Why We Should Close All Prisons & Legalise Drugs | Chris Daw QC | Modern Wisdom Podcast 211

Chris Daw is a Queens Council Barrister and an author. Does the current UK justice system work? Is it rehabilitating offenders? Does it even deter them? Why are drug laws not working and why is the recidivism rate so high? Chris has some radical propositions for a system he says is totally broken. Sponsor: Check out everything I use from The Protein Works at https://www.theproteinworks.com/modernwisdom/ (35% off everything with the code MODERN35) Extra Stuff: Buy Justice On Trial - https://amzn.to/33HpwCN Follow Chris on Twitter - https://twitter.com/crimlawuk Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #justice #law #reform - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, howdy friends. Welcome back. My guest today is Chris Dorr QC and we're talking about the UK justice system, particularly just how broken it is as far as Chris is concerned. He thinks it's totally fucked. He thinks that we need to close all prisons, that children can never be criminals, that we need to legalize drugs and that no one is either good nor evil. Now, I know that that sounds like the dreamy journal writing of a teenager that's just discovered car marks, but Chris is a Queen's Counsel barrister. So he knows his law, you could put it that way. He's worth his salt and is highly regarded. The BBC use him as

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  a commentator on lots and lots of law issues going on in the UK. It's a compelling argument. I provide the counter narrative today and he's got an answer for pretty much everything that I could throw at him. So I'd be very interested to hear what your thoughts are on this. Immediately the sort of visceral responses, fear of the other criminals need to be locked up. Don't we need to punish them? Blah, blah, blah. But if the goal is to have a society in which crime is minimized and wellbeing is maximized, I think it's pretty difficult to make an argument against what Chris is saying here. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Chris Dorr.

• 1:38Chris Williamson?

  What's QC stand for?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  So QC sounds for Queen's Counsel. So one of Her Majesty's Counsel, which is a special kind of barrister lawyer. And we're appointed to kind of basically be the elite of the elite when it comes to being a lawyer, basically. And even though I say so myself, which I do.

• 1:56Chris Williamson?

  Are you the SAS of the?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  We are. They bring us in when it gets messy.

• 2:01Chris Williamson?

  You're the wet work black squad sent in under the cover of darkness.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  You've got it. We're the Navy SEALs. You've got to go underwater. You've got to like get through mud. It's yeah, it's basically anyone who's in the proper, proper shit, we're the ones who are supposed to pick them out.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  The deepest kind and the smelliest kind.

• 2:19Chris Williamson?

  I love it. I absolutely love it. Okay, so justice is on trial today. I want you to give the opening speech. Approach the microphone, please, Chris or QC and give us the opening speech. Why is justice on trial?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Well, I'm putting justice on trial because I've spent 26 years as a criminal lawyer. And in all of that time, I think most of what I've done has been a complete waste of a waste of time and a waste of my life because the criminal justice system, that's the police, the prosecution of people, locking people up in prison, chasing after people because they take drugs. All it does is make society worse. Lock people up, they just go back in again. They commit more crime when they come out and then it costs us a load of money when they when they're in there 50,000 a year to keep someone in prison. We're locking up young kids and some kids as young as 10 are going into the criminal courts, which is completely insane. And of course, we continue to prosecute people for drug crime, when,

• 3:16Speaker 01

  as I say in my book, drugs have been taken for tens of millions of years by human beings and no one's gonna, we're not going to stop people. You can't, you can't, you can't change people's basic desire to get wasted. And that's gonna happen. It happens today. It happened 1,000 years ago. It happened 50,000 years ago. So as long as we keep trying to stop people doing things that like that, they want to do that largely don't harm anyone else, we're gonna just keep on making the same old mistakes and we kill people with overdoses and gang wars and knife crime and stabbings. And I'm just sick of it. And the time has come for someone in my position, you know, fairly kind of senior position in the profession to say, do you know what? Why are we doing it? What's the point? And that's what the book's all about. What's the point of it? And I don't think there is to

• 4:00Speaker 01

  most of it. I think we need to change it all. Start again.

• 4:02Chris Williamson?

  What do we need to know before we can get into this? Is there some background that we have to kind of lay, get the lay of the land about why crime and punishment's even important?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's in the book, interestingly, so you don't, you don't need to know anything before you read the book, because as you know, I, I, I go right the way back to 28 million years ago, when cannabis evolved on the plains of the, you know, of, of, of China. Um, and people started using cannabis in, in funeral rituals, so they could all get wasted to, you know, to kind of get over the grief of losing their loved ones. And, you know, and, and, and I go into all of like, why we got here, you know, what prisons were like, going back 10,000 years ago, what they were like in the Victorian era, you know, when kids were hanged at the age of eight, you know, for stealing apples, you know. So, so, all, it's all in the book. And, and, and, but most of all, I hope what you agree in the book is, is, is, is just some real life stories, some sort, you know, there's

• 4:56Speaker 01

  some tragic ones about people who die in tragic circumstances, you know, drug dealers getting murdered, and, and, and for what? And, and, and the point, I, I, this, the answer to your question is, I don't think, I think anybody that is a human being, and has ever either been a victim of crime, has known someone who is, or has maybe committed a crime, or takes drugs, or knows someone who does, anyone who's interested in crime, justice, punishment, will be interested in what's in the book.

• 5:20Chris Williamson?

  My mum is a Crown Court usher.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:23Chris Williamson?

  Has been.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  I know many, many of them. They're the most important people in the room.

• 5:26Chris Williamson?

  They're the ones that keep the wheels oiled, aren't they?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  They absolutely do. And, and do you know what? I, I, I had what's called a pupil barrister, so that's like a trainee that I, that was training under me a few years ago. And he asked me a month or so after I started, you know, training him, he said, come on, Chris, give me the pearls of wisdom. What's the most important thing? I said, keep the ushers happy.

• 5:45Chris Williamson?

  Hahaha, mum, mum, are you listening?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  I hope so, because I'll tell you what, if you keep the ushers happy, and, and, and I always have done, you know, you, you, you, you, you treat them with respect. And what happens is, when you need to get your case on, because you're desperate to go somewhere else, the ushers, I'll make sure we get your case on next. And I bet your mum's one of the nice ones, Chris, yeah?

• 6:05Chris Williamson?

  She is, she is an absolute star, yeah, absolutely, above and beyond the college youth. She's the, uh, wet work, black ops equivalent, I think, for the ushers. They send her in when there's, yeah, when there's red wine everywhere from a, from an exhibit or whatever, whatever the hell needs to be sorted out. Um, so, okay, let's go.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  On the red wine subject, right? So here's a story for you, um, talking about that and here and the story and it relates to ushers. Many years, many years ago, uh, when I was first starting out in this job, sorry, I don't know what I've done here, but I'm getting interrupted by calls when I'd switch them off. Um, anyway, um, so many years ago, I was out with a, a, a, a very rotund kind of red faced kind of barrister of the old model. And, and, and he insisted we went out and drank a load of red wine at lunchtime in the middle of a murder trial. And the judge was sent the usher to find us in the pub. And he said, oh, no, no, I'm not coming back to court today. I'll come back tomorrow. And the usher had to take the message back to the High Court judge that this particular QC wasn't, wasn't for doing the afternoon session.

• 7:00Chris Williamson?

  And how, how did that go down?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  That sort of thing never happens in my cases.

• 7:04Chris Williamson?

  How did that go down?

• 7:05Speaker 01

  To be honest, it was 20 years ago and it, well, it was 20 years ago and 20 years ago, you know, the QC's can get away with stuff like that. I'm not going to try it now though. It wouldn't work now.

• 7:13Chris Williamson?

