Post-Ruth Ellis: Changing Attitudes to Crime and Punishment in Britain - Essay Example

Post-Ruth Ellis: Changing Attitudes to Crime and Punishment in Britain Almost six decades after her trial and execution, Ruth Ellis still haunts the world of law as well as society, in the UK in particular. In 1963, a couple of years before the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 suspended the death penalty for murder, Robert Hancock published Ruth Ellis: The Last Woman to be Hanged.1 The issue was just as fresh in 1990 as may be inferred from Laurence Marks and Tony Van Den Bergh coming out with the publication of the book Ruth Ellis: A Case of Diminished Responsibility?.2 Dance with a Stranger, Kenneth Harper’s apparently fictitious work based on the life of Ruth Ellis and its film version of the same name were both well received.3 The 2013 book A Fine Day for a Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story by Carol Ann Lee4 claims to have done a lot of research and makes yet another effort to throw light on the facts of the case. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1Robert Hancock, Ruth Ellis: The Last Woman to be Hanged (London: Orion Publishing Group, 1963) 2Laurence Marks and Tony Van Den Bergh, Ruth Ellis: A Case of Diminished Responsibility? (New York: Penguin, 1990) 3Kenneth Harper and Shelagh Delaney, Dance with a Stranger (London: Panther, 1985) 4Carol Ann Lee, A Fine Day for a Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2013) The trial of Ruth Ellis may have lasted only a couple of days or even less than that. But the echoes of the trial continue to linger through the corridors of time and that is a testimony good enough to understand the impact of the case on the British legal system as well as the attitudes of people and society towards crime and punishment. For instance, such terms as ‘crime passionnel (crime of passion)’ and ‘diminished responsibility’ that would otherwise have remained strictly confined to the arena of legal jargon are almost in the public domain today, and in this the contribution of Ruth’s trial cannot be understated. Whether or not Ruth deserved the penalty that she was given continues to be a matter of debate. But it is quite likely that those on either side of the debate confess that she stirred their conscience. It makes one wonder what made the British Home Office authorities of the time so stubborn in dealing with the pleas for a reprieve in Ruth’s case. If that was a move meant for strengthening the abolitionist cause, it did succeed eventually. Were this to be true, it might look unfair that Ruth should have been victimized in the process, but it can be rationalized by calling a Ruth martyr rather than a victim irrespective of the truth. Most people would agree that, the law of the United Kingdom with regard to capital punishment, as it exists today, would not have taken that shape without Ruth’s execution. 5Nevertheless, it may be noted that even in 1965, when the UK Parliament …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 5Kaye Stearman, The Debate About the Death Penalty (New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2007), 40. resolved to end the death penalty, public opinion largely seemed to be in favour of keeping it probably because conventional thinking would lead us to believe that capital punishment could be a deterrent to murder. In spite of the infamous example of the Birmingham Six who had been doomed to spend seventeen long years in prison before their convictions were finally quashed by the Court of Appeal, the question of reintroducing the use of the gallows continued to be hotly discussed and in 1994, there was a even a legislative attempt to do so. It is a different thing that in the end, the motion was defeated by a large majority.6 The implication is that there still seems to be in existence a significant section of the society that differed on the issue. It is common knowledge that the so-called facts and conclusions presented by statistics, averages and surveys can be often misleading on the one hand and conflicting on the other. It is sometimes because they are politically motivated, sometimes because they have been manipulated by vested interests and sometimes owing to inconsistencies in the research or the ambiguity or closed-ended nature of the questionnaires prepared by the survey agencies. In Britain, the impression created by rhetoric of the media and politicians, even in the decades following Ruth’s case, was that the public wanted the laws and punishments to be harsh. If it was true, it was quite against the basic objective of criminal justice system which is reform and ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 6Roger Grahame Hood and Carolyn Hoyle, The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 47. not revenge. As each of us has divergent interests and perceptions, It will never be possible to get a completely homogenous and objective picture of the public attitude towards any issue let alone an issue like Ruth’s. Moreover, the attitude is not likely to remain unchanged with time. Social, cultural, economic and international developments do have their role in influencing public opinion. Indeed, there appears to be an inverse relation between economic prosperity and rate of imprisonment and it is believed that the use of imprisonment in a society rises or falls subject to the growth or deterioration of its economy. 