'Murders and Murderers' — In Conversation with Professor David Wilson (SE 1980)

so good evening everyone um we welcome all our guests here in the Quarry White House Auditorium and also people joining us from the UK and from around the world you are very welcome the the list of countries allegedly uh where people watching this live include Australia Taiwan and New Zealand where it strikes me it must be what 3 or 4:00 in the morning so if you really are watching live in Australia or New Zealand do let us know but you're very welcome to watch on demand as well and plenty of people near a home in France and Germany and Ireland and Portugal and over to the USA so lots of people joining a SE in alumni and friends from Britain and from around the world and um as usual with our events at sewin you are very welcome to ask questions um because of um um trying out the auditorium really we're going to play it safe tonight so we'd like your questions if you want to send them in uh to do them by email is probably easiest and if you email me at master cell. cam.ac.uk so that's master. cam.ac.uk and what we're going to be doing is interviewing David for maybe 15 or 20 minutes and then throwing over the uh to the audience where you can ask any question at all that you want and we are delighted tonight to have with us um Professor David Wilson who has many hats he's a criminologist he's a former prison Governor he's a writer he's a broadcaster and um most most important he's a SE alumnus and we think there are probably fairly few se alumni who went pretty much straight from sein to working at wormwood scrubs and he spent quite a long time in the prison service and uh there came across quite a number of notorious prisoners including Dennis neelon Charles Bronson and others and he wrote a book about the various murderers that he has known um he's also Familia face of course from TV and Radio currently on Channel 4 with Amelia Fox talking about cold cas and he has a new book which you have brought with you happily um called a plot to kill um which we're going to talk about a bit and really start with the book and then go on a bit more widely to talk about murders and murderers and then the criminal justice system which a number of questions have coming already so quite wide ranging and we will aim to finish a little before 7:00 so uh David um a plot to kill um is one of those alluring book descriptions about a um a mystery and a murder in a quiet part of the English Countryside and um tell us why you wrote it well I I tried to resist writing it for um many many months um so firstly uh thank you for asking me and uh so nice to see people and I know there are other people that uh I can't uh uh see um but it's lovely to be back and so on and to see all these incredible buildings going up which was very different to my day when and I knew professor chatia and Professor moral um I live in bakum and I moved to buum when I became a governor grade at a place called grenan and then I would subsequently go on to run a prison in um or a part of a prison in Milton Keens called woodill and so I live in Buckingham and this is a murder that took place in bakum and I couldn't escape conversation about the murder because people would say to me in waitr or in the pub are you going to write a book about that murder and I tried to resist doing that because I had my previous book had been written at the bequest the behest of my sisters um about a murder that took place in the 1970s in the town where we had grown up in Scotland called car luk and I remembered how difficult it was to write honestly about murder because you have to ask often really insensitive questions or what are seen as insensitive questions of various people to get the information that you need to be able to understand what it happened in that particular incident and so this was my previous book had been about a murder in the 1970s and I knew how difficult that had been and here was a murder that had taken place in my in the town where I was living and was very much still being discussed in the town so I thought why in Earth would I want to take that on board and in some respects I felt I'd been kind of forced into it I'm glad I was forced into it because it's an extraordinary story of a man who used to be head of English at Stow school which is one of our leading Public Schools he had taught at Manchester grammar school before going to Stow after he retired he had had become a part-time lecturer at the University of buium the only private university in the country and one of his students um befriended him inv vagled his way into the man's life and over a long period of time um slowly but certainly poisoned him but because that offender had convinced everybody in the town that the older a man who's called Peter farquar was um drinking too much um he started spreading rumors that you know Luke don't be surprised he's drinking so much he's got Alzheimer's he's this he's that he's something else nobody really questioned when he eventually dies and so the book really is not just telling that story but trying to open up middle England by bakum literally is at the heart of England and metaphorically though it's you know we go to wait a crisis in buum is an absence of singon Blanc in in the supermarket rather than upsurge and muggings and so it was trying to open up the culture of middle England to say how did he get away with this what responsibilities do the organizations like the coroners core the NHS Peter farar was a very committed Christian uh he went through a betral ceremony with Ben Field who murders him Benfield was 5 days away from ordination training he was teaching part-time at the local University Buck him University published the Killer's um ma dissertation um the the