From Where I Stand
PMC4997112.txt
EDITORIAL COMMENT:
The sentence given to 23-year-old Pauline Jones and the amount by which it was cut on appeal (from 3 years to 21 months) has caused a healthy amount of public outrage, which is kept going as long as her letters and reports of her condition in Holloway Prison hospital keep showing up in the newspapers.
Denise Weller’s well-known abduction of the Harlow baby has also brought attention to the problems judges face when they have to deal with a criminal whose “state of mind” is in question.
Although the psychiatrist is now a fairly familiar figure in British courts of law, how his professional opinion is taken into account still leaves quite a lot to be desired.
It could be argued that psychiatric opinion on behalf of defendants is suffering from “over-exposure”—that too much is made of psychological troubles in an attempt to excuse too many offenders—but, even when psychiatric evidence does have an important bearing on the case, the legal system does not seem to have the flexibility (nor the prison system the facilities) to take it sufficiently into account.
It appears that the Appeal Court was unable to reduce Pauline Jones’ sentence by more than 15 months or to recommend any form of “care” other than prison because, although she was deeply emotionally disturbed at the time she took the baby (“out of my mind” is her expression), how she covered her tracks after the offence, and the skill with which she concealed the baby from the nation-wide search, indicate that, by that time, her mind was working in a cool, deliberate, and “normal” way and that she was aware of the hue and cried out of Denise’s parents.
Fear of the consequences if she returned the baby-after realising the enormity of what she had done-does not seem to have been acknowledged in law as a reasonable response to the situation. A frightening desire for self-preservation would lead anyone to try to avoid detection, surely, particularly a young woman with no knowledge of the law and no idea what sort of prison sentence might be waiting for her if she was caught.
So, because it would have been impossible for a psychiatrist to say that Pauline Jones was disturbed throughout the whole of the 5 weeks in which she had the baby (the competent way she looked after the child counts against her in a rather strange way in this context), the offence became “compound” in the eyes of the law because of the prolonged, knowing concealment of the baby.
Although the problems of interpretation that this kind of situation poses for judges can be appreciated, it would seem to indicate that some modification of sentencing policy should somehow be “built-in” to the law when the issue is so complicated by psychiatric factors. There doesn’t appear to be any room in which judges can move in this respect, and they should be allowed more scope for discretion.
When a man who battered his child, who died at the age of 15 months, gets an 18-month sentence and, a couple of years later, batters his other two-year-old baby and is sentenced to two years, while Pauline Jones, desperate to get her lover back and emotionally disturbed after a miscarriage, takes a baby in an irrational moment, then cares for it lovingly for 5 weeks and is sentenced to 3 years, something is wrong somewhere.
Without making any moral judgements about either “offence”, it does seem that the legal and psychiatric professions need to come together to establish a new set of principles to cope with this entire category of offenders-and psychiatric provision within existing prisons is not the answer.
This should be the winter of slightly more content for the disabled and the relatives who care for them at home. Alfred Morris’ Chronic Sick and Disabled Persons Act came into force on December 1st, as did the Attendance Allowance scheme.
But local authorities and the government still have a long way to go in the campaign to encourage people to come forward to take advantage of the Act and claim an allowance.
After 1,000 volunteers delivered leaflets to all 97,000 homes in Ealing, the director of social services, Nicolas Stacey, found more than 1,000 disabled people who had never been known to the borough before. All of them were eligible for help under the Act.
If this kind of demand is reflected in other boroughs throughout the country, there are not going to be many councils with social services committees that have allowed for so many more “clients” in their budgets. But Nicolas Stacey seems to work on the principle of “show that a demand exists and there is no alternative but to meet it.” This seems preferable to allowing some random estimate to be put into the budget to meet an unknown demand and risking being “caught on the hop”.
By December 1st, 95,000 people had applied for an Attendance Allowance (4.80 per week payable to people caring at home for a relative needing constant, day and night, supervision). 44,000 had been granted, 21,000 were rejected, and 30,000 were still under consideration. The government is preparing to substantially extend its original target of 50,000.
However, a couple with an autistic child who requires constant attention was refused an attendance allowance in November because they claim, the application form filled in by the family doctor dealt solely with a physical handicap. It would be interesting to know how many of the 4,100 appeals against the refusal of an allowance (88.6% of which were upheld) that have been looked at so far by Attendance Allowance Boards were made by family members of people with mental disorders.
Sir Keith Joseph must be congratulated for getting the agreement of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to release a further? 118 million to be spent predominantly on the services for the mentally ill and the elderly over the next four years.
About a third of the Room. allocated to England will be spent on local authority projects, notably an effort to sweep away the old workhouses still in use as old people’s homes.
The money is intended to be spent on institutional care, which, although to be welcomed, still does not apply any pressure upon local authorities to meet the community care requirements of the Mental Health Act. In Sir Keith’s own words in the House of Commons, “local authority money will not be distributed by the Government. It is up to local authorities to make their own decisions in the knowledge that increased loan sanctions are available and those who come first will be first served”.
Decisions, decisions for local authorities and even Room. spread over 156 authorities, will get swallowed up pretty quickly when it comes to putting up new buildings.
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