7 Though it would be difficult to make definitive conclusions, empirical studies reveal that attitudes may also vary subject to generation, gender, racial differences and class differences. Understandably, the older generation could have been less sympathetic to Ruth whereas the younger citizens held a different viewpoint. It may not exactly be the result of age and could be a result of their vulnerability to victimization. On the length and severity of sentences pertaining to rape convictions, men and women are bound to exhibit different emotional orientations and such variation could be true of Ruth’s case as well. Similarly, those on the higher rungs of the socio-economic ladder would be more concerned about the protection of victims whereas those on the lower rungs would worry more about the rights of the accused. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 7Joanna R. Adler (ed.), Forensic Psychology: Concepts, Debates and Practice (London: Routledge, 2013), 1998. The way different sections of the British society responded to Ruth’s execution was also, obviously, a function of different kinds of sensitivities. However, this is not to say that these perceptions about crime and punishment have anything to do with the actual crime level. A recent report published by the British Crime Survey suggests that a large proportion of people continued to believe that crime has risen across the country as a whole and in their local area. In actual fact, there was a reduction in the total number of crimes since 1995.8 In this, the abolitionists whose voices became louder after Ruth’s execution can find a point to validate their argument. The positive note is that, according to the same report, people’s confidence levels in Britain’s criminal justice system have generally been improving and people are, to a great extent, convinced that the performance of the system is effective enough at reducing crime. It is worth mentioning here that, based on the findings of the British Crime Survey 1998, the public favour community based sentences rather than prison sentences contrary to the assumptions and claims of politicians. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 8Krista Jansson, British Crime Survey: Measuring Crime for 25 Years [web document] accessed 13 April 2009. Vis-à-vis these trends, what strikes as a surprise is that in the recent period, the UK has witnessed the emergence of contradicting phenomena – of rising imprisonment rates and falling crime rates, in spite of the post-1955 changes in attitude.9 From this trend, we have to wonder whether Ruth’s episode really succeeded in persuading governments as to the worth of correctionist goals, for, they seem to slowly but steadily moving away in the opposite direction. The prison too has come to be seen as a place where it is possible to detain persons who are deemed to be harmful to the community. Our safety rather than their reform or rehabilitation turns out to be the primary concern of the administration. In this, it is all right if the conditions have to be harsh. Maybe we need a few more eye openers like Ruth. The shift towards humane methods of punishments is easier said than done. The arguments of human rights advocates notwithstanding, punitive attitudes were found to become more intense in times of high unemployment. What could explain this? For a lay man, it defies logic to see the conditions in a prison being much better than the living conditions of the poor in the society. They would rather be glad to see the opposite being true. 10As such, public attitude to crime in a society at a given point of time may be regarded as being reflective of the prevailing socio-economic situation. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 9David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 14. 10Joanna R. Adler (ed.), Forensic Psychology: Concepts, Debates and Practice, 1998. The impact of the overall socio-economic order is much, much greater than that of isolated incidents like Ruth’s, which fail to have an enduring influence on public sensibility. For most part of human history, for that matter, harsh punishments were preferred and advocated by people as well as governments. Death sentence was accepted as a very natural form of punishment in line with the conventional doctrine of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth’. It is this rule that implicitly justified capital punishment even in Ruth’s case. In the late twentieth century, while the humane punishment idea was catching up, we notice a trend emerging which marked a transformation from incarceration to decarceration, a term that refers to tendency to close down of prisons and asylums. We may hope it was more than a cost-cutting strategy. So, it was hailed as a great reform and an enlightened policy derived from humane reasoning. The so-called criminal tendencies and deviant behaviour were now beginning to be viewed as symptoms of an identifiable psychiatric disorder to which remedies can be planned and implemented by social workers, medical professionals and professionals of education.11 Though there is a lot of scepticism about the proclaimed element of this reform, the approach would have qualified Ruth for a reprieve, had it existed in the mid-twentieth century. As pointed out by Bertrand Russell in his essay ‘Religion and Morality’, we are all very patient with a motor car that will not go. Rather than being annoyed, we ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 11 Mark Kirby, Sociology in Perspective, (Oxford: Heinemann, 2000), 633. realize it is more important to find out what has gone wrong and rectify the problem. It