Killer goes to his father's Church you remember he's 5 days away from ordination training and while is on remound preaches a sermon on the sixth commandment and I want you all I'm looking around to see how many of you know what the sixth commandment is which is Thou shalt not kill you you cannot get over the psychopathy and the skill of this particular perpetrator and that's what the book is about and we should remember of course there are real victims and this is a tragedy as well as a a story of Murder in the English town but it it does have some of the read of um a classic mystery about it in the when the victim is originally discovered they don't think it's murder no because the perpetrator had been very skilled at planting all these seeds and there was also something which I call weaponized gentility as is quite clear from what I've just said the older man Peter farquar was in a same-sex relationship with the much younger man the killer Ben Field and so there was there was that kind of weaponized gentility as I put it which was a distancing of what was happening in their life as opposed to a real questioning that might have taken place I think would have taken place if it had been a hetosexual relationship uh and therefore one of the things that upset me the most in doing the research was that afterwards the Church of England's stance was that well there's not much to see here it's just an extraordinary set of events whereas in fact it was the Church of England's stance on homosexuality which created the conditions in which the killer was able to exploit so that he was able to murder Peter Fara and the other extraordinary thing is that then there's a second victim and the second victim so the the cover shows literally the houses where the two people lived this is where Peter farquar lived who who was murdered and this house was where an elderly woman uh who was in her 80s called an Moore Martin um who had been a former teacher herself field was very I think there was something deeply interesting about why he targets teachers I think he was also a jonto file which is somebody who's sexually attracted to the elderly there was a presumption it must have been the older man that was interested in the younger man whereas I really did get the impression it was the younger man that was sexually interested in the older man and after Peter farquar dies but everybody thinks it's a tragic accident field turns his attention to an Moore Martin however field was never charged with that particular murder because anmore Martin was cremated whereas Peter fart was buried and therefore they could exume Peter fart and test his remains for the poisons that were being used and that wasn't possible in the case of an more Martin now here's a big question about this specific murder what is it that makes a murderer start on a course like that do they always intend to murder is that what happened in this case or is it something which just develops from a particular set of circumstances so I often say that most murders and most murderers that I've encountered or worked with um it's the it's it's a cliche I know but it sums up my experience it's five minutes of Madness they do something in a five minute period that they regret for the rest of their lives and they would never dream of ever using that kind of violence again that's the majority sadly a lot of my career is working with people who murdered not because of 5 minutes of Madness they murdered because usually they have an underlying personality disorder which we usually call psychopathy and for them murder is a way of gaining power of gaining control of um making them feel um alive in a set of circumstances that they can manipulate for their own ends and um and so this this murder this particular particular murder was not 5 minutes of M Madness it was a very carefully calibrated sequence of events that gradually the killer was able to um succeed by killing his um partner and he did so because his partner no longer was useful to him he needed to move on somewhere else and the best way he could do that was to get rid of his former partner I I I want to look at the wider issues in in a bit more detail but before we leave a plot to kill um spoiler alert if you're going to read the book but how was this uncovered how did it come to light that it had been murdered not an accidental death so it was uncovered simply because the killer overreached himself and had moved on to anore Martin and an more Martin's uh niece um who also lives in bakim uh raised es her disqui about the relationship that um her aunt has with the killer because he convinces the aunt to change her will as he had done in the case of uh Peter farquar and um and so it's going to be uncovered as a consequence of the lawyer her niece went to uh the lawyer to actually say you know look this is really giving me um concern here's the other concerning thing the buck him dodged a bullet because the killer was working not only part-time at the University he was working part-time at the nursing home and he looked after patients who had Alzheimer's and work close to the end of their lives and when he was arrested the police found that he had a list of a hundred people who would be useful to him in the weeks and months and years to come Ben field would have used the place of the elderly in our culture to be and religion to achieve his ends to become a serial killer in exactly the same way that Harold Chipman had used medicine to become our most prolific serial killer now um You and I know the way this works in terms of publicity and blobes for books and it says um not much shocks David Wilson but this really did um it must of course have been it was a rattling good book and that surely is the issue about our fascination with