  Prison. Talk to me about prison. What do you know about prison?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Prison. Well, I've travelled all over the world. I've been to probably hundreds of prisons, certainly dozens and dozens of them in my career because I have to visit clients there. Uh, but I also spent a lot of last year researching the book and I travelled to, you know, the deep south of America and Alabama and saw some of the sort of hell holes of prison there. And I looked into the very different kinds of prisons that they have in places like Norway and and they're more sort of, um, progressive kind of Scandinavian countries. And my kind of take on prisons, and as you know, there's a chapter in the book and it's called why we should close all the prisons. Because I think all of the prisons we have now in Britain are failing us because they are just universities of crime. That people go in and I tell the story of a young man who went into prison, never taken a drug in his life and came out a heroin addict.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Now, what, what, what are we doing when prison? You can get heroin in prison, get any drugs in prison. Um, and, and you could, they, they come out with no skills. They live in this alien environment behind these massive walls with barbed wire. And you treat them like animals. We, we, we cage people in prisons as if they were wild animals. And unsurprisingly, when they come out, they behave in many cases like animals. Uh, and, and, and if you treat someone like an animal, they behave like one. If you call someone a criminal and you constantly uh, say that they're a bad person, don't be surprised when they come out and do more bad things. Cause that's what happens when you treat people like that. So my, my kind of whole philosophy and that comes across in the book is

• 8:38Speaker 01

  knock them all down, all of these big Victorian prisons with the cell blocks and the heavy gates and the big heavy cell doors and the bars. Knock them down, turn them into shopping centres or apartments and start again. And do something completely different because at the moment we've just got a prison population that goes up and up. We've got more and more people who are being locked up for longer and longer than ever before. And yet we have got crime on the streets, we've got murders, we've got stabbings and we've got shootings. The public don't feel safe. So if we carry on like this, we will end up like the Americans with 2.3 million plus people in prison in the States and off the chart levels of violent and serious crime. And that's the, that's, that's the problem with prison. It just doesn't work. It does the opposite of what we want it to do.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  We want to send people to prison so they come out and don't commit another crime. But what happens is they come out and they commit loads more crimes.

• 9:28Chris Williamson?

  Why? Why, why does, why, why does that happen?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  It happens because prisons condition people to be criminals. If you, if you, you know, if you send someone to tennis camp and they play tennis all day, they're going to get quite good at tennis. Now, if you send someone to prison and they hang out with criminals all day and they learn about crime, they're going to come out and they're quite good at crime, but they're not going to be any use at anything else. I mean, your tennis guy isn't going to be any use at plumbing because all he's learned is tennis. And in prison, all they learn is crime. They don't learn anything else. There's virtually no rehabilitation. Many of them have got serious mental health problems, serious psychiatric conditions or, or enormous emotional problems. I mean, one of the things that really absolutely drives me mad is the fact that the prisons consist of many, many people who were in the care system as kids.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  So you're 15 times more likely to go to prison if you were in care as a child. Now, what that means is that we're locking up people who are, who have been in the care of the state for most of their childhood and they are damnable and that we need to care for them is because you want to normalize them and make them feel part of society so they can live like the rest of us. But what we do is we send them instead of tennis camp, we send worse criminals than, than they were when they went in. If they're lucky, because many of them in there are self harming, committed suicide. It's an absolutely animalistic and archaic institution, the way that we run our prisons in this country, and they've just got to be shut down because, because otherwise we're just going to keep, it's going to go up and up and we're going to have more and more serious and violent crime.

• 10:54Chris Williamson?

  What's the purpose or what should be the purpose of prisons? I, I, I don't we need to be kept safe from all of the, all of the crims? Aren't there people, dangerous people that need to be kept away from the general public?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  There are, and there's a very small number actually, because I mentioned in the book that 69% of people in prison are in there for a non-violent crime. They're in there for a drug offence, or a fraud offence, or some sort of theft offence. And only 31% are in there for a violent crime. And many of them are fairly low-level and trivial assaults. But when it comes to, you're right, there are psychotics, there are people who are seriously violent and dangerous, and maybe they amount to 10 or 15% of the total prison population. And yes, we need to be kept safe from them. But 99.9% of them, even the most violent ones, even the murderers, will one day come out of prison.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  There's only about 60 in the entire 80-odd thousand in prison who will never be released. Almost every prisoner will one day be released. So you have to still think to yourself, okay, you might have committed a murder, but why are we focusing on hammering you, punishing you, keeping you in terrible conditions during your sentence? Why are we not focusing on the day you come out? Because it's the day you come out that matters. The day you come out, it determines whether you're going to go and get a job, whether you're going to be able to keep and reconnect with your family, whether you're going to be able to pay rent or a mortgage and have somewhere to live. And at the moment, many people come out of prison with nothing, except the skills they've learnt in crime camp while they've been in there. They're damaged individuals, they've got no connection with their family, they've got no job, nowhere to live.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  And if you do that, people are going to just go straight back on the streets, and they're going to go straight back to crime. So that's the reason, we are making the problem of crime worse, every day, with every minute that anyone spends in our prisons.

• 12:47Chris Williamson?

  What about if you're a policymaker, I don't know who the job of this lies with, whether it's the Prime Minister, or some government body or something, but what if you're that particular policymaker, and you say, right, we're going to shut down all of the prisons, and then someone gets out, and they cause a riot, they go on a murdering spree, or there's someone who kills someone? That is the sort of press nightmare that is sufficient to probably stop this from happening, no?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Well, that's what's happening now, time and again. People are coming out of prison and going on to commit violent crime, including murder, within a short time of their release. So I talk in the book, I tell the story of the tragic case of the two young people who were killed on London Bridge, uh, last year. And Osman Khan, who was their killer, had been in prison for eight years, eight full years, 24 hours a day, in a high-security prison. And within a year, he went out and killed two young people, stabbed them to death on London Bridge. So that's what's happening now, Chris. At the moment, the system is that we chuck people back onto the streets and they go out and commit terrible crimes. And my argument is, if we'd done something different with him for those eight years, and it's a big opportunity, if you've got eight years with someone, to work with them.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  I mean, if you had eight years of tennis camp, just imagine how good your backhand would be, right? So, I mean, I'm making light of it, but the fact is that it's just common sense, that if you spend eight years keeping someone in terrible conditions, and they mix with other terrorists and other criminals, and you do nothing to try and change their thought processes, or give them any other alternative, uh, way to spend their life, then they're going to come out. And sadly, in that case, it was a terrible lesson. And the interesting thing about that case for me, and I, and again, I talk about this in the book, is that Jack Merritt, who was one of the two young men who were killed by Osman Khan, um, his father, David, after Jack's death, he came out publicly and said, "Don't use my son's death as an excuse for longer prison sentences, because my son didn't

• 14:49Speaker 01

  believe that long prison sentences don't, uh, work, and I don't believe that they don't work." And when you have the father of someone who's just been stabbed to death by a long-term prisoner saying, "That, don't blame the shorter sentences, you need to start looking at doing something different." When a father in his grief is prepared to say that, then people need to start listening.

• 15:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're right. That's someone who's very much prepared to put their principles before their emotions, right?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Well, and the evidence, because it's the evidence that matters to me. The evidence is that prison doesn't work. The evidence is that when you move to a system like they have in Norway, where you very rarely use prison, but when you do, you make it as normal as possible. People live in normal housing units. They've got kitchens. They cook. It's not a great big kind of, you know, Shawshank Redemption scenario. Then in Norway, only 20% of prisons come out and reoffend. And they're the most violent ones because they don't send the others to prison in the first place. In our system, it's up to 75%. So the Norway system, where you treat people humanely and you normalize the conditions, works. The American and to a large extent, the British model of kind of oppressive prison regimes with high walls and fences and all the rest of it, doesn't work. It makes crime worse

• 15:59Speaker 01

  and it makes people's lives worse. So just use the evidence, use common sense apart from anything.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  I think upon reading the book, the thing that struck me was that I believe the public's idea of what the purpose of

• 16:19Chris Williamson?

  the current litigative makeup, the current sort of crime and punishment justice system in the UK is decoupled from what actually works to a degree where it's going to be very, very difficult to bring that bifurcation back in line. So I think that most people believe that

• 16:40Chris Williamson?

  prison is supposed to be a punishment, that there is some form of penance to be paid by someone. They've done this thing, stolen, robbed, defrauded, hurt, assaulted, whatever it might be. Therefore, they should have some liberties taken away. They should be put into some form of discomfort. That this is some kind of recompense, right, for them to come back. And I think that there are some people out there.

• 17:09Chris Williamson?

