think about how they engage with the real world how you actually make the world a better place or seek to do so I think that it's inspirational thank you very much for provoking us it'll be really interesting whether the questions are on philosophy of punishment or how you integrate philosophy of punishment into that common humanity which you seek to espouse but let me thank you and indeed the organisers of this lecture series for making us all I think considerably harder than it's often easier not to think very hard thank you