murders and murderers which is as we say there are victims but we like reading about this sort of thing and I think there is um there is genuinely it seems to me um sniff about that um a lot of people want to see the public or my or our interest in merder in as if it's somehow disreputable it shouldn't be something that we own up to whereas I actually think it's perfectly understandable because I think the public are interested in Murder because it's so outside of their experience and therefore it's a mystery for them and in evolutionary terms we have progressed as a species because we solve Mysteries and it's no coincidence always seems to me that that women in particular are interested in True Crime because it's women in particular it's the female gender that so often has to deal with men's violence and therefore why wouldn't they be interested in well why is that man violent and what could we do to prevent that violence happening to me so I so I think there is perfectly good reasons why uh people would be interested in True Crime and murder in spe and Mur specifically and I'd also say that we're now at a Zeitgeist moment more broadly in terms of uh True Crime because people no longer it seems to me and I have to say to Executives and TV um offices I have to say the public don't want to hear the story again the public are far more aware of what the story is than you are and indeed the Zeitgeist point at moment is the the public the armchair detectives the web sleuth would like to solve the Mysteries themselves and guess what they're often incredibly successful there are people who are web sleuths are armchair detectives who are genuinely solving some of these Cold Case Mysteries and that's the Zeitgeist moment about True Crime it's no longer about just retell the story can you give it in more gruesome detail it's well what happened and who was the culprit so you're going to tell us that the uh appearance of Amelia Fox in your new channel for show she is a distinguished criminologist like you or are you saying that that's necessary to get people into those kind of True Crime shows so the Roger is alluding to a Channel 4 Series that's just finished it finished last night in which Amelia Fox uh who's best known for playing Dr Nikki Alexander in Silent Witness uh Amelia has met more forensic Pathologists been in more prisons more police stations than you can imagine as a consequence of getting that part right and she and I are good friends and we speak regularly about True Crime however the approach with the new channel 4 Series was that we were trying to do a hybrid we weren't trying simply to do a true crime documentary in the way that we've become used to True Chrome document documentaries we were trying to do a uh a documentary meets scandin Noir so it was always meant to be a documentary as unfolding drama and I have to say I thought Amelia was absolutely brilliant in it and um and the and we we haven't I made sure the master hadn't read the Times review the times very prominently on his table as I I went into the lodge and I went you haven't been reading the TV review because of course reviewers don't like something that's brand new they like to review something that they're comfortable with and this kind of hybrid style has absolutely found its audience on Channel 4 the people who are slightly still sniffy about the style are the broad sheet reviewers now um I would remind everybody at home that if you would like to email a question please do to master cell. cam.ac.uk master. cam.ac.uk and I'll also in about five or six minutes be bringing in the audience here in the Quarry White House Auditorium but David this sounds like a quite Benard question but I'm sure it's one you've been asked an awful lot um when you meet a serial killer like Dennis neelsen yes what what do they like uh so it's a it's a good question because of course they're not at all like the media portrayal of um serial killers and so everybody I always feel slightly disappointed when I say well you know Dennis neelsen left my office the very first time I had met him and I said oh he's a bit like a weedy geography teacher and I don't mean to be disrespectful to geography teachers but he looked like the kind of person that wouldn't be able to control a class of 30 GCS students and so everybody wants me to say that somehow they're like Hannibal lecor that they're going to discuss with me um Fine Foods Florentine architecture they're going to play B or whatever whatever it's not like that at all they are usually characterized in my experience by something that they have which is missing there's a blankness to them the other thing that they very rarely do is talk about their crime most of the serial killers that I've worked with are very silent about their crimes they'll talk to me about other things but they don't like talking about their crimes at all and it really is therefore only in drama where they kind of want to unburden themselves by explaining why they did it that's not my experience at all um we have some questions which have been um sent in one of them from David Radford who's asking whether homicide cases do largely have personality disorders as contrasted with mental illness so so the the um that's a a very broad question just let me break it down so the first thing to say is that two women a week are murdered in this culture by their partner uh or former partner so the what we think of as homicide or as murder is usually is a phenomenon about men killing the women they love or supposedly love or used to love just under two children a week are murdered in this um Culture by their parents or carers so the phenomenon of murder already if you think about it there are about 700 800 murders a year just count those figures up for yourselves