Hindley and Longford
Patrick Marn ham
Lord Longford's campaign to free Myra Hindle), has just reached one of its periodic climaxes, and the Parole Board has been Persuaded to consider next year whether the time has come to review her case. Myra Hindley is serving two life sentences for her Part in the Moors Murders of which she was found guilty in 1966. Lord Longford, now joined by Bernard Levin among others, considers that she has been imprisoned long enough.
According to Levin, Myra Hindley's punishment cannot be justified on grounds of retribution, since that is out of date, and it cannot be intended to deter anyone else, since her criminal behaviour was irrational. Therefore she is only in prison to be reformed, and this has been triumphantly accomplished. Longford considers that she Oily continues to be held because the authorities are frightened of the outcry 11 she were released. He is the chief witness to the fact of her repentance, and `no One', he writes to The Times, `who knows anything about prison life supposes that a ieur more years of incarceration would be expected to make her a better woman'.
Another of the arguments put forward by her supporters is that she played a sub ordinate role in the Moors Murders, that She was dominated by her lover Ian Brady, and that she was therefore merely a victim of misplaced loyalty. There is room for disagreement here on grounds of fact. The policemen at her trial admitted to being extremely frightened of Myra Hindley, which does not seem to fit the 'dominated little woman' role. And some cautious souls might even suggest that the excellence of her new character should be certified by people whose powers of perception were even greater than Lord Longford's. But the chief objection to the Longford-Levin crusade is surely that their interpretation of the purposes of punishment is self-servingly selective. Prisons are not social hospitals. Although they are supposed to reform criminals' behaviour, everyone knows that they are so oldfashioned that their success in doing so is almost incidental to their existence. And in cases like Myra Hindley's, prison is not seriously expected to do anything, except confine the guilty people for the rest of their lives.
Levin and Longford do not approve of the theory of punishment as retribution. They think that retribution means revenge, and that this is a primitive and anti-social emotion. Revenge is perhaps as primitive as any other emotion, like love, but its exact meaning — to obtain satisfaction for an offence by retaliation against the offender — is not particularly anti-social, rather the contrary since, when regulated by the state, it strengthens social order.
Retribution does not only contain the idea of revenge, it also suggests recompense and repayment on the part of the offender to those he or she has harmed. It will never be possible for Myra Hindley to repay the families of her victims for the suffering she inflicted on their children, but in so far as her own life is affected by her imprisonment she is making the only repayment that it is possible to arrange. When the two Moors Murderers were sentenced, nobody doubted that the only appropriate place for them to spend the remainder of their lives was in prison. Nothing has changed in the eleven years since; the reality of their actions has not faded, the appropriateness of Mr Justice Atkinson's sentence is not altered. All that time has done is to cloak the general sense of shock and disgust at their actions. How easy it is to revive those feelings is shown by Lord Longford's tasteless and foolish campaign.
And here we reach the low point of the Longford-Levin argument. The Longford end of the pantomime horse neighs about `a manufactured public outcry'. The Levin end vents a reproof against the parents of the murdered children for harbouring hatred of the murderers, and warns them that hatred is `damaging and corrosive'. This seems rather a lot for the parents to put up with. First this extraordinary animal appears on the stage, stirs up a great row about the murderers being released and reawakens all the dreadful memories; then it criticises the parents for persisting in their hatred, and the press for `creating' unnatural public alarm. When the parents express their outrage at the idea of parole for the murderers, Longford says that they are the last people whose views should be consulted since they are too deeply involved.
In an obvious sense that may be true but it invites the retort that the parents at least have some standing in the matter, whereas the necessity for Longford's own involvement in the Moors Murders case seems more elusive.
If the victims of crime meted out their own justice, it would very soon become the justice of the mob; but in replacing the mob with a more objective system, the state does not entirely forego its role as representative of those individual citizens who have been wronged. That is another reason why the element of retribution persists in the theory of punishment. The Moors Murders ended the lives of two young children and one older boy. The value we place on those lives is partly measured by the length of time their murderers spend in prison. Even Lord Longford should have begun to realise by now that most people do not consider that an adequate sentence has been served. That is why the two Moors Murderers should continue in prison. It is nothing to do with official fear of a manufactured public outcry.
It would be a sad thing if the only practical result of Lord Longford's agitatings on behalf of Myra Hindley was to be increased support for the reintroduction of capital punishment, particularly in view of the number of people found guilty of murder in recent years who have subsequently been cleared long after they would formerly have been hanged.
Previous page