  Who would want that even if it didn't result in less crime because of a sense of at its truest sense how they believe justice to be performed. Does that make sense?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  It totally makes sense. And what you're describing in a nutshell is the Old Testament idea of an eye for an eye. And of course, if you take the eye of someone who's taken your eye, it doesn't actually bring your eye back. And actually, you end up with someone who's lost their eye and is probably deeply resentful against the system and will go out and take someone else's. But you're right, that that is fundamental to the approach to justice that I talk about in ancient times, you know, going back to the Mayans and the Romans, you know, the idea that you take a life or you impose serious harsh prison or harsh conditions or torture or something like that as a penalty for committing a crime, it goes back a long, long, long way, goes thousands and thousands of years. But the

• 18:04Speaker 01

  example I give of why that doesn't matter and why we need to change our ways now is because back in those times, people thought that slavery was okay. You know, it wasn't that long ago that there was slavery in the United States. And, you know, the fact of the matter is just because we've always done something, doesn't mean we have to always carry on doing it. Any more than we carried on having slavery, why do we carry on having prisons that don't work and that are deeply inhumane and deeply destructive to the fabric of our society, as was slavery and as were many of the other things that we don't do anymore. So, you know, we've come a long way in some respects, and we've changed certain things. But the reality is in Britain, we still criminalize 10 year old children. And

• 18:47Speaker 01

  when you just think about that for a second, it's absolutely catastrophic for the young people involved and for the society that we're sending them out into when we've done it.

• 18:57Chris Williamson?

  What's the alternative? We're going to close the prisons. What are people going to do?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Well, my my take on it is very straightforward, that you look to the examples of prison systems that do work, um, uh, you use them as sparingly as possible. So for the seventy one percent, uh, sorry, the sixty nine percent of prisoners who are nonviolent, I would send very, very few of them into a custodial environment or a prison environment at all. Because most of them are capable of working and of of contributing to society, of paying taxes, of looking after their kids. And the way in which you, if you have to restrict their movement for a period of time, we have the technology to do that now. We have, you know, retina scans, we have, uh, voice recognition, we have fingerprint scans. You you can imprison people in their own homes if you have to, and you can allow them

• 19:44Speaker 01

  the liberty to go out and work if, uh, you know, as part of the day, uh, and you can allow them to to have restrictions, to go to one place but not to others. There's all this technology is available, and it would cost a fraction of keeping someone locked up in an actual prison, which, as I say, is on average fifty thousand pounds a year to keep someone in prison. You know, for for a fraction of that, you could have the technology to monitor them wherever they go, you know where they are, you know what they're doing, and you can allow them to normalize their lives again with a degree of control as much as necessary. You know, the probation officer can check in via Zoom every day. What are you up to? What's happening? Yeah, but at the moment, they trudge along to the probation office once a month, there's no supervision, and unsurprisingly, they're either back on drugs, or they're back selling

• 20:29Speaker 01

  drugs, or they're back committing crime. But use the technology instead of the walls. That's the point I'm making. For the vast majority of nonviolent and not inherently dangerous prisoners, and for the rest, and the ones that have to be in prison because they represent a risk to the public, because they might commit a rape, or a murder, or or a serious violent robbery, keep the prison conditions as normal as possible. Have them living not in cells, in cell blocks with jangling keys and all the rest of it, have them living in normal residential blocks of accommodation with with kitchens to prepare their own food, with rooms, uh, and, you know, yes, you've got to secure the perimeter for the most dangerous people, but you actually don't need a forty foot high concrete or brick wall to secure a perimeter these days.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Again, when you have all of the technology we have, you know, to thermal imaging and everything else to to to make sure that people can't escape, all you need is a fairly unobtrusive fence of sufficient height to stop people getting out, what you don't need, and and therefore people will move around relatively freely inside. Yeah, only the absolute tiny number of immediately violent people who are likely to harm anyone that comes in their sight will need to be secured in what what might look like a cell. But you keep it as normal as possible. And the reason for that is, going back to the point I made earlier on, if you treat people normally, they are much more likely to behave normally when they come out of that environment. So, you know, it's it's not something that you can do overnight. I'm not suggesting that you start, you know, next week with the bulldoze and knock every prison and let everybody out. It would take,

• 21:58Speaker 01

  it would be a rolling programme of replacing one group of prisons with another and replacing in policy terms, instead of locking people up, using all of the technology which is all available to keep them secure in their homes or in another environment, it might be, it might be a hostel, it might be somewhere else, depending on their circumstances. But don't put them behind these monstrosities of of of of concrete walls and great big brick walls, where their soul and their spirit will be sapped and destroyed, and they'll come out violent and angry. Because that's what happens now.

• 22:27Chris Williamson?

  Is making the consequences of committing a crime by prison now being at home with your family, potentially still being able to go to work with more liberty and access to fresh air and so on and so forth, whenever you want, does that not act as less of a deterrent? Is that not going to cause people to have less fear about committing crime in the first place?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Well, the evidence all suggests that it doesn't, because in every form of sentencing, the least punitive sentencing and the most normal, the lifestyle of the person who's been sentenced, the less likely they are to commit another crime. So the the one form of punishment, the one form of sentence that has the largest rate of recidivism or reoffending is prison. Everything else has a lower rate of recidivism. And it's not surprising, is it? Because as I say, if you are normalised and allowed to live in society with whatever restrictions are needed, you you have continuity of your life. You can maintain very important things. All of us take for granted, you mentioned your mum being Usher, all of us take for granted that we have these sort of family networks, most of us do. Anyway, we have

• 23:34Speaker 01

  our parents, or we have, you know, our our our other half, or or kids, or or a wider network of family and friends. People in prison have none of that. Most of that disappears, well, particularly when people are serving very long sentences. So the point about keeping people in the community is, those are the things that keep most of us grounded. And most of us on the, you know, even if we have tough times and we might be feeling angry about stuff. We've got people around us and we've got support mechanisms. And, and that's why keeping people out of prison, unless it's absolutely essential, is so much more successful. At keeping people in the long run from committing more crimes. And it's an absolute cast iron statistical fact.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Wherever you look in the world, that the worst outcomes are the most punitive prisons. They create the most recidivism, the most reoffending. So, again, it's, it, it, anybody, if people want to have an eye for an eye, and, and the public do vote for it, you know, when a politician says. Oh, we're going to increase sentences for criminals, the, the public clap and they vote for it. So, obviously, people make that choice with their eyes open, realising, as you, a point you made earlier, Chris, well. Now, maybe people won't care. Maybe people won't care if we double the risk that someone will commit another murder, provided we punish them harshly. Well, if people are prepared to accept the risk that their son or their daughter will be murdered. Because we are giving somebody a harsh sentence in prison. Then people need to accept that, but that needs to be put on the table as part of the debate.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  And politicians need to acknowledge that, that, that, that the sentences and the, and the, you know, long, long sentences for things like drug crime. They need to say, okay, we're going to do this because you want us to, not because it works. And then we'll see what, we'll see what the debate looks like when people are honest. At the moment, there's no honesty. You hear, you hear the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, you hear the Prime Minister before the election. Get tough on criminals, crack down, make them, you know, quiver in their boots. Criminals don't quiver in their boots at the thought of being locked up in prison because they don't think they're going to get caught. That, that's the most important part of criminal justice and deterrence. None of my clients over twenty six years went out one day and thought, said, I know I'm going to get caught for this and I'm going to get ten years, but I'm going to do it anyway. They don't think they're going to get caught. That's why prison isn't a deterrent.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  That's why it isn't a deterrent in America, where you can get life without parole for selling an ounce of weed in some states. You know, people, people don't go up in the morning and think, oh, I could get life without parole for this, I'm going to go and sell the weed anyway. They think, I'm going to get away with it. And most of the time they do. And that's why deterrence in prison doesn't work, because people don't think about getting caught. What you need to look at is why are people out there doing these things in the first place? And they're out there in most cases because they have broken lives and broken lives based on a broken childhood. And that's why I'm so keen on reforming the way we deal with children in particular when they get caught up in the criminal system.

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  Let's talk about it. Why are children never criminals?

