The impact of terrorism on financial markets

1 Introduction

Financial institutions could be involved in financial crime as victim, as perpetrator, or as instrumentality: financial institutions can be subject to different types of fraud or abuse; they can directly commit financial crimes; or they can be used by third parties to commit crime (International Monetary Fund, 2001a). Similarly, terrorism can have multiple implications for financial markets. First, as demonstrated by the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center financial markets can be, directly and indirectly, the victim of terrorism. Second, financial institutions can be specially set up to support terrorism. Third, financial institutions can be used, without their knowledge, to channel terrorist funds.
The present paper examines cases where financial markets became, directly or indirectly, the victim of terrorist acts, the consequences of those acts on the financial markets, and the policy and regulatory responses. Section 2 discusses some of the direct and indirect economic consequences of terrorism; Section 3 reviews the reaction of the financial markets to the 11 September 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, and 11 March 2004, attacks in Madrid; Section 4 examines the authorities' crisis management responses to the attacks on the financial markets considered; Section 5 examines the regulatory responses; and Section 6 concludes.

2 Economic consequences of terrorism

In recent years, terrorism has shown new patterns, shifting increasingly from military targets to civilian targets, including individuals and business activities. Figure 1 shows that business facilities have represented, by far, the preferred target of international terrorist attacks since 1998.
Recent terrorist attacks affected both the national and the global economy. The economic consequences can be largely broken down into short-term direct effects; medium-term confidence effects and longer-term productivity effects.

The direct economic costs of terrorism, including the destruction of life and property, responses to the emergency, restoration of the systems and the infrastructure affected, and the provision of temporary living assistance, are most pronounced in the immediate aftermath of the attacks and thus matter more in the short run. Direct economic costs are likely to be proportionate to the intensity of the attacks and the size and the characteristics of the economy affected. While the 11 September attacks on the United States caused major activity disruption, the direct economic damage was relatively small in relation to the size of the economy. The direct costs resulting from the terrorist attacks were estimated by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development at $27.2 billion ($14 billion for the private sector, $1.5 billion for the state and local government enterprises, $0.7 billion for the US federal government, and $11 billion for rescue and clean-up operations) (Bruck and Wickstrom, 2004), which represented only about 1/4 percent of the US annual GDP.

The indirect costs of terrorism can be significant and have the potential to affect the economy in the medium term by undermining consumer and investor confidence. A deterioration of confidence associated with an attack can reduce the incentive to spend as opposed to save, a process that can spread through the economy and the rest of the world through normal business cycle and trade channels. Likewise, falling investor confidence may trigger a generalized drop in asset prices and a flight to quality that increases the borrowing costs for riskier borrowers (International Monetary Fund, 2001b). The size and distribution of the effects over countries, sectors, and time would depend on a range of factors, including the nature of the attacks, the multiplier effects, the type of policies adopted in response to the attacks, and the resilience of the markets (Bruck and Wickstrom, 2004).

The 11 September attacks primarily affected the major industrial countries through a fall in demand generated by the loss in confidence about the economy and its impact on output. Emerging markets were affected by slowing external demand and a flight to quality in financial markets. Other developing countries may have been affected through commodity markets (International Monetary Fund, 2001b).

Despite having been the direct target of terrorism, which materially affected the market infrastructure and operations, following the 11 September attacks, the financial markets demonstrated resilience and a capacity to return to normalcy quickly (see below). This allowed the financial markets to perform one of their key functions: that of digesting the information on the economic and financial impact of the terrorist attacks after an initial shock and efficiently incorporating the information into asset prices so that it could be integrated into decisions about the future.

Financial instruments involve commitments over time and, therefore, price and provide a hedge against uncertainty. While the initial effect of any major crisis may involve a financial market overreaction because of higher levels of uncertainty, as the new information is being assessed and absorbed, once the long-term impact of the crisis is assessed, markets return to their pre-crisis condition. Thereafter, financial markets shift up or down according to investors' perceptions of how the crisis will be resolved (Taylor, 2004).

Finally, over the longer term, there is a question of whether the attacks can have a negative impact on productivity by raising the costs of transactions through increased security measures, higher insurance premiums, and the increased costs of financial and other counterterrorism regulations.

3 Impact of the terrorist attacks on financial markets

As noted above, financial markets have been directly and indirectly the victims of terrorist attacks. Striking at the core of the world's main financial center, the terrorist attacks of 11 September aimed at undermining the stability of the US and international financial system. In the aftermath of the attacks, the financial markets were not only confronted with major activity disruptions caused by the massive damage to property and communication systems, but also with soaring levels of uncertainty and market volatility.

