21 September 2024
It is not often in my line of work that you get to the light at the end of the tunnel, but when you do, it gives you the chance to step back and see how differently and better things could be done.
Over 16 years ago, I started work on a “difficult” case of a 16-year-old child. He had been sentenced to detention for public protection (DPP), the equivalent of an IPP for children, with a minimum term of just over two years. He was in a children’s prison. He spent a lot of time in “segregation”, which he recently described as being held in a single room for months at a time, your meals pushed through the door and nobody having any time for you. He remembers being brought directly from the segregation unit a few years later in a young adult prison to his parole hearing – and I remember that too. He was all over the place and did not stand a chance. But it was in preparation for that hearing that I was able to commission a specialist adolescent psychiatrist to prepare a report that identified a suspected learning disability and raised the possibility of a transfer to hospital under the Mental Health Act 1983. I remember going to visit him to go through that report over a decade ago. We were not permitted a private room in the busy and noisy young adult prison and we had to go through it in the main visits hall, in hushed voices. He cried when we went through it – somebody had finally understood him and his needs.
He did not get parole that time. But, as a result of that report and a lot of letters sent to in-reach in the prison on his behalf, he did eventually find himself in one of the country’s three high secure hospitals. It was only once he got there and was properly assessed that the full nature and extent of his needs became known. He had a significant learning disability which, as with so many children in the criminal justice system, he had not known about himself, and his survival mechanisms had masked.
He recently described that transfer to hospital as the point when he became understood – or in his own words, which I felt somehow described it better “understanded”. His time in the specialist hospital in turn allowed him to do psychological work tailored to his needs. He feels that in hospital staff finally had time for him and wanted to help him. He also started some medicines that helped with his impulsivity. If only he had had this kind of understanding and support from the outset, things could have been very different. Just over a year later, he was ready to move from a high secure hospital to a medium secure setting.
Once in hospital, clinicians were able to review the nature of his mental disorders, their link to his index offence and the best pathway for him and the wider public. He asked me to belatedly appeal his sentence, which we did, successfully. His indeterminate sentence was substituted with a restricted hospital order. It was as though a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. He recently said that, before this point, he feared he could be rushed back to prison at any point, but, once his order was changed, he felt much more able to accept the help on offer and crack on with repairing his life.
It was a long journey, and one which mirrored the development of my own legal practice from parole hearings, to criminal appeals and then mental health work. Slowly and surely, he moved from medium to low secure to a rehabilitation ward, before being conditionally discharged into the community. With the support of an aftercare package under s117 of the Mental Health Act 1983, he had supported accommodation and a care team that included a mental health social worker and a psychiatrist. I continued to attend regular reviews every six months, which looked at his physical and mental well-being. We would talk about supporting him with finding work, getting driving lessons and anything else he needed to work towards his ambition of having a “normal life”.
Four years after he was first discharged under conditions, I recently represented him at his final hearing for an absolute discharge Mental Health Tribunal – these are only granted in fairly rare circumstances, and the Tribunal has an absolute discretion. By the time we got to this point, my client was living in the community, living an entirely pro-social life with his own little family. Don’t get me wrong, life is complicated for all of us and there had been bumps along the way. But what came out at the recent hearing was just how much formal legal labels had impeded his progress, preventing him from feeling like the new person he had become: every single professional involved in his care agreed there was therapeutic benefit in removing his section for this reason. We forget, or do not acknowledge, what a shadow criminal justice processes cast on the lives, hopes and confidence of those we want to grow away from crime.
The experience of securing an absolute discharge from the Mental Health Tribunal was one of the most affirming and positive legal experiences I have ever had in my own career: This time there were tears of joy on his part. Borrowing from Shadd Maruna’s concept of the potential benefits of “graduating” from criminal justice, the hearing could not have been a more appropriate graduation marking the beginning of a new chapter.