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Because I, one of the things that I just don't understand is the mentality that says that you have to be eighteen to be wise enough and mature enough to vote. You have to be eighteen to make a choice to drink alcohol or to smoke cigarettes. And there are all sorts of other age restrictions, you know, for different activities. You have to be twenty-one, I think, to drive a lorry, for example. But somehow or other, at the age of ten, you know, just think about a ten-year-old child. I mean, I don't know if you, if you, if you know, if you have kids in your family, and I've got four kids of my own, including an eleven-year-old and a nine-year-old, actually. And the idea that either of them would have the kind of maturity to understand what crime is. Yes, they know right from wrong on a basic, simple level.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  But the idea that you treat them the same, having the same understanding of crime as an eighteen-year-old or seventy, seventy-year-old is just ridiculous. It's just absolutely, and, and I, I explain in the book how there are countries and, and, you know, even Saudi Arabia has an older age of criminal responsibility than us. You know, they're hardly a beacon of civilization when it comes to criminal justice. But, but Luxembourg is the beacon for me because in Luxembourg, what I advocated in the book is the law. In other words, you can't be convicted of any crime unless you are eighteen or over. It's the same age to vote and it's the same age that you're capable of, deemed capable of committing a crime. And in their system, if a child commits what would be a crime for an adult, they don't call him a criminal, they don't call him a prisoner, they just call him a child.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  And they say, okay, a ten-year-old or eleven-year-old or even a fifteen-year-old has done a bad thing. What they do is they work with them in an educational environment. They don't put them in a prison environment. And our young offenders institutions are prisons in all but name, and they are hellholes for those young people inside them. Uh who are called young offenders, they're labelled young offenders. Uh point I was making, you label someone with something, they will be that thing. They will act to that that description and that label. And young offenders become adult criminals. And often they go in and out on a revolving door for twenty or thirty years and they cost us millions. Both in terms of the cost of locking them up and the crimes they commit. And we just keep on doing it.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  So if you divert children from ten, eleven, twelve years old, when most of the sort of the more hardcore kind of element that end up in prison. Start their life of crime or their life of involvement with the police. If you divert them at ten, eleven, twelve. Away from the criminal justice system and into the education system and the welfare system. Then you have a chance of saving them from that revolving door for the rest of their life. And saving the rest of us a load of money and a load of grief.

• 28:55Chris Williamson?

  Does that mean no such thing as a criminal record for people under the age of eighteen?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely not, there should not be a criminal record for someone under the age of eighteen. And and again, it goes back to the same point we were discussing earlier about about, yes, there's a hardcore. Of people in our society who are inherently dangerous. They might assault people, rape people or or or hurt people in one way or another. Amongst children, that group is tiny. A tiny number of ten, eleven, twelve year olds. Are already so dangerous that they have to be physically secured from others. It's a tiny, tiny number. But even those, they're not going to spend their life locked away. So you still have to be humanely working on what it is that is going to uh make them change the way they're living their lives.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  And and as I said, many of them that get caught up in the system, you know, the majority, in fact, in the early part of the criminal justice, the youth justice system. Many of them are just a product of of a horrific childhood and and and an experience of being in the care system. And we're responsible for that, Chris. You, you, me, the rest of us, the adults that vote for the way in which society organizes itself. And and decides what care, what the care system is and what it looks like and decide how much money to spend on it. And decide how much we care about it. We're responsible for those kids. And we need to take responsibility, not just throw them in youth prisons and then in adult prisons in later life.

• 30:19Chris Williamson?

  Got you. What about drugs? Why you proposing that we legalize drugs? All drugs? Every drug? Should they be available on a street corner?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  No, not on the street corner, but yes to all drugs. So my model for the licensing and regulation of drugs, so I don't use the word legalization, because what you don't do is allow drug dealers to just sell drugs freely, because that's that's one of the worst elements of the drug market we have now, is that the market is in the hands of violent criminals, and I've represented many of them. And they care about only one thing, and that is profit and getting as many people as possible to take drugs. So you take the market away from them, and you have licensed, regulated supply networks, which are highly regulated by the state, just as pubs are. You know, if you're a if you're a serious criminal, you can't get a license to run a pub. You can't get a license to sell alcohol.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Alcohol is a highly regulated product, that you know, that you have to have warning labels, you have to have a percentage of alcohol on the label. People have to know exactly what they're getting when they buy alcohol. And my model for regulation is exactly the same as alcohol. So you have age restrictions on certain products, which might be different for different products. But at the end of the day, the idea is, and I tell the story, that probably the most tragic section of the whole book is the story of Martha Fernbach, who was a young girl of 15, who went out one Saturday, and with her friends, who were all sort of teenagers around the same age, they decided to take some MDMA, some ecstasy in effect, some MDMA powder. And they'd done it a couple of times before, and it was okay.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  But on this occasion, Martha ended up with a bag of MDMA powder that was 91% pure. And she took enough, she had no idea what she was taking, because there's no label on it. She took enough to kill a horse, and she died within a couple of hours of taking, or a couple of days, I should say, of taking the MDMA powder. And the interesting thing about that, I mean, it's a horrific thought that a 15-year-old's got this see-through packet, you know, if she asked someone to go to the off-licence for her, to buy a bottle of wine, or, you know, or whatever, whatever she might want in terms of alcohol, she might get very drunk, but she'd know what she was doing, she'd know what was going into her body. And she might make bad choices, like many of us did as teenagers. But but when it comes to drugs, you just get a see-through packet from a dealer in a back alley,

• 32:38Speaker 01

  and you don't know whether it's 91% or 1% or 0%. And it's the equivalent of sending a child into a pub and saying, drink this drink, and we're not telling you what's in it. And it might kill you, but we don't know until you've drunk it. And that's the way that we're allowing drugs to enter into people's bodies in our society. And and and it's all based on an absolutely ridiculous belief that we can stop people taking drugs by making it a crime. You know, people have been taking drugs, as I say in the book, for hundreds of millions of years. It's the beginning of evolution of of the modern human. There is evidence of people taking psychotropic psychoactive plants. People have been taking drugs of one kind or another for the entire history of human evolution.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  So the whole idea that you're going to stop people doing something so fundamental as taking drugs is ridiculous. And if you can't stop people doing it, you need to make it as safe as possible. And you need to also not only make it safe for the users who are overdosing in massive numbers because of the very features I've just pointed out. But you also need to wipe out the crimes that these people commit. Because to keep up a habit of street drugs, of heroin or crack, or even a heavy cocaine habit, it costs hundreds of pounds a day. And the only way that drug users can get hold of hundreds of pounds a day is to commit crime or to sell themselves on the street. Uh, uh, and many, sadly, many drug users are in the sex industry. Uh, often in a very, very poor state of mental and physical health and selling themselves to strangers just to fund a habit.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Where they should be getting those drugs in a much more humane licensed system. And I saw it in action in Switzerland, as you know, from the book, you know, I saw the heroin assisted treatment program where. You know, they treat heroin users as if they have a medical condition that needs to be helped. They don't treat them as criminals that need to be kind of marginalized from society and locked up. And one of the one of the wonderful things, Chris, and I'm sorry to to to go on about this because it's it's one of my major passions. But but one of the things that that that the head of that heroin assisted treatment program told me was. The the users of that service, mo- mostly long term chronic heroin addicts. They already think that they're shit when they go in there. They don't need the police or the courts or someone else telling them they're shit. They feel like shit already.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  And that's one of the many reasons why sadly they've become addicted to heroin. It's only when you show your compassion and kindness and give them proper medical care and give them safe heroin, safe needles. You test them for HIV, you test them for hepatitis, you give them healthcare. That's when they start to feel less shit about themselves and that's when they start to take fewer drugs. And the success of that program in getting people off drugs by actually giving them heroin is quite unbelievable. Compared to any comparable criminal justice outcome where the success of getting people off drugs is negative. In fact, more people take drugs when they've gone through the system than before they went in. It's crazy. We're killing people. We're killing people in this country.

• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  It's so circular. The crime is needed to pay for the drugs which are overpriced because the dealers are, there's too much costing implications in terms of transportation and the ability for the quality to be fucked around with, which means. So I first heard about the Switzerland heroin programme from Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did a call with him recently, an online event with him. He's a great guy.

• 35:58Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, past Modern Wisdom guest and a wonderful, wonderful fellow. I imagine that you two had a really good conversation.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  We did, yeah, we did. It was, I mean, I mean, anybody that is prepared to speak truth to power, as he has done over in recent years, is someone that needs to be listened to.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

  No, absolutely. He's a real sort of voice for it. So again, with this, there's just each of the chapters, closing prisons, children being criminals, legalising drugs, good and evil, internet of crime, like all of the stuff in your book is increasingly difficult red pill to swallow about what the common held narrative, perhaps either by press or by our own perception, our own uninformed perception of what is effective policymaking and what is effective justice. Those two things continue to just be further

• 36:58Chris Williamson?

  and further apart. Had it not have been for me reading Chasing the Scream by Johann, I would have looked at why should we legalise drugs as a fucking mental title. But having read that, and then I'm like, increasingly more and more and more people that I respect and who have done the work and have the stats to back it up, agree with you.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we're all, we're actually trying it a little bit. Well, I think we're dipping our toe in the water. I say we, but the Scottish are dipping their toe in the water with a heroin-assisted treatment programme on a, on a small scale. But the truth of it is that, that I would love the Home Secretary or the Prime Minister to go and visit that clinic that I went to in Geneva. And indeed, some of the other facilities that I visited in, in Switzerland, like the consumption rooms, where people can take their own drugs. Which is not ideal from my point of view, but at least they can take their drugs in hygienic conditions, they get given clean needles, they get given the opportunity to, to wash, to access healthcare. I, I'd prefer that they were, they were all in, in a treatment programme, but, but, but at least they are kept safe and much safer than they would be in Britain.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  But I would love our politicians to go and visit some of those programmes, instead of just standing on their soapbox saying, drugs are terrible, drug crime's terrible. And we need to just crack down on it all the time. Because every time you crack down, we've had all these raids recently. Even during lockdown, drug crime was going up and up because drug, drug dealers are relentless. They're never going to stop because there's so much money in it, as you say.