Numerous key market players had substantial operations in or around the World Trade Center that were destroyed or damaged in the attacks, causing a widespread closure of the New York financial markets. Above all, the financial industry suffered a huge and tragic loss of life, accounting for over 74 percent of the total civilian casualties in the World Trade Center attacks (Lacker, 2004).

The biggest disruption to the trading infrastructure was caused by damage to the communications system of the world's largest custodian and settlement bank, the Bank of New York (International Monetary Fund, 2001b) Both Bank of New York and J.P. Morgan Chase, the two main clearing banks for government securities, had to relocate to backup sites as their main centers of operations were located just a few blocks from the World Trade Center (Lacker, 2004). Manual processing of securities and payment transactions resulted in significant delays in clearing and settlement, raising uncertainty about the completion of trades and demand for liquidity (International Monetary Fund, 2001b).

The government securities market was severely affected by the loss of the largest interdealer broker, Cantor Fitzgerald, and other smaller brokers whose offices were located in the World Trade Center (Lacker, 2004). While confronted with the impossibility of communicating by phone (the interdealer market operates by phone and screen-based trading systems) as phone contacts with brokers were disrupted, traders turned to online platforms, including BrokerTec, a consortium of primary dealers, and Cantor Fitzgerald's own eSpeed Inc., which was able to continue operating out of the firm's London offices (Lacker, 2004).

Other markets were affected as well. On the repo market, the initial incapacity to trade caused by damage to trading infrastructure, combined with the growing reluctance of market participants to lend out securities, resulted in a lack of supply that demanded immediate intervention by the authorities (International Monetary Fund, 2001b). Also, several federal funds brokers were disabled in the attacks, some ATM networks crashed entirely, and the facilities of the New York Board of Trade were destroyed (Lacker, 2004). Because of widespread disruption in the payment systems, many market participants became unable or unwilling to execute payments, causing a growing liquidity shortage.

A number of alarming signals prompted an immediate response by the Federal Reserve as discussed in the following section. First, the large buildup of Federal Reserve account balances ($120 billion – almost ten times the pre-11 September levels) was limited to a few banks, which meant that others were running huge negative positions and were in acute need of liquidity (Ferguson, 2003). Second, on 11 September, the number of transfers though the Federal Reserve's large-value electronic payment system (Fedwire) was down more than 40 percent and the total value was down 25 percent (Ferguson, 2003).

The insurance industry was also affected by large claims resulting from the attacks that generated losses estimated at more than $50 billion (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2001). Further evidence, however, indicates that by and large insurers have suffered less as they were able to take advantage of the heightened uncertainty by raising premiums (International Monetary Fund, 2001b). In addition, some insurers were able to get exempted from paying some of the claims stemming from the attacks by using act-of-war clauses (Flynn, 2002).

On the capital markets, because of the timing of the attacks (around 9:00 a.m. eastern daylight time), the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ Stock Market never opened for trading on 11 September. The US securities markets resumed trading on 17 September, following close consultations between the private sector and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The decision on when to reopen the markets took into consideration factors such as the safety of the personnel returning to work, and the viability of the infrastructure and communication systems[1].
In terms of market volatility, the US stock markets were down overall during the first day of trading and continued to drop in the following days. Between 17 and 21 September, Standard and Poor's 500 index fell by 11.6 percent (Figure 2) and NASDAQ index by 16.1 (International Monetary Fund, 2001b).

The impact of the 11 September attacks was visible worldwide on the major equity markets, which experienced sharp and rapid declines, demonstrating that market participants perceived the event as a global shock. The decline in the European stock markets, which started operating before the US markets were opened, was even greater after 17 September, because of spillover effects. All in all, the Dow Jones Euro STOXX index was down 17.3 percent between 11 and 21 September (Figure 3) (International Monetary Fund, 2001b).

In comparison with the impact of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, the effects of the 11 March 2004, terrorist attacks on Spain were felt much less by the capital markets, and by the financial markets in general (Figures 2 and 3). In the euro area, the Dow Jones EURO STOXX fell by about 3 percent on 11 March, and continued to drop during the following days but recovered almost completely by the end of the month. Similarly, after a small decline, the Standard and Poor's 500 returned to the pre-11 March levels in less than a month.
Figures 2 and 3 demonstrate, however, that in the aftermath of both terrorist attacks investor confidence deteriorated beyond the national boundaries because of contagion effects. Likewise, in both cases the US markets seem to have suffered less and also recovered faster from the attacks, proving enhanced resilience. Nonetheless, once the initial shock passed, both markets bounced back within weeks to pre-11 September levels and generally continued to rise thereafter.