already the phenomenon of murder is a very domestic is contain in a very domestic setting and some of those murders uh Jane monton Smith's uh most recent work I thought has been extraordinary about coercive controlling men and how that leads to crime and some of that coercive controlling behavior is the pattern of murder now that has got nothing to do with underlying mental health issues it's got nothing to do with personality disorder it's got to do with gender and it's got to do with my gender taking responsibility for my gender and the Damage that we do to the people that we supposedly love and are closest to so long before you get into a debate about personality disorder or mental illness you have to deal with the what's really underlying a lot of these cases which is gender and the power of men in our culture to do what they would like to do in some circumstances to women if we then deal with the mental health and personality disorder the next big um um group of people who will commit murder are very much in my experienced about personality disorder as opposed to mental illness there are some people um who clearly I will deal with in my um applied work who have got mental clear mental illness they're not competent uh they couldn't um uh they wouldn't be fit to plead they have diminished responsibility but the bigger group would be those who have underlying personality disorders and of those underlying personality disorders the one that I will encounter most regularly is psychopathy although again we probably don't have time A lot of the stereotypical um public understanding of psychop ay is um uh well it is probably predicated on I'm reading that book The psychopath test by John Ronson which was a complete and utter load of rubbish but everybody now thinks that they understand psychopathy because they've read that book and you have to go no that isn't what psychopathy is these are long-term ingrained behaviors which uh will manifest themselves in every aspect of that person's life you make a very important point about removing the reasons why murders are committed if we were uh better in the way we handle gender or um also U you know I've Tau before um the Harold Shipman case reveals a lot about the way our society operates and the way that doctors operate how how much of those factors things you think we should look at more in terms of trying to stop either serial killers or the more routine acts of murder and violence so whether in my academic work or my popular work and including things that I will do on radio or on television I point out as far as serial killing is concerned it's no good trying to think that you will resolve those issues by entering the mind of a serial killer which again is one of the tropes that you'll see regularly on uh TV or at in film um and that's actually not what I would do when I would be working with the the the the police in an applied setting what I've always tried to say is for me it's much more interesting and it's also gives us the greatest scope for doing something about it if you look at who it is that falls victim to serial murder in our culture because only five groups fall overwhelmingly you know it doesn't work for 100% of the cases but overwhelmingly only five groups of people get murdered fall victim to serial murder four of those groups are dominated by women and only one group of men overwhelmingly gets murdered by a serial killer in our culture and that group of men are gay men and the two groups of women who get targeted most regularly in our culture by serial killers are sex workers and women over the age of 60 and so usually I say um I used to describe them when I first started to write this as elderly women and then I turned 60 and thought I'm not elderly but if you think about it in those terms you can do a great deal to overcome serial murder in our culture if you challenge homophobia and if you have a grownup debate about sex work and how sex work is pleased and the violence that sex workers will regularly experience as they go about selling sexual services and above all if you have a if you begin to unpick the place of the elderly in our culture and their voicelessness nobody questioned Harold Chipman about the fact the the person the patient that he saw who was 74 was perfectly healthy and was only wanting an injection because a flu injection because because she was you know she wanted the flu injection but she would end up dead nobody questioned that in the same way that nobody questions when Peter farquar at 69 is found slumped on his sofa with a bottle of abala whiskey beside him nobody questioned he was 69 we need to start remembering the place of the elderly in our culture and above all give them a voice in our culture and if nothing else covid-19 we shut off so many elderly people into Care Homes and at one stage in the first wave of the pandemic 400 people a day were dying in those Care Homes largely because we allowed people to be released from hospital in the NHS without giving them any um any tests to see if they had Co and put them back into the Care Homes where everybody else was then going to to Die the things that we have done to the elderly in our culture are appalling I'm I'm going to ask you a question from the audience here in just a moment but can I just pursue that are there any countries in the world which have had that mature debate either about homophobia or sex crimes or or or the elderly is is is there evidence of a society that can make a more mature debate work well the more mature debate in terms of each of those issues that I've drawn attention to will have a slightly you know different culture is probably going to be uh cited by me if I think about sex work then the more mature debate has already been had in a