• 38:22Chris Williamson?

  Industrious, industrious chaps.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  They are, they are very ingenious. And I've had drugs, drug trafficking clients who are major dealers, you know, who are bringing in tonnes of weed a month or tens of millions of cocaine a month into the country. And they are some of the most bright, sophisticated and business-minded people I've ever met. Because it is a business. And as you say, it's a logistics business. It's about how do you get poppies in Afghanistan turned into heroin and then transported in packets or in, in, in, in, in vehicles or by any other means. How do you get that to someone's vein in London or Manchester or, or Carlisle? And, and every time you move it from A to B, there's a, there's a layer of profit. And there's someone who has to be bribed. And there's, you can produce pharmaceutical heroin for almost nothing.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  It's a very cheap product to produce. And, and, and that's why people say, oh, but you're giving them thousands of pounds worth of heroin a week for free. You're not. You're giving them, you know, maybe less than a hundred pounds a week. Because it doesn't cost that much to produce most drugs. What costs money is to illegally transport them from where they originate to someone who wants to use it in a, in a, in a. In a western society, that's why you go onto the markets in Pakistan or Afghanistan, you could buy a kilo of heroin for about a thousand dollars. By the time that reaches the streets of Britain, it's a hundred thousand. And that's why it's so much. That's why pure kilo of heroin. Uh it goes up from a thousand dollars to a hundred thousand by the time it's been transported and cut onto the streets.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  So the government could license heroin production as they have done, of course, and heroin is produced for pharmaceutical reasons. And they could produce it for next to nothing. And we would cut out all of that criminal profit and we would get rid of those criminals once and for all.

• 40:04Chris Williamson?

  Who would do it? Are you gonna have off licenses on sort of treatment facilities like pharmacies where people can go and get MDMA?

• 40:13Speaker 01

  I think that it would make sense to have the premises initially operated directly by the state. And there are different types of premises. So rather than private business making a profit from it. Um I think because the government has to be able to supply, sorry, government has to be able to supply. Um uh uh control the price. Because if the government can't control the price, then you may create the room for there to for the criminals to remain in the market. So the government has to very precisely control the price. And of course, with alcohol, prices vary. There's no there's no restriction on pricing in alcohol. Uh it can go up, it can go down. But I think you'd need to be very careful. So and you'd need different kinds of facilities. So with heroin, which is a drug almost entirely of addiction, it's not a not a drug that people take

• 40:58Speaker 01

  uh most mostly on a night out or a weekend uh or a weekend clubbing or whatever. With heroin, you would have medical facilities to dispense heroin in the Swiss model. With other drugs that you, I don't call them recreational drugs because because drugs are just drugs, you know, and people use them for even so-called recreational drugs like ecstasy, cocaine and cannabis are often used by people who have got, you know, serious issues. They may have addictions, they may have other kind of um psychiatric or emotional problems that cause them to try and mask pain, just as people do with alcohol. So I I you know, yes, and there are others. There are, you know, a fairly fair number of drug users who just use drugs for recreation. They go out the weekend. And it has relatively little ill effect. They carry on with their life and their work.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  And I think those drugs that we might call recreational drugs, you would access them through a licensed dispensary. And initially, I think it would have to be a government-run one, because I just don't like the idea of private business getting into the profit model for drugs. I don't think it works for drugs. And I'm not sure we would have a profit model alcohol industry if we'd started, you know, if we started again. But I would have licensed dispensaries. And you'd go in, you'd have to tick a couple of boxes, sign a couple of forms, and you'd make it relatively straightforward to get the drugs. But you would nevertheless, everybody that got drugs, they would have access to, you know, help lines, or even face-to-face counselling if they felt that they had a problem. And you don't get that from drug dealers. Drug dealers don't say, okay, we'll give you your drugs, tick this

• 42:24Speaker 01

  box, here's a number and a card if you think you've got a problem, you know, ring this number and we'll get you to see someone tomorrow.

• 42:30Chris Williamson?

  They need to up their game. Drug dealers really should try and improve their service if they can. The aftercare is, you know, Apple, Apple Care, I'm going to, do you want the extended warranty on this, on this bag of MDMA?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:46Chris Williamson?

  A load of different ways that we could go about it. So here's, just as you're speaking and having really enjoyed the book, here's what, here's my suggestion, or here's my thoughts on what I think drives this point home and what I think is missing. And it's, it's an emotive way to grab people's attention. And the reason that I say that is I have a buddy, Alex O'Connor, who's a vegan philosopher. So he justifies veganism from an armchair philosophy perspective. And he has wholly convinced me of the moral position of veganism.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:25Chris Williamson?

  And yet, I don't have as much of a visceral response as when I see chicks getting thrown into a grinder. Now, I don't, I don't disagree that you need the philosophical.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Where do you, where do you go out, Chris, where you see chicks getting thrown into grinders? Where is this place? I'm worried about your social life.

• 43:47Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm from Newcastle, Chris, so you get some weird stuff up here, mate. You get some really bizarre stuff.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Cockfighting, the whole thing, right?

• 43:53Chris Williamson?

  Full works, full, full works. Yeah, exactly. St. James's Park's a hell of a night out.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  I'll bring a bag of chicks and we'll get out next.

• 44:04Chris Williamson?

  We'll throw some into a grinder. Yeah, that's it.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, smoke some weed.

• 44:12Chris Williamson?

  He's convinced me of the moral framework that underpins it. But it does not drive that point home. This is something, as much as I'm not a huge fan of his podcast, but it's something that I think Russell Brand has done fantastically with some of his stuff on TV, is how he's repurposed, sort of moved the window of how people view drug dealers. I think a lot of the general public, especially like the kind of classic British middle class, just see it as people having a low key party 24/7. The heroin dealers, you know, they're in a smoky, hazy room somewhere. It's like a real budget version of probably what Dan Bilzerian sees.

• 44:57Chris Williamson?

  The reality appears to be much, much more disgusting.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, drug dealers are mostly, the great majority of so-called drug dealers are actually just low-level users who are just selling on behalf of someone else or they're cutting their own drugs just to try and get enough for themselves. Many of them have got serious health problems. I mean, I tell this tragic story in the book of a guy who got, you know, he was a heroin user and he got caught up in in low-level dealing and he got beaten to death for allegedly stealing.

• 45:31Chris Williamson?

  Behind a caravan, yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, allegedly steal a few hundred quid from his boss, basically. He was also a low-level dealer himself and that's what happens in a criminal market. And so, yes, I talked about the sort of, what you might call the sort of big time drug dealers who are, who represent like anything. You know, there's only one chief exec of, you know, Tesco's. Most people are shelf stackers and work on the tills and the drug market's the same. There's only one guy who's really making it big. Everybody else along the way has a miserable life where they're much more likely to die young. They're much more likely to get serious health problems. So the whole industry is built on misery as it stands at the moment.

• 46:10Chris Williamson?

  Do we have a equivalent of Rico in the UK?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Not so much. We don't specifically have legislation that targets gang activities as a whole, but we have plenty of laws that cover, you know, organised crime activity. But they're usually related to specific conduct, like supplying class A drugs, or serious fraud, or people trafficking. So we don't go down the American kind of federal model of trying to criminalise whole gangs just for being gangs. We focus on them committing specific crimes. But it amounts to much the same, because most organised crime activity is around the drug market, by volume, by the number of people involved, and by the

• 46:56Speaker 01

  value of the transactions. So, you know, and we spend a vast amount, we spend billions on criminalising the drug trade, on investigating and prosecuting drug dealers, and we spend a tiny fraction of that on health services for serious long-term drug users. And that's an absolute scandal. Because if we did try to help users with real medical programmes that have been proven all over the world to work, we'd have, not only would we have a kinder society, but we'd have a much safer one. Not just for them, but for all of us. And that's the real tragedy. That we're doing all of these things, we're criminalising mostly fairly hopeless people for selling a few, you know, an ounce here, or a few

• 47:37Speaker 01

  grams there, and sometimes getting, sending them away for five, six, seven years for selling, like I say, an ounce of coke or something like that. Why? What's the point of that? What does that achieve? I'll tell you what it achieves. It takes one dealer off the street, takes one ounce of coke, or even if it's 100 kilos. All that happens is, if you get a drug drought, because there's been loads of enforcement activity, the price goes up. So the profits go up. And, you know, it's supply and demand.

