The right to know
Following on from yesterday's plea by a tabloid journalist for someone to identify Jon Venables, one of today's tabloids has come up with a clever bit of logic when it comes to our 'right to know':
Meanwhile, prison officers were outraged by the secrecy surrounding the killer, saying the move meant every 20-something, newly-imprisoned lag risked being attacked by vigilantes.
“There will be bloodshed,” one officer said. “The sooner we know more about what he’s done and where he is, the better.”
Cunning. The only way you'll stop vigilante attacks is to name him, so that the vigilantes only attack him, and not anyone else thinking that it's him! I suppose that makes sense, in a twisted way. At least, it would make sense if they hadn't identified his exact age, and then gone on to speculate about the offence for which he has been recalled to jail, and then gone on to speculate also about the conditions under which he would be held in jail. You know, apart from all that, it's entirely responsible reporting.
And so the drip-drip of details goes on. As I said yesterday, I can't help suspecting that the papers and broadcasters are secretly hoping that someone will release details on the internet, that they will become widely spread through social networking, and that they can then go on to reveal them, using the excuse that the information is in the public domain. They're sly enough to do that. They're certainly trying to create a clamour, and much as they try and distance themselves from the 'bloodshed' of vigilantes and pretend it's nothing to do with them, they've created the environment in which such attacks will flourish.
The question that never gets asked is whether there might be an understandable reason why these men's identities aren't released. They claim it's all about our 'right to know'. Really? Really about our right to know? Or about their need to flog a few papers?
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March 4th, 2010 - 09:56
Having worked on many a story that full details cannot be released about, reporting restrictions are usually in place to protect the innocent. I can’t comment about this particular story but in the case of Baby P for example, restrictions would have been in place to protect innocent people, not the people that committed the crime. These innocent people may include vulnerable people – children or other family members. Isn’t the need to protect innocent people greater than the need to ‘name and shame’? I think so.
March 4th, 2010 - 10:01
I felt like I’d walked into some bizarro world when I read what those ‘officers’ said. Presuming they were even said by officers, shouldn’t there be some sort of outcry over the fact that, you know, we have police officers who can’t or won’t even do their jobs and protect inmates from attack?
March 4th, 2010 - 10:20
I was wondering if it was just me who was questioning the right to know. I’m pretty sure that the staff at the prison he is in will have been told and it will be classified information. It’s the way these things work, people with the actual right to know actually know so that they can protect people from vigilante attacks and, more likely, from journalists
March 4th, 2010 - 12:34
Agreed, but what these papers are tapping into is the very justifiable anger that these people are being let out in the near future at all. I don’t agree with releasing their identities if they ARE to be released, but the fact is they should not have been released so soon.
March 4th, 2010 - 15:09
The way this story’s running seems depressingly predictable. The tabloid press love bogeymen, and Venables is perfect – not only did he commit a truly heinous crime, he’s also become mysterious and unidentifiable. Doubly scary. And if he was unmasked it would be even bigger news, so they put out ominous headlines and drum up speculation and the news machine rolls on. Public interest doesn’t really come into it.
But this story isn’t just the usual irresponsible, amoral scaremongering that always goes on with these things. The papers are tapping into a fundamental disagreement that a large proportion of the population has with the justice system when it comes to high profile cases like this.
There’s a genuine debate to be had about how we deal with the perpetrators of a crime this serious. I happen to think that prison ought to be about rehabilitation as much as punishment, but a lot of people belong to the ‘cage these beasts’ crowd. We need a proper debate between the sides, and the press ought to be facilitating it.
Instead, they’re just fanning the flames of people’s outrage and hoping for a scoop. It’s predictable, it’s depressing and it’s missing the point.
March 4th, 2010 - 21:10
The point that, as so often is missed here is that, whoever and wherever he may now be, the erstwhile Jon Venables has been able to live in the comunity without being recalled for a period of nine years, from the ages of eighteen to twenty-seven. Given what we know of his history, that is not insignificant, and tends to rebut the whole “Well, he shouldn’t have been let out in the first place” argument.
Many psychologists and risk assessors working in the area of parole agree that once someone has been in the community on licence for over a year, the factors giving rise to any future recall for breach of licence are more likely to be the result of events in their life at the time, rather than a throwback to what may have happened or failed to happen in prison. That’s not a view you’ll see much reported in cases such as this, but then it’s the view of people who spend a large amount of time in prisons, talking to prisoners, and carrying out detailed studies of reoffending, and as such will fail to chime with the “prison is a holiday camp” pronouncements of those who have never set foot inside a jail.
I do not know what Venables is alleged to have done; if he is facing charges and has pled not guilty, then he is as entitled to the presumption of innocence as anyone else accused of a crime. If it is proven that he has returned to violence, then he will spend a very long time back in prison, and rightly so. The fact is, all the digging to find out his new identity is jeopardising any prospect of a fair trial, and (as stated above) making it likely that wholly unconnected young men will be seriously assaulted in prison. However, as with Baby P, those of us who wanted to see the law take its course were howled down by those who wouldn’t last a week in a real jail, even when all the accused were given “Soft” life sentences.
There are times when I despise the twisted morality of many of my fellow humans. If a convicted killer has reverted to violence, let’s allow the courts to deal wityh it as they should.
March 5th, 2010 - 18:19
Erwin James has written an excellent piece on Venables in G2:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/mar/03/erwin-james-jon-venables
March 5th, 2010 - 21:24
That comment from the Prison Officer is fucking priceless, because think how unusual men in their 20s are in jail. I mean think how everyone of them will stand out in those jails full of er….. men in their er….. 20s.
Every nick in this country will get a fresh crop of 20 something men in every day, no one is telling me everyone of them will get jumped by the existing inmates.