On Saturday, December 24th, 2022, the Daily Mail published an article by David Barrett: ‘Dangerous prisoners let out on Christmas Eve, warns Labour’. Violent criminals and sex offenders were let out of prison on Christmas Eve last year – posing a threat to public safety, the Labour Party has revealed.
The article criticised the Conservatives, stating: ‘Our country needs a government that is serious about getting tough on crime’. A Conservative source hit back declaring: “Labour released thousands of prisoners early because they didn’t build enough prison places, and recently voted against longer jail time for dangerous criminals. Labour is weak on crime, and this Conservative Government is doing whatever it takes to protect the public.”
Woeful and pathetic words, the same old ‘stuck record’ being pumped out by the two main Political Parties, trying to score points against each other on who is hard or soft on crime. The very same Parties, who for over the past six decades have knowingly ignored the consequences of subconsciously implanting extreme violence in combat soldiers prior to their serving in conflicts, without any subsequent programme of deconditioning. Their minds have then been stuck in an unbalanced world of extreme violence, while being expected to lead normal productive lives on their return from conflicts. Tragically, this has resulted in very high numbers of combat veterans in the prison population serving sentences for extreme violence, such as rape and murder – the very same heinous crimes and threat to public safety these two Political Parties are bickering on about in the newspaper article!
Unquestionably, service in conflicts requires that soldiers can kill or maim the enemy (other human beings) without any thought, hesitation or conscience, so I am not denying there is a requirement for this deliberate implanting of extreme violence, and dehumanising of the said enemy in combat veterans’ minds. However, this “full on” training prior to service in conflicts will deeply affect individual soldiers in many different ways, and the Ministry of Defence has since the early 1970s been implanting the realism of ruthless extreme violence as the natural order of things. Therefore, surely each and every combat veteran who has served in conflicts during this period must be properly deprogrammed from this brainwashing. Otherwise, they are still at risk of using this embedded violence whenever future circumstances dictate, especially if involved in a heated argument whilst under stress.
I am the co-founder of Veterans in Prison (VIP), and for many years we could not obtain any true figures regarding the numbers of ex-military personnel in the prison population from either the Ministry of Defence or the Criminal Justice System. Then in 2008, when the prison population reached the 80,000 mark in England and Wales, we at VIP had established our own network with veterans throughout the prison system. This enabled us to carry out our own survey of military personnel in the prison population, which found a massively disproportionate representation of army veterans compared to Royal Navy and Royal Air Force personnel. To be exact, 7,435 were combat veterans made-up mainly of ex-soldiers and Royal Marines, 323 were Royal Navy and 404 were Royal Air Force. In fact, combat veterans were more excessive in numbers than any other profession in the entire prison population.
These figures did prove that something was and still is very seriously wrong, yet the only elephant in the room which connects all combat veterans in the prison population serving sentences for violence is that they were all brainwashed by the “full on” training and never deprogrammed from this implanted violence once their duty was done. Appallingly, they are unknowingly being left wide open to the non-existent mercy of the Law if their behaviour ever becomes violent during any part of their future lifetimes. There will be no sympathy from the Criminal Justice System, as they will not accept that violent behaviour by combat veterans is related to war experiences and the intensified or “upped” training methods to which they were subjected prior to their service in conflicts.
Subsequently, in 2009 the Assistant General Secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) Mr Harry Fletcher, contacted VIP and asked if he could borrow our figures of the numbers of ex-servicemen in the prison population. Seemingly, Mr Fletcher was taking a leaf out of the VIP’s book and carrying out his own survey of veterans under supervision by his colleagues in the Probation Service. His findings were shocking, and showed that 12,000 veterans were being supervised by the Probation Service and ‘domestic violence’ was by far the most common conviction.
Shortly after Mr Fletcher’s survey (05/07/2009), the Daily Mirror published an article by John Clements: ‘War veterans in arrests scandal’. This article was about thousands of ex-servicemen being arrested by the Police every month, as allegedly a third are committing violent crimes while a quarter are suspected of drunkenness, vandalism or sexual assault. Interestingly, a couple of months later (26/09/2009), the Daily Mail published an article with the headlines: ‘20,000 neglected ex-servicemen are either in jail or on probation’.
Over the past eight years, there have been two inquiries into the number of veterans in the prison system. An official one was carried out by the Government, the other was purported to be independent by the oldest penal charity in the world – the Howard League. Ironically, both these inquiries resulted in complete whitewashes, as they did not even bother to differentiate between combat and non-combat veterans in the prison population. In fact, both of these inquiries purposely ‘hid’ what VIP had uncovered and doggedly raised with the authorities many years earlier, which was the mountain of specifically combat veterans serving prison sentences for extreme violence in the prison population.
The first inquiry within the Criminal Justice System was in March 2014 and chaired by then Justice Secretary Mr Chris Grayling MP. Unbelievably, the conclusion of the report of this inquiry was that we should start counting the numbers of veterans entering the Prison System only from January 2015. There was nothing, absolutely nothing about the thousands of combat veterans already serving or having served prison sentences for violence over the many years prior to this date.
What is so dismaying is that the Howard League inquiry appointed an impressive panel of high ranks and titles such as: Admiral the Lord Boyce GCB OBE DL: General the Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank GCB OBE DL: Major General David Jenkins, Wing Commander Dr Hugh Milroy, Chief Executive of Veterans Aid, Elyfin Llwyd MP and Chris Sheffield former Governor of Manchester prison. Appallingly, this supposedly distinguished and expert group had the audacity to ‘cover-up’ the mountain of combat veterans from the very start by stating: “It is important to begin by repeating that the significant majority of those leaving the forces lead constructive lives after discharge and do not at any stage become involved in the Criminal Justice System.”
It was obvious from the very beginning that this Howard League report was going nowhere, other than to toe the line and follow the policy of the Ministry of Defence and the Criminal Justice System. If they had any real intention of committing a proper account of the reason behind the high numbers of combat veterans in the prison population, the Howard League should have felt it important enough to have emphasised in their report that the significant majority of service personnel in the prison population are combat veterans, who prior to their service in conflicts were indoctrinated in pure unadulterated extreme violence and never rehabilitated before returning to peacetime surroundings.
Shamefully, it is the deliberate practice of these official inquiries to not contemplate or have any intention of understanding the reason behind the high numbers of combat veterans in the Criminal Justice System. This is intentional because they are complicit with Government censorship and do not wish to endorse any reports of the harsh reality of combat veterans in the prison population. Perhaps Governments already realise that they are the initial instigators of this implanted extreme violence that is ultimately responsible for this situation.