• 48:03Chris Williamson?

  Adam Smith turning over in his grave here, yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  You know what? Absolutely, absolutely. And we're, we're, we just don't get it. And that's why lockdown drug crime was up, because there was a big interruption.

• 48:13Chris Williamson?

  Was it really?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you why. And there was a big, there was a load of drug violence and gang violence going on during lockdown. And I know that from speaking to those who are kind of directly involved in policing those activities. And the reason was, because there was an interruption in the supply chain, because it was very difficult to move anything during lockdown, in the first weeks of lockdown. So what happens is that people are then selling stock. Or what little they can get through at much higher prices. And that means there's even more of a premium on territory. If you if you're if you can sell your kilo for three hundred grand on the street instead of a hundred. You need to make sure no one else is selling on your streets because you want the three hundred grand. So that's why the stabbings and the murders carried on during lockdown.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Uh, they carried on because people could get even more profit than they could ever get before. Um, and and if that doesn't tell you that you're doing something wrong. That you're locking you're locking down the whole of society, but the drug market still operates. If that doesn't tell you that the war on drugs is always going to fail, then nothing will.

• 49:12Chris Williamson?

  It's a fuck it. It's a robust market, Chris. If we could.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Totally. And since time began.

• 49:17Chris Williamson?

  If we could harness the innovative power. And the uh logistical and operational talents. I've got I've got a number of different tasks that need doing inside of my company. That I that would be fantastic for someone with the lateral thinking that

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:36Chris Williamson?

  is really common in the drug market, apparently. What did you what did you learn about the dark web and the internet of crime? You had a look at that?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. And and it's fascinating topic. As you know, it kind of it's it may well lead into another book, I suspect. Um, because I I was absolutely fascinated by it. I I I talk in the in the book, in that particular in the epilogue of the book about my involvement in one of the original kind of internet based kind of internet piracy cases many years ago, which looks very quaint compared to the to the dark web now, you know, it's just basically.

• 50:06Chris Williamson?

  It's a cute cottage industry, that.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, back then it was just getting a load of DVD recorders and and and, you know, um, creating copies of DVDs or CDs or whatever. And of course, that whole world has changed and and and, you know, and it's a very different world now. But no, I talk in the book about my own kind of journey, if you like, into the dark web and and and how surprising it was to me that it was so easy to access because uh, I had I had some help with it, but it took less than 10 minutes to go from Google and just just looking at normal like websites like the BBC, et cetera. And then suddenly, within 10 minutes of setting up a VPN and all the rest of it, I'm being offered any drug I could possibly imagine. In any quantity, in any purity, I'm being offered guns, I'm being offered hitmen.

• 50:49Chris Williamson?

  It's on the rabbit hole there.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Down the rabbit hole, I'm telling you.

• 50:53Chris Williamson?

  I took a left, I took a left turn at Google. Oh bloody hell, don't do that again.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  I know. You'd have to deliberately do it. You have to download the right software, you have to have the right browsers and everything else. And you wouldn't get there by accident. That's the whole point. It's not accessible via ordinary browsers or via ordinary internet connections. You have to do it via a VPN, etc. You can't get there. But once you get there, all of this darkness is there, all of this unregulated criminal market. And the fact that you can buy firearms where they promise they will send the components, they will break it down into how many pieces. They'll send you a firearm with bullets. They'll break it down into 10 or 20 pieces and get it through customs without detection. And if you lose one of the pieces, they'll send you a replacement and you then reassemble the firearm.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  You get bullets included in the deal and Bob's your uncle, you're on the street with an AK-47 within 48 hours of placing your order. And it's a scary, scary world. And it made me think that much of my 25 years plus in criminal law it doesn't look like it's the last quarter century. It looks like it was a century ago. But when I started out, people still very regularly went out with shotguns and balaclavas and committed armed robberies. That hardly happens now because of DNA evidence and tracking of vehicles and AMPR, which is number plate recognition systems. There's very few. And of course, they have special dyes on all the banknotes. So you can hardly ever get away with armed robbery. But on the internet, on the dark web,

• 52:23Speaker 01

  you can get away with almost anything. And it's really absolutely scary. But it's also fascinating. I found it fascinating because it was a world that I didn't really know. And it very rarely gets into the hands of the criminal courts because people could operate from anywhere. I mean, while I was on there, my VPN was moving location to, obviously, to avoid any form of detection. And one minute it looked like I was in South Korea, then I was somewhere else. And it's impossible to track. Venezuela, and there's going to be a real challenge in our society. So definitely looking ahead to potentially another book. And my book's only published today, so maybe this is looking ahead. Too quickly, but but I'm going to go to Russia and some of these other places where they have these sort of deep web,

• 53:06Speaker 01

  dark web rather, uh, kind of hackers and so on, who are who are masterminding hundreds of millions and billions, in fact, of dollars a year in trade, in drugs and crime and people. You know, there's lots of child prostitution. Um, and and and it'll be fascinating to see what's happening, but also in the next book, I may look at how law enforcement is responding to it and whether, in fact, as I, as I say in the book, it's a battle that can never be won.

• 53:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, it's it's not fucking Kansas anymore, this is it.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  No, you're absolutely right.

• 53:35Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely not. And I I think you're correct as well that as with everything at the moment, if you look at the um amount of wealth that someone like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates has been able to accrue, leveraged by technology, it's orders of magnitude more than the the next closest, like, well, textile man, cotton manufacturer from like the eighteen hundreds or something like, you know, what what we what are we comparing this to? Because the amount of leverage you can get on technology is so disproportionate. And then, if you roll that forward, it's not like criminals, as we've identified, they're fucking smart. Like, really, really scary, scary smart. Um, and

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Some of them, not all of them, Chris.

• 54:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I'm sure you I'm sure you've encountered your

• 54:20Speaker 01

  The ones that don't get caught are the smartest, and so they never cross my, they never come across my desk. But uh, but even the ones who do, you're absolutely right. I I made the point. I mean, I had a I had a drug dealing client. He was importing, uh, I think a couple of tons of weed a week. He was one of the largest sort of impulses of weed. And he did get himself caught. And he only got caught, actually, because the police had put surveillance devices in his house. Uh, and were recording all of his conversations, even in his house, which is really quite unusual and and and was unusual then to get a warrant for for a domestic sort of property like that. Um, but I remember sitting down with him. I went to see him in prison many, many times. And eventually he, you know, we we did a deal and he got a relatively light sentence. But I but I remember saying to him, um, You know, uh, at the time, you know, you're such a clever guy. You've got, you're all over this.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  He knew every page of the evidence. He was incredibly articulate, fiercely intelligent. But he dropped out of school at 14 and, and ended up just going, going and sort of kind of, um, bombing around and committing crime. And, and then just the only world he knew was crime. And so he applied that fierce intelligence and that, and he had enormous business sense. You know, that kind of, you know how the best entrepreneurs can spot an opportunity can, and can motivate the troops and the staff.

• 55:29Chris Williamson?

  Built for it, isn't it?

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:30Chris Williamson?

  The brain is aligned with the operation.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  But he had no education and he had no, no formal education of any kind. And he just decided to apply his mind to a business that was illegal. And he made millions from it until he got caught. Unfortunately for him, because he was cannabis rather than cocaine or heroin. He ended up doing, I think about four years, whereas if it had been cocaine or heroin, and this no doubt was part of his calculation, actually. Uh, but if it'd been cocaine or heroin, he would have got 25 or 30 years for the same thing. So, um, you know, and, and even that was a, he was taking a calculated risk.

• 56:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  As, as, as to which drug to deal, you know?

• 56:08Chris Williamson?

  The, I, I think the, um, the dark web stuff, I, I went really, really far down the rabbit hole of the Ross Ulbricht, uh, uh, case. Um, who was the, the guy, guy behind the original Silk Road and I've done my fair, my fair bit of, of rabbit hole tumbling about that. So I would, um, I would absolutely love to find out some more stuff. If you go to Russia and, and find out some stuff from these deep web hackers, that sounds.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  We have to come as well, Chris.