number of different countries and some states of the United States where they have gone from one stage legalizing uh sex work to having manage zones or having tolerance zones we haven't yet had that kind of debate in our public policy about how to approach the issue of uh the sale of sexual Services by mostly young women who often have uh addiction problems some young men also with addiction problems involved in sex work we've not yet had that debate but the if you think from Holland to Nevada to Austria to the Scandinavian countries again one would site the Scandinavian countries in relation to the place of the elderly in their culture because of their Arrangements in in in with regard to pensions that would also be something that one could look at homophobia seems sadly a kind of worldwide phenomenon and um and I'm not so sure I can simply say uh they've got a much more a better Outlook there than somewhere else because every time you think there's some movement forward about homophobia our most recent serial killer is Steven Port um who targeted who was a gay man targeting other gay men so I'm not quite sure I could site someone there okay does anyone in the auditorium want to come in I am getting questions in so um Dr Sullivan the vice Master strikes me that it Beni yeah having describ very clever in the way portray alcoholic um and yet then he did something incredibly stupid was T another victim in the same very very close didn't Harold Shipman do the same crudely for your is that a patter maybe it's people self selected group or is it do you see that that very very cunning psych people errors I'm just going to Jenna repeat the question because we we're not using a roing mic tonight for covid reasons so I'm going to repeat the question for people at home and the question really is that some of the people you've talked about Ben Field very clever in um multiple respects but then does something really stupid of targeting um another victim and equally har Shipman who was obscuring his tracks for a long time but then crudely forged Wills so um hello Janet it's nice seeing you um so in my experience they don't want to be caught so this isn't them um trying to find a way of you know drawing attention to themselves because they want to be stopped this is often because they are by that stage of their killing cycle they are completely living in a parallel universe and they have no sense of that they're behaving so extraordinarily that somehow that's drawing attention to their behavior it they they have kind of just simply no longer engaging with the kind of things uh and social structure that you and I would engage in and behave appropriately um the other thing is of course never ignore the underlying psychopathy because one aspect of psychopathy is risk taking behavior and so it Thrills them it you know they really are excited by what they are doing and if they can get away with even more extraordinary Behavior then and try and talk their way out of it that also floats their boat which is the only way that you can begin to I think interpret Field's willingness to preach a sermon at his father's Church Thou shalt not kill and something I can't establish at all be the the sermon was on the church's website for a while and I was able to read it on the website and then the church realized we better take that down um but who would it who do you think you see who would who would suggest to his father I'd like to preach a sermon this Sunday on the theme of Thou shalt not kill who do we think it suggested that theme who do we think said why don't we publish the why don't we make the sermon available of course it was Ben Field I can't prove that definitively but it's that sort of excitement that he would get by thinking here's yet another one that I've you know here's another one I've pulled the wool over their eyes Okay question from Peter Woodman so in 1980 thank you for sending it in um my question do we have an obsession with punishment in this country rather than Rehabilitation or prevention of crime I'm sure I'm sure I was at sellin with Peter Woodman from 1980 um so hello Peter Woodman from 1980 if indeed was overlapped with you um so the first thing is the because I know this is maybe it's because of the work that I do um I don't mind people being punished I and that's always um you know here there goes my liberal points if you're all liberal and woke or whatever it is that we say these days um people some people have to be punished and I think punishment plays an important role in our culture and there are some people I would never want to be released from prison because they're dangerous no that set that Benchmark the other thing I would say is and so the second preliminary is that there are a number of prisoners who cloak themselves in Rehabilitation and they haven't changed at all and I think we become less skilled over time about recognizing who it is that says they're rehabilitated and being able to judge if they're being honest and authentic now so with those two things as as kind of uh setting the context the next answer is yes to Pete Woodman 1980 of course we are putting more people per capita in our prisons than our European neighbors and we're putting them in prison for longer periods of time and much earlier in their so-called criminal careers than the French the Norwegians the Spaniards the Germans the Portuguese the Italians you name you name it we we're we're punishing more severely and earlier and for longer so yes there is an a a tendency for us to ape not our Scandinavian or european Neighbors in our approach to criminal justice system and we ape much more our North American um uh allies in terms of their approach to punishment and I would prefer the balance to be reassessed okay I think you