The differences in stock market behavior in the aftermath of the two episodes of terrorist attacks have several possible explanations. First, while the attacks in New York raised uncertainty about the stability of the global financial system, the attacks on Spain were perceived as mostly having a regional effect. Second, unlike the events of 11 September 2001, which occurred in the midst of a global economic downturn, the terrorist attacks in Madrid occurred at a time when the world economy was growing strongly (European Central Bank, 2004). The market uncertainty was even stronger in the first case as doubts raised about US capacity to drive the global economy out of recession.

Finally, the terrorist attacks in Madrid did not directly target the financial markets and, therefore, did not damage their infrastructure and communication systems. However, as noted above, despite major capital losses in the immediate aftermath of 11 September, most financial firms affected by the attacks were able to revert to backup sites and effectively resume their activity instantly or within days. The prompt intervention of the Federal Reserve in cooperation with other authorities also resolved the liquidity shortage and managed to maintain business and consumer confidence in the United States and abroad.

Further evidence on the impact of terrorism on financial markets is offered by a number of recent studies, confirming the observations above. Chen and Siems attempt to statistically test the significance of the 11 September attacks on global capital markets by measuring the deviation of index returns from their average (Chen and Siems, 2004). When the return deviation is large and statistically significant, the authors conclude that the market saw the events as important.

Table I shows the abnormal returns in the aftermath of the 11 September terrorist attacks for banking/financial sector indices from 14 global capital markets. As depicted in Table I, the event had a widespread negative impact on all the markets considered. Surprisingly, the impact was smaller on the US market, which displayed the least adverse abnormal returns 11 days after the attacks (11-day CAR), and also underwent the second fastest recovery. Chen and Siems also examine the financial markets' reaction in other periods of extreme risk aversion. They find evidence that US capital markets rebounded and stabilized quicker than other markets in the world following the 11 September attacks than in earlier periods when surprise terrorist/military attacks shocked global markets.

The authors find that one possible reason for the more limited impact of the terrorist attacks on the US markets (despite the fact that they were the actual terrorist target) stems from the Federal Reserve's accommodative policy, which was able to calm and stabilize the economy through the US banking/financial sector. Also, the authors find evidence that the increased market resilience can be at least partially explained by a banking/financial sector that provides adequate liquidity to promote market stability and stifle panic.

The main conclusion, however, is that financial markets were efficient in absorbing the shocks determined by terror attacks and continued to perform their functions in an effective way. A similar conclusion is reached by Eldor and Melnick in a study on how stock and foreign exchange markets react to terror (Eldor and Melnick, 2004). Referring to the 11 September attacks, SEC notes that “[The markets] did what they do best: they assessed, and responded to the crisis rationally. Unlike human beings, capital markets are capable of absorbing great shocks quickly”[1].

In terms of the lessons that can be drawn for the financial markets, at a general level, having diversified forms of risk intermediation makes the financial system more robust (Ferguson, 2003). At a practical level, the direct attacks on the financial sector of 11 September underlined the importance of having operative business continuity plans across the financial sector as a measure to counter the operational risk arising from severe activity disruption.

In the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, most of the financial firms directly affected by the attacks were able to relocate to backup sites and resume their operations within a short period of time. Thereafter, a large majority of the financial market players recognized that the preparations for Y2 K proved to be of value in the quite different context of 11 September. The serious consideration that the Y2 K issue received throughout the financial industry brought considerable improvement in the backup IT and communication systems helping market participants withstand the 11 September crisis (Ferguson, 2003).

4 Authorities' response

The 11 September terrorist attacks on the US financial system underscored the critical importance of the authorities' response in heading off systemic concerns. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Federal Reserve acknowledged that an immediate and firm policy response was key for restoring confidence within and outside the financial markets.
One of the first messages to transcend the chaos and panic of 11 September was that “[t]he Federal Reserve System is open and operating. The discount window is available to meet liquidity needs”. The Federal Reserve promptly deployed a wide range of instruments needed to provide sufficient liquidity, to ensure that the payment systems were operational, and to keep markets open (Ferguson, 2003).

The policy response of the Federal Reserve included unprecedented liquidity injections, estimated at more than $100 billion (Lacker, 2004). Liquidity instruments ranged from extensive discount window lending and open market operations to waiving overdraft fees and decreasing the intended federal funds and discount rates (for a comprehensive account of the Federal Reserve's action).

Moreover, to help foreign financial institutions cope with the liquidity shortage, the Federal Reserve arranged for the availability of reciprocal currency facilities of up to $80 billion though swaps with the European Central Bank and the Bank of England, and raised the ceiling of a preexisting swap with the Bank of Canada.

In addition, various steps were taken to render market mechanisms and systems operative. Although the US airspace was closed for several days after the attacks, preventing the timely collection of checks by their home bank, the Federal Reserve continued to provide credit for checks on the usual availability schedules (Ferguson, 2003). Likewise, the Federal Reserve encouraged state member banks and bank holding companies to work flexibly with customers affected by the disaster and contact their regulator to discuss ways to respond to the distress (Ferguson, 2003).