• 56:33Chris Williamson?

  Mate, I'm, I'm in. If you, if you want to road trip me out to Russia, I, I have no. There is never been a flight I haven't got on that someone suggested. Haven't bottled a dare since 2001 and I don't intend on doing it now, Chris, talk QC. Um, what's the most common criticisms about your proposals? Can you steel man the other side of this argument?

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. So, so the, the argument I get most is what about the victims? You know, victims want justice, victims want punishment. Uh, and, and they don't care about all of your ideas and what does or doesn't work. If they've been raped or if they've been robbed or if they've had their, you know, their house burgled. They want to see some vengeance. They want to see some justice. So, so that's one of the arguments that's put to me. As far as drugs are concerned, the false argument is always put, which is. We're going to have more drug use and and actually in any deregulated or in particular heavily regulated or licensed market, what you see is falling levels of drug use. They saw it when they decriminalized the possession of drugs in Portugal many years ago, and they have had massively positive outcomes from that and not they don't go far enough for

• 57:39Speaker 01

  me because they because they still allow criminals to deal drugs. But they they decriminalize users and they made users part of the healthcare system. Drug use fell, crime fell, and health outcomes improved. So so those arguments are made. And insofar as children are concerned, I always get this. What about the Jamie Balger case? They know they know right from wrong at that age, and therefore they should be able to take the consequences. So so people have this kind of view. And and you know, it's not an unusual one. And I I I'm quite happy to accept, Chris, I'm probably in a minority of about 30% of the population that's prepared to kind of listen to evidence and to think about these things without getting carried away with the gut and the emotion of

• 58:22Chris Williamson?

  Being dispassionate about it's hard, man. Like even me as someone, I've never the closest I've ever come to a court is when I pick my mom up from work if a car's been had an MOT. Like, I I don't have any of my family who've ever been in, you know, I am I am the the absolute epitome avatar for that person, that middle class British person who hasn't got a fucking clue what's going on. And for me, I'm I'm as you're talking and as I was reading the book, and these proposals come up, and everyone that's listening may have noticed this as well. I have to check my immediate visceral emotional reaction because there is something that's been programmed into me to fear the other, right? It's quite tribal.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:03Chris Williamson?

  The way that I oh, no, keep them away. Don't want them on the street. Don't want them. Don't want them. Like, who's them? Who am I talking about to myself when I say them on the street? Do you mean those other humans born in the same country as you with the same rights as you that did a thing? Like, is that is that genuinely the way? So, you know, all of this, and the the proposals that you're putting forward, I think, upon

• 59:30Chris Williamson?

  Reflection, like with real nuanced thought, they do make sense and land, but there's a challenge, as we know, like, look at, you know, Trump run 2016 on build that wall and make America great again. The simple visceral response often is actually the one which is able to elicit the best output, the best outcome from the audience.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. So that's, you know, that's the point that I make is that I talk in the book about some appeal judges that I interviewed and criminal judges that I interviewed in Alabama. None of them would go on the record, which is perhaps understandable. But they're all elected judges. So they're judges, unlike ours, who are appointed. Their judges are elected directly by the public. And I said to one of the court of appeal judges, you know, you've given people the death penalty. You've sent people of 18 years old for life without parole for a drug crime. You regularly sentenced people to 100 years in prison for crimes that are not even violent crimes. They might be, you know, fraudulent or white collar crimes. I said, you know, looking at your system, you have these millions of

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  people, 2.3 million people in prison in the States. And, you know, as you know, from the book, I call it the city of incarceration. It'd be the fifth largest city in America if you put them all in one place. It's just a, just think about the numbers. They're actually mind

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  Catastrophic, yeah.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  But I said to this judge, I said, you know, so, so you're doing all of these things, but your, your level of violence and murder in particular is the highest in the world. And your rate of imprisonment is the highest in the world. So, and he said to me, he turned around, he said, I know, I know, it's crackers. Or you can use that word. He said, it's crazy. It's completely crazy. And I said, but why do you do it then? I don't understand. You've got, you're sitting on that bench

• 1:01:10Chris Williamson?

  You have the power, yeah, you're the guy.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  And he said, two things. He said, the sentences are dictated by guidelines and I'm not allowed to move from them. The guidelines are set by effectively the legislators, the politicians who are elected. And he said, secondly, if I came out on television and said, I'm in favor of legalizing drugs, reducing the prison population, and starting to have a much more benevolent youth justice system, he said, I'd be out of office in five minutes. No one would vote for me. So. So his point was, it's all very well you saying, and he acknowledges that it's all wrong, but if he wants a job, he's got to carry on playing the same old tune. Just as I'm sure many southern politicians in the States, after slavery was abolished, you know, they didn't want that, they didn't like it. And it was kicking the scream, it

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  was fought by a civil war to get slavery abolished, you know? And that was only, you know, 150 years ago.

• 1:02:02Chris Williamson?

  Are we going to have to have a civil war to get some justice reform?

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Ah, do you know, I wonder, if we keep creeping towards American levels of imprisonment, and we are, we've doubled our own prison population in a generation in Britain, if we keep creeping that way, I wonder whether the British people will actually then look at the increasing rates of murder on the streets, because that's what will happen, and start to say, hold on a minute, it wasn't like this 20 years ago, and they'd be right, we doubled our prison population, but we've got double the number of murders, because I'll guarantee that's what happened. And just then, maybe people will start to say to their politicians when it comes to an election, what are you actually going to do about it that works? Because we're sick of our kids being stabbed and shot.

• 1:02:46Chris Williamson?

  It's the, that works, that is the important distinction to make, because the natural, uneducated, uninformed view is, get tougher on crime.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Chris Williamson?

  But what people mean is, we want less crime.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Well, that's what people want. I'm not sure that's what they mean. What they mean is, we want to punish and harm criminals, we want to lock them up in the worst conditions, make it tougher on them. That's what they want.

• 1:03:15Chris Williamson?

  But that's the presumption of that, is that that is going to act as an effective deterrent, so that there is less crime. However, as you've said, there are some people who want this retributive approach to the way that justice is enacted, especially those who perhaps are the victims, or the families of victims of crime. But from a society-wide perspective, you're right, it's what can we do that reduces overall crime, which in turn reduces overall suffering? Like, what are the options? So I mean, where do we start then? Because this seems a little bit self-defeating, in a way, if...

• 1:03:56Chris Williamson?

  The policymakers are the people who can begin this change rolling down the hill. But by proposing these particular policies, they then get unelected by an uninformed public. Is it a bottom up public information campaign that's needed? Is it top down?

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  I think it is. And I think, I think, I think it's a combination of the two. I mean, if we had an inspirational political leader.

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  Boris Johnson, what do you mean?

• 1:04:24Chris Williamson?

  Chris, he's the voice of a, he's the voice of a generation.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  I'll start my sentence again. If we, if we, if we had an inspirational political leader who was prepared to get behind the idea of serious criminal justice reform and was popular and populist in the way that, for example, Tony Blair was back in the, in the 90s. And, and unfortunately, he didn't do, do, do enough in my mind on this topic. But if we had an inspirational political leader to come from the left or the centre left and win a big majority in parliament who's prepared to back this agenda, that's one way it can happen. So that's the top down model. But the bottom up model is how it happened in Switzerland. So in Switzerland, what happened was, why did they reform their

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  approach to drugs? Was because there were heroin users dropping dead in the streets, shooting up in parks, assaulting people as they went about their daily business. And the people of Switzerland said, you've got to clean up our streets and make our streets safer. So they took the drugs away from the streets and they put them into consumption rooms and treatment programs. And they then saw the streets became safer for the public. And when that happened, people were prepared, because in Switzerland, they have an amazing system, they have referendums for everything, everything. It happens by referendum. So it's only when the Swiss people decided that their streets were too dangerous that they, they voted literally by referendum to bring in heroin assisted treatment, to

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  bring in the consumption rooms, to stop criminalizing low level drug dealers. And in the end, they gave drug users in Switzerland the same disability rights as any other disabled person. And, and, and they treat, they treat. Addiction to drugs or alcohol or gambling or anything else as a disability to be treated and to be given support from the state. And that was the bottom up. So it can happen either way, can happen with an inspiration. And they had inspirational Prime Minister, President, rather, in Switzerland, who was prepared to back this agenda. And she did get support in elections and she did get support in referenda. So it worked in both directions in Switzerland. And I think that for my part to answer your question, I think it could happen either way.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  I would rather it happen because it would happen more quickly if we got an inspirational leader who would back rational reform, because then that person could introduce it and make it happen quickly. It takes much longer for a groundswell of public opinion to drive the political classes. And we're not seeing that, I'm afraid, at the moment.

