On the anniversary of my wrongful conviction the memories of my time on remand stay in my mind. Something which
I have been thinking about a lot recently is the fact that while I was held on
remand I was able to read through much of the very limited 'disclosed' documentation on my case. If
you’re charged with a crime you’ll need to read the charge sheet and indictment,
your own statement or transcripts of interviews for signing, all statements
against you and forensic reports both for and against your innocence. This
material might be quite extensive and require many hours of reading.
Forensic and legal documents often contain technical language, which can be
difficult to follow without specialist knowledge or a dictionary. I was
fortunate enough to be able to do this but for many people charged with
criminal offences it’s not an option because they cannot read and write.
In today’s society there’s always
help available for people with disabilities such as partial vision or hearing
difficulties and similarly if you can’t read or write you should be able to ask
for someone to read it to you. The problem is that the vast majority of people
charged with crimes who are not literate will not tell anyone about it. This
means that the situation arises where many people have no idea of the detailed charges
against them and this places greater difficulty on formulating a defence
strategy. The bigger issue of course is that some people go through police
interviews facing often very serious charges, and end up tried and convicted
without really knowing the many factors of how this came about. Imagine not knowing
the reasons why you were convicted, maybe wrongly, of serious crimes and
imprisoned for even the shortest period or as long as whole life sentence.
This can also have impact on the
victims of crime because admission of guilt by the perpetrator often helps
victims to understand what happened to their loved one. Many of the accused
won't understand the nature of the evidence against them and will not make
confessions, where as if they had been able to read they might have done.
Confessions also help the prisoner to rehabilitate and work towards better
prison conditions and long-term objectives of building a new life on release.
During my time in Full Sutton prison
I took a course, which enabled me to be capable of teaching people to read and
write. It was called a ‘Peer Support Qualification’, and once achieved allowed
me to be a classroom assistant in jail. My role was to help those guys who most
others had given up hope on. One of those I helped was a guy with Tourette’s
syndrome. He had a lot of involuntary physical ticks and verbal outbursts. He
had clearly struggled with every aspect of his life until this point plus his
personal hygiene was not the best but I saw through that and we got on okay. I
managed to get him to learn the basics and above all to find some
confidence in himself, which he had been sadly lacking before. Learning to read
and write to a reasonable standard can often only take a few months and makes
all the difference to prisoners who need to use cost effective methods to keep
in touch with family and friends and read their legal mail.
Why is it that a justice system
completely reliant upon written documents to create the case against someone,
can proceed with a prosecution even though the defendant cannot read a word of
any of the witness statements put before them? It is only in recent times that
the government has realised quite a substantial amount of prisoners struggle
with being able to read and write. In the last ten years or so every inmate
gets tested to see if they can read and write, prior to that it was possible to
simply conceal that fact from the prison authorities and everyone else around
them. Guys simply had a range of good excuses at the ready for not being able
to read. A classic was and is: “I haven’t got my glasses with me”, or: “My
glasses are broken.” There is no come back on that.
Some prisoners have learnt where to
put numbers or ticks on the forms they have to fill in for their canteen orders
or meal choices, so even friends don’t notice. But since the system realised
that reading and writing ability was a problem for prisoners, proper testing
has been done where there are no excuses for why they can’t do the test. Accordingly
the authorities have discovered that between 40% and 60% of prisoners cannot
read or write to entry level one, the expected level
for children under the age of 11. That is simply shocking and it’s not just that schooling has
failed these men, or that prison education might have failed them, it’s that
they have been prosecuted and jailed, probably many times and yet they’ve not
been able to read the prosecution’s case against them and they could well be imprisoned in the first place because they were unable to gain employment owing to the fact that they can't read and write.
With the huge cuts in legal aid, and prisoners not admitting to their
solicitor that they can’t write or read the witness statements, people simply
wait until trial and listen to what people say about them in Court and react to
that but by then it’s a bit late. Moreover, I’m told that those who serve on a jury are not required to prove that they
can read or write well enough to be able to understand legal documents and
witness statements either.
My personal experience of those who
struggle to read and write is that you’d never know from how they looked or how
they spoke or how they conducted themselves. Their conversation is varied and
interesting and there really aren’t any outward signs indicating they can’t
read and write unless they tell you. But to think that probably 50% of those
people who are prosecuted for the most serious crimes cannot read or write to
entry level one standard is quite simply scandalous. How can they have had a
fair trial? Maybe they received some help but not enough.
Being able to read and write should
be one of the basic human rights, every citizen should have.
Prisoners should never be prosecuted until they are literate – hold them on
remand and teach them how to read and write, and hold the prosecution until
they can. It’s simple, some will simply delay but the prison system has ways to
encourage compliance and then the country has a chance of another 50% of
prosecutions being fair. Alternatives could be providing audio transcripts of
all material but this doesn’t solve the long-term problem of illiterate
prisoners hoping for rehabilitation and release.
Jeremy