However, ensuring the financial markets' return to normalcy required more than the Federal Reserve's quick and efficient action. Close cooperation and coordination with other domestic and foreign authorities was necessary. The US Securities and Exchange Commission helped the markets overcome the crisis by relaxing trading rules on securities lending and share repurchases (International Monetary Fund, 2001b). Similar to the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission left the communication channels open and kept the public fully and timely advised[1].

Also, while the monetary and financial authorities focused on maintaining financial stability, other government agencies took the initiative to introduce fiscal stimulus to bail out industries affected by the attacks. The insurance and airline industries received direct government assistance in the immediate wake of the attacks. The US administration and the Congress announced their intention to act as an “insurer of last resort” to cover claims that private insurance companies could not or would not pay (Flynn, 2002). A year after the attacks of 11 September, a “Terrorism Risk Insurance Act” was passed, providing for a transparent system of shared public and private compensation for insured losses resulting from acts of terrorism.
In the short and medium terms, more economic stimulus was needed to help the economy recover as the recession deepened further after the terrorist attacks. The global slowdown that had started most prominently in the US in 2000 had, by mid-2001, become a synchronized downturn across all major regions of the world, leaving them particularly vulnerable to a negative impulse (International Monetary Fund, 2001b). The Federal Reserve continued to lower the targeted federal funds and discount rates in the following weeks an additional 1.25 points. Further downward adjustments followed in 2002 and 2003 (Figure 4). Also, expansionary fiscal policies have been implemented to help the economy recover.

At the international level, a coordinated effort was made to support the global payments system, strengthen confidence, and shore up financial markets. Monetary authorities from major economies such as Canada, the euro area, Japan, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom directly injected large amounts of liquidity and made immediate interest rates cuts in response to the Federal Reserve's measures (International Monetary Fund, 2001b). These actions were subsequently followed by a number of other economies, including Denmark, Hong Kong SAR, Korea, New Zealand, and Sweden (International Monetary Fund, 2001b).

Within a short period of time of the attacks in New York, a majority of countries stepped up the fight against terrorism in an effort to maintain international peace and security. Further actions were taken globally in the fight against terrorism and terrorism financing, as discussed in the next section.

In contrast with the wide range of monetary, financial, and fiscal measures undertaken at the national and international levels in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks in New York, the terrorist attacks that took place in Madrid, on 11 March 2004, called for little economic policy response. While the human loss was equally tragic, the effects of the terrorist attacks on the Spanish and global financial markets were rather muted and, therefore, no special intervention was required (European Central Bank, 2004).

The European Central Bank, the monetary authority of the euro area, which includes Spain, announced on 1 April 2004, that the main intervention rates (minimum bid rate on the main refinancing operations and the interest rates on the marginal lending facility and the deposit facility) were to remain unchanged (European Central Bank, 2004). Also, in a period of strong economic recovery, no fiscal stimulus or other economic measures were deemed necessary, other than providing aid to victims and facilities directly struck by the terrorist attack.
The dramatic episodes depicted above underscore a number of key lessons related to financial crisis containment. First, the experience underlined the importance of the central bank's role in safeguarding the stability of the financial system during crisis. From acting as a lender of last resort, to maintaining an open and transparent dialogue with the regulated entities, the Federal Reserve played a paramount role in restoring the markets' confidence and helping them perform their functions.

Of particular importance in this context was the role of the Federal Reserve as lender of last resort (Ferguson, 2003). Past experience has shown that deposit insurance or suspension of payments are neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent banking crises. The Federal Reserve's prompt action as a lender of last resort in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks events allowed banks to manage the acute liquidity shortage, and to prevent public panic and possible bank runs.

A second key lesson was the critical importance of cooperation and coordination among domestic authorities and across borders. In the US markets, there was synchronized action by the US regulatory community and other stakeholders that allowed markets to return to normal functioning quickly and effectively (Ferguson, 2003). Some of these actions included non-traditional emergency measures. Both the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission waived the observance of a number of rules by the regulated entities and offered their expertise in helping them overcome the distress caused by the attacks. As noted above, the coordination extended internationally, as key central banks stood ready to intervene to provide the necessary liquidity to support the payments system. The timely provision of liquidity by central banks and the relatively healthier position of financial intermediaries were instrumental in containing financial contagion across industrial and emerging markets and across asset classes.

5 Regulatory perspective

Besides providing timely and effective support as needed in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, the financial markets' authorities have to undertake preventive measures on an ongoing basis. Namely, from a