• 1:06:53Chris Williamson?

  We're also not going to see for, there's no way that I can see, unless something catastrophic happens, there's no way I can see a left-leaning government getting in for at least another

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Well, that's because you're a young man, Chris, and you think that where we are now is where we'll be forever.

• 1:07:09Chris Williamson?

  No, I mean, I'm talking at least the immediate future. We've got four years. And then you would have to have the biggest swing in history to reverse what just happened only six months ago.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, but you're forgetting the Corbyn factor in that. I mean, you had a deeply unpopular with the majority of the electorate, very left-wing Labour leader, who was never going to win election if he stood a hundred times. We now have a younger, we have a younger, more palatable leader of the Labour Party, I say we, but, you know, in the country, we have a younger, more palatable Labour leader. In fact, one of my professionals, a QC and former head of the Prosecution Service in England. I'm not so sure how many people positively voted for Johnson. And of course, there was also the Brexit factor in the last election.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  It was pre-COVID. I don't think you could read into the fact that Johnson won a majority in very particular circumstances against a very unpopular and very left-wing Labour leader, the fact that, and extrapolate that through to the next election. I think all to play for in the next election.

• 1:08:19Chris Williamson?

  I mean, you know, my My goal with regards to this conversation is just to to get the reform on the right track.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:28Chris Williamson?

  I'd love to hear anyone that's listening, if you think that you have an alternative to what Chris is suggesting here, I'd love to hear it. But being honest, it seems like a statistically sound and humanely

• 1:08:47Chris Williamson?

  comfortable and compassionate approach to moving forward. There's few arguments that I can come up with in my mind that aren't just those quite infantile visceral like, yeah, but what about this? You know, it's just like a, like a throwing around point. It doesn't, I don't have anything. So with that in mind, when you can't rebut an argument, that's usually, that presumably is when you win a case.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and I, you know, one of the most moving conversations I've had in the last couple of years was with the family. So I, so I made a documentary series for the BBC last year, which went out on BBC One. It's still on iPlayer, actually, if anyone wants to catch it.

• 1:09:33Chris Williamson?

  What's it called?

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  It was called Crime, Are We Tough Enough? And it's on BBC iPlayer.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  And it was five episodes and we looked at different aspects of criminal justice policy. And, and we travel all over the country. I went into prisons and we interviewed prisoners and I interviewed the family of a young man who had been stabbed to death outside a pub in his twenties. And his mother and father and his, his brother. We sat around their dining table with a picture of their son, Michael, who died in the background. And they were telling me that they want, so the killer of their son had not long got out of prison for another assault. And he was released on licence and he'd been arrested a couple of other times and wasn't recalled to prison and therefore was at liberty one evening to stab their son to death.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  And they were saying he should have been in prison for longer, should have got more prison time. And then he wouldn't have killed our son. And, and it was a very difficult conversation, as you can imagine, Chris, because I come from it, as you know, from a very different perspective to that. And I, but I said to them, Can I just ask you to look at it in a slightly different way, which is that the killer of your son, who was caught and sentenced to life imprisonment, by the way, but I said to them, the killer of your son had been in and out of prison since he was about fifteen, and he was in his twenties by the time he committed the murder. And I said, is there an argument that that you should look at it the other way around? And that is that whatever happened to him in prison didn't work, and the prison system actually chucked

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  him out onto the streets, a more violent person than when he went in. And to their credit, as I would see it, they they did have, they were willing to reflect on that, even though they were massively still grieving. Their son had been dead for a couple of years, and he and they had a grandson, he had a young son himself, who was left fatherless by this by this murder. But they were prepared to take a deep breath and say, we're listening to what you're saying. And if you can get people like that, so Anne-Marie Coben, who's the mother of Martha Fernbach, the fifteen year old, the girl who died, she's a huge advocate for the legalization and licensing of drugs, having lost her daughter to drugs that were supplied on the streets. And I think if you're going to get people to make the

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  argument, you'll probably, and I hope I hope I've used some of those voices in the book. But if you're gonna, if you're gonna get people to make the argument, and you're gonna get the public to listen, I think possibly you need to have voices from people like that, people who actually are the victims. And I talked about David Merritt, who Jack Merritt's father, who was prepared to say, not in my son's name, don't have longer and longer sentences, because it doesn't work. And when you get victims' families saying that, then maybe the public will listen.

• 1:12:16Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right. That's what I was getting at earlier on, when I said that the emotive response to animals, pigs being gassed in chambers, and, you know, that to me, drives home the philosophical position that I understand underpins veganism, the same as this. I need to, everybody needs to genuinely believe in the stats and in the justification.

• 1:12:43Chris Williamson?

  From for the policy that you're putting forward.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Chris Williamson?

  That's not what is going to deliver the hammer blow. That's not the nail in the coffin. The nail in the coffin is the grieving mother that says, if X, then Y. Because people, people remember that, you know? And man, I, Chris, I, I, let us, I, I think it's a oddly revolutionary book that I didn't think would have come out of someone whose job, I mean, is your job, are you putting yourself out of a job here?

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Well, I'd like to.

• 1:13:16Chris Williamson?

  If you weren't needed anymore, is that the, is that the end goal? Is this just an early retirement plan?

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Well, I can tell you now, and I've, and people have said to me, you know, oh, you support criminals because they're your livelihood, et cetera. Well, actually, nothing would give me greater joy than to retire from being a criminal lawyer, because there weren't enough people being put through the criminal justice system. And we had a much lower rate of crime and we had a much safer and happier and fairer and more humane society. I'm very lucky, of course, because I have several other jobs, for example, writing books and presenting TV programmes and, and, and various other things. So, so I'd have something else to go to, but, but I, I'm absolutely, you know, I would, nothing would bring me greater happiness than to make myself redundant.

• 1:13:59Chris Williamson?

  What a way to finish. That's so good. Look, Chris, Justice on Trial is an awesome read. Anyone that is thinking of getting it, it will be linked in the show notes below, of course. Also, you're, you're pretty big on Twitter. You're pretty, you're putting out some really interesting stuff. What's your Twitter?

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  It's at crim law UK. And you're right, I try, I get involved in quite a number of debates and, and different points, but, but I also, I'm using Twitter as a way to try to make the arguments and to, and to persistently bang the drum. And, and it does get a lot of, you know, we get a lot of people that, that come, many, many people, as, as the nature of Twitter, you know, talk, call, call me names and, and tell me everything I'm saying is insane. But there are plenty of people who are policymakers, MPs, who follow me on Twitter, who comment favourably on what I say on Twitter. So my, my sort of basic position is use the voice that you've got. We should all be, you, you, you obviously have a platform. I've got a slightly different platform in different ways. And, and you've got to use the voice to, to stand up for what you believe in, haven't you, Chris?

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Because otherwise, what's the point of being, having freedom of speech if you don't use it?

• 1:15:03Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more, man. You want to do something, not be someone. If you become someone, it's only because you've done something. We will, I'll have linked your fantastic Twitter, Justice on Trial, in the show notes below. I'll also try and find if I can get a shareable link to Crime Are We Tough Enough on BBC iPlayer. If not, just search it.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  You definitely can. You can get a link for that. And you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel, which is ChrisDawQC. And I put all sorts on there, including career support for people who want to be lawyers, particularly who come from backgrounds like mine of comprehensive schools and everything else. We need to get more people coming into the profession who have kind of experienced every walk of life. And there's loads of guidance on the YouTube channel about that as well.

• 1:15:41Chris Williamson?

  I love it. And then we can get the vlog of me and you heading to Russia to go and see these dark web hackers.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  I'm in. And we'll drink a lot of vodka as well, I imagine.

• 1:15:52Chris Williamson?

  Whatever you say, man. Whatever you say. Look, Chris, thank you so much for your time, man. This has been fantastic. Everyone that is listening, let me know what you think. Are we gonna, are we gonna be able to reverse the criminal justice system in the UK? Is that, have America got it as wrong as Chris says they do? Let me know. Comments below or get at me. You know what, follow me at ChrisWlex on all social media. But Chris, thanks for your time, man.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  You're welcome. Thanks for the chat. Really enjoyed it.