is a mystery why we should fail to apply the same line of thinking when we have to deal with the deviant. The Prison Reform Trust observes that the traditional manner of punishing criminals has failed in both reforming and deterring them which is substantiated by the fact that half of all prisoners re-offend within two years.12 This is not compatible with the HM Prison Service’s objective to reduce crime by providing constructive regimes which address offending behaviour. Measures like probation for young offenders instead of custody and starting Borstal schools in early twentieth century were not without effect but in the last part of the century there was again some rollback with Detention Centers replacing Borstals. This cannot happen if the institutions care to derive long-term lessons from cases like Ruth’s. The world takes rather an unduly long time to learn lessons from history. Violent revolutions like the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century and the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century owe a substantial portion of their character to the ineffectiveness of the judicial systems of their times. In the case of Britain, if such rebellions did not occur, it is largely because of the accommodative nature of the legal systems. That is not to say that jurisprudence alone can bring about reclamation of the judicial system. Relaxing punitive rules and embarking on penal reforms is a multi-faceted task and in UK, the penal policy as we have it today has ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 12 Bob Bowie, Ethical Studies, (Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes, 2004), 268. become possible because various demographic, social, sociological and infrastructural concerns such as population control, poverty eradication, welfare of industrial workers, education, housing, employment schemes and strengthening the family institution, have been addressed successfully. The cause of this accommodative nature is furthered by the Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998 which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into the domestic law of UK and became operative with effect from 2 October 2000.13 But some of these changes would have occurred much earlier if the governments cared to dwell a little deeper into the issues invisibly associated with Ruth’s conviction. Eighteenth-century criminal justice system was characterized by brutality but from that history of public execution and transportation being routine punishments, the system has matured and evolved into the phase wherein dealing fairly, openly and humanely with prisoners is laid down as the first and foremost principle in Her Majesty’s Prison Service.14 This is the spirit necessary for the democratic ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 13 Bethel Erastus-Obilo, Reason Curve, Jury Competence and the English Criminal Justice System: The Case for a 21st Century Approach, (Boca Raton: Universal Publishers, 2009), 205. 14 Debra Gray et al., BTEC First Public Services (Uniformed), (Oxford: Heinemann Publishers, 2004), 19. institutionalization of the judicial system in which there is no more role for informal agencies in dealing with offences. Moral outrage is no more an acceptable reaction to the stimulus of crime. The state strives to make CERTAIN, PROPORTIONAL and IMPERSONAL as the key characteristics of punishment. In order to sustain this spirit, it will be necessary to make sure that politicians and administrators do not get carried away by the findings of misinterpreted opinion polls, for, if they make the mistake of drawing comprehensive conclusions based on such polls and use it to form the basis of policy making, the damage to the system and to the principles of justice and fairness will be enormous and irreversible. All said and done, it is not easy to shake off the conventional framework of crime and punishment of which the institution of prison continues to be a representative. Prison and reform are antithetical. We have continually experimenting to make things better and as this journey continues, we can be optimistic that there will arrive a day that sees the prison as an extinct establishment. Bibliography Adler, Joanna R. (ed.). Forensic Psychology: Concepts, Debates and Practice. London: Routledge, 2013. Bowie, Bob & Robert A. Bowie. Ethical Studies, Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes, 2004. Erastus-Obilo, Bethel. Reason Curve, Jury Competence and the English Criminal Justice System: The Case for a 21st Century Approach. Boca Raton: Universal Publishers, 2009. Garland, David. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Gray, Debra & Helen Cook et al. BTEC First Public Services (Uniformed). Oxford: Heinemann Publishers, 2004. Hancock, Robert. Ruth Ellis: The Last Woman to be Hanged. London: Orion Publishing Group, 1963. Harper, Kenneth & Shelagh Delaney. Dance with a Stranger. London: Panther, 1985. Hood, Roger Grahame & Carolyn Hoyle. The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Jansson, Krista. British Crime Survey: Measuring Crime for 25 Years. [web document] , accessed 13 April 2009. Kirby, Mark. Sociology in Perspective. Oxford: Heinemann, 2000. Lee, Carol Ann. A Fine Day for a Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2013. Marks, Laurence & Tony Van Den Bergh. Ruth Ellis: A Case of Diminished Responsibility? New York: Penguin, 1990. Stearman, Kaye. The Debate About the Death Penalty. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2007. Read More