partially answered or or quite well answered that uh question which Newton con's also asked 1992 the average life sentence for murder in the UK's 15 to 20 years in other jurisdictions for instance the US life means life does sentencing for the most violent crimes under the UK's Criminal Justice System need to get tougher well I don't think it needs to get tougher because the we have something which isn't usually talked about we have something called the whole life tariff um and there are a there are numbers of people who are appropriately sentenced to a whole life tariff who will never be released again I suppose the um more controversial thing I would say though in response to that question is that I would not release Colin Pitchfork and if you know who Colin Pitchfork is he was the first man in this country to be convicted through DNA evidence and I do not believe that anybody could say hand on heart that Colin Pitchfork has changed uh for the better and I would go even further given what Colin Pitchfork did to those two young women and how he then went about covering his tracks I would not be prepared to release him and frankly I thought it brought the criminal justice system into a bit of disrepute that it didn't quite get why Colin Pitchfork shouldn't be released um Ian HW 1983 and as a for I'm sure I went I'm sure I remember that all these people who know you there's some quite personal questions coming in um which I may get to later on um how coste effective is a prison sentence um well you know that cost is well it depends what you want to do with the prison sentence you know if you really wanted to have a true rehabilitation program in prison that doesn't come cheaply um all the money that's currently spent in our prisons goes on staff costs more than anything else and if you really wanted to tackle some rehabil if you really wanted to put into our prison regimes Rehabilitation that would make a difference remember the average reading age of the sentenced male prisoner in this country tonight is s they are functionally illiterate and one of the things that you therefore could do and I've advocated for on a number of occasions is that we really could be looking at education properly educating people in prison and that would cost money and and therefore you've got to go back to our questioner whose name Escape me I forgive me um you've got to go back and say well what is it you want the prison sentence to achieve and if you just want to lock someone up and keep them behind bars then that's relatively cheap if you want the prison system to do something that might alter for the better those majority of prisoners who are in prison if you want to alter that their behavior so that they can positively contribute after they come out that's going to cost you a bit of money in the short term but the long-term benefits for investing in that is that you're not then dealing with recidivism are there any more questions in the auditorium um Fabian thank this particular Cas I'm interested in what your view on the psychology of this particular person field you already elabor on possible motivations and probably some narcissistic toy other people I'm particular what do you think happens with this this person in prison when he's I don't know whether he people inis is contins would you like to just pring the question quickly so Fabian asked um about Benfield and who is the perpetrator in the the uh of the murder about the book that I've written and what will happen to him in prison uh Benfield didn't get a whole life tariff um Benfield was given a determinate sentence but he will have to serve I think if memory serves me correctly it's just over 30 years before he could be considered for parole so potentially he could be released back into the community and one of the things I talk about in the book is that how will Benfield behave in prison and how he'll behave in prison is exactly how he's behaved in the community he will be manipulative he won't be violent he'll be manipulative he he will appear as if he's conforming and he will probably he will probably again talk religiously um espousing of a faith will again be seen as something that um he will use to his advantage and um and I I have said the difficulty is that Benfield would need to go to some place like grenan which is the only prison in the whole of Europe that operates as a psychodynamic Therapeutic Community where he can a authentically undergo therapy that might actually change his behavior I I quote somebody in the book who says that he'll probably convert to another religion um they because you know he'll think the way way through this is to kind of disavow his kind of Christian faith and then probably find another Faith to uh latch onto so I think he'll behave in exactly the same way as he um behaved in the community interestingly I don't know if you know Janet Malcolm her work Janet Malcolm's work uh she wrote A New Yorker she wrote for the New Yorker and she uh wrote a wonderful book called uh the journalist and the murder her Janet Malcolm died last week which is why she's very much uh at the Forefront of my thinking and she said that and her book the journalist and the murderer was all about a murderer in North Carolina uh called Jeffrey McDonald and a journalist called Joe mcginness befriends um uh Jeffrey McDonald and that befriending he led Jeffrey McDonald to believe he was going to write something positive and and he didn't he wrote something scathing and uh Janet Malcolm said you know Luke the the journalist who has a relationship with a murderer often is performing a confidence trick one of the things I point out in the book that Janet Malcolm never talks about is that sometimes the murderer is performing the confidence trick and that's the big worry Fabian about what would happen with Ben Field as as always happens I think people have been engrossed in the presid ation they are now sending lots of questions so we're going to jump around fairly quickly but question there from the audience yes yes no no you're quite right in case somebody didn't hear the question was about five minutes of Madness and how much is that how much is that about drugs or alcohol or young men being in the company of other young men and losing face totally it's absolutely totally the context and uh and often often I I talk a lot with um some young offenders about that need you know one of the things that they will talk about a lot is the need for respect that they want to be respected and if they lose respect if they lose face and the face is often the target you know I love analyzing the master and he knows he's in for a hard time over dinner um and so that sense of the face being a Target and losing face uh totally the context I'm going to find some really tough questions here now um we're going to go really quickly Maran kishek says would like say well he says would like to say hello to Dave great informative presentation um Antonio wolf very good point actually um you mentioned five main groups of vict and discuss three of them what are the other two oh the other two so the other two would be um runaways and throwaways young young kids uh especially girls who are being thrown out of their home or indeed are choosing to run away um because they can no longer stomach being at home okay um someone I know and you know as well John Silverman uh former BBC home Affairs correspondent uh yeah and and and um he says one time co-author with David Wilson so in 1968 John um a serial killer is likely to get a whole life tariff if caught and convicted but do you think it's possible to rehabilitate a seral killer so they are safe to release at some point the answer to that question is I don't care because I never would because I go back to the point about punishment I don't think Dennis neelon would have killed again but I would never have released Dennis neelen because I think our Criminal Justice System the law has to eventually put a line in the sand that says beyond that line is no longer civilized and we as a society have to be able to say that we're going to we're going to Poli that boundary and so John's quite right and we wrote about pedophiles John and I wrote a book called innocence betrayed which was about the kind of moral Panic around pedophiles um but so I believe that some serial kill that I've worked with in particular neelson wouldn't have killed again but I would never have chosen to release him uh Mike Rosner from Malta are your observations on the relation between murder and personality limited to murder or do they also apply to types of crime other than murder if so which ones no I mean so it's a good question and I suppose my observations are based on my work and most of my work is overwhelmingly about men who commit violent crime and in particular murder Dave cyen do you believe any of the deadly sins are curable um well I I gluttony I'm sure especially Prof moral on the front R especially if you're filming uh you can't be gluttonous I'm particularly paranoid always about my weight so yes gluttony I I would say can be cured okay um will swainson back uh to a a serious topic as a former prison Governor what do you make of prison privatization do you think it renders a better prisoner experience or even makes for a more cost effective solution it's absolutely been a disaster and I wish we had never gone down that particular road we've created a market for imprisonment and no Market wants to contract all markets want to expand and if you think there are better private prisons I would just draw your attention to the fact that they've had to close um the private prison that was set up to house young offenders it was so appalling and abysmal Marian Janna who says she thinks she's so in 1982 and somebody I knew you know everybody um thanks for fascinating talk and good luck with your new book please could you tell us about how therapeutic communities in prison for instance grenan how do they work what are your views about their effectiveness I I'm a huge um advocate for therapy and I'm a huge advocate for the Therapeutic Community hmp grenan I was a governor grade there I still chair the friends of grenan I take in people twice a year to have lunch at grenan if you want to come you should contact me um I'll charge you a little fee to do so because it's a charity um grenan is the most heavily researched penal regime in the world you would not be able to move without an academic doing some research about is grenon effective is grenan cost effective and what every piece of research says is that if you go to grenan for at least two years you are statistically less likely to reoffend most of uh the people that I I mean I think I've shared with certainly shared with Roger before that my one of my friends is no Razer Smith who was once Britain's most prolific bank robber NL is a u if nol was here he acknowledges all this thing he's written a book about all this stuff he uh scores um 37 out of 40 on the hair psychopathy checklist he is clinically a psychopath he's my friend and um nol had to go to grenon for five years uh you know you really have to commit to changing your behavior and if you really want to commit to change your behavior thank heavens there is something like grenon in our penal system that people could turn their lives around okay we seven or eight minutes left so U anyone who wants to ask a question here please signal complete change of Topic in a way but obviously um strongly related um Casey Davis I've returned recently to education after a 10year career and I'm studying for a master's degree in criminology uh she's Keen to enter this field professionally but the challenge appear to limited to research positions what would you recommend as an alternative route oh an alternative well it's not an alternative route it's the thing that I feel that you should be trying to engage with now I am vice president of a charity called Newbridge Newbridge was set up in 1956 to create links between offenders and the community and it needs constant volunteers that it will train and pay you to go into prisons to visit people who don't get anybody to visit them and it's a way that somebody like Katie was it Katie her name it's a way that Katie can start getting oneon-one direct experience of working with offenders and then if you've got that direct experience of working with offenders it's much easier to move out of uh research Academia into applied work using your criminology degree okay if anyone here wants to yeah Jack front you mentioned that you think that pitch hasn't changed but you thought that Dennis nson kill again how do you make an assessment how change inter watch inise how did you make that assessment uh over a long period of time and getting to know how they will behave in particular sets of circumstances and I said uh to be fair to me just because you know I'll get quoted as having said said to be fair to me I said nobody could put their hand on their heart and claim that Colin Pitchfork had changed and I would also say I also said that I don't believe that what Pitchfork had done deserves him to be released and that fit fits also with my argument about neelen to see people change to judge them as being authentic you need to see how they behave with other people in different and multiple situations you need to see how they begin to establish um how they begin to express remorse you need to begin to see if they understand understand the harm that they've caused where that harm came from and then watch to see if they go about trying to learn to live their life in different ways which is why it takes a long time you know it's not something that you can do on a cognitive behavioral tick box cause it's something that really needs um an embedded approach within an institution to watch that change take place professor John moral professor John moral I know him he's here brilliant that's what's the professional judgment on Jimmy govern's time just just finished on B it's it was an extraordinary um well drawn picture it had a couple of weaknesses um the couple of weaknesses are don't in any way detract from I thought it was it was incredible the couple of weaknesses would be the Sha Bean character would quickly have moved out of that prison and been and gone to an open prison they wouldn't have kept him in that kind of jail and the second weakness is that sadly I've had to deal in the past with lots of officers who came under the kinds of pressure that that officer came under and we would have found ways of working with him to have resolved that without him needing to smuggle in drugs but it was an amazing amazing series uh two uh slightly lighter questions to finish I was looking for something which would psychoanalyze you but nothing's coming unfortunately Michael Drake 1965 um who are your favorite detective fiction writers uh yeah so I do like detective fiction very much and I tend to read a lot of the Scottish Tartan Noir authors at the moment um because you know being Scottish and I present a BBC Scotland series about crime I've tended to read a lot of The Tartan Tartan Noir and I like Denise Miner Min Denise Miner her work I think is really really interesting and relatively undiscovered in England whereas Val mcdermid whose work again I like very much is much better known but Denise Miner if that name doesn't mean anything to you Denise Miner is worth finding out about Richard Bailey 1979 do you still play tennis Richard Bailey Richard Bailey um yes I still play tennis and um I played relatively recently and uh Jeremy huet also of CW late of this Parish challenge me to a match uh we haven't yet organized the match but I'm playing Steph terrelli late of this Parish uh sometime in August okay um that that does bring us I think to to the end of the evening but David thank you for an incredibly informative presentation and I think it really has opened up lots of avenues of inquiry so we will mention the book a plot to kill which you can wave again at the cameras which are up there and um also there are plenty of things if you um email us we'll put you in touch if there's anything more you'd like to know about David's work or research he's actually you're actually at um Birmingham City University and on the website and so on so there are plenty of ways to contact David um can I thank everybody at home the hundreds of people joining us from home and everybody who's here in the auditorium as well um I think this has been um do tellers I think it's been pretty successful in that we really have had the interactivity of audiences at home and we will make sure this keeps getting better because um ultimately we'll have microphones that can whiz around the auditorium when it is safe to pass them from one person to another um but thank you very much for joining us David you've been a complete treat as a guest and uh we look forward to you coming back to so again soon so thanks everybody thank you thank you very much you and marijan kek well well I I was going to say I don't know who all these people are but Maran kek is from Palestine all right okay I think he was the mayor of napis all right okay so it says so in 197

Channel: Selwyn College, Cambridge

Views: 24,865

Keywords:

Id: vUU9-7Tusc8

Length: 57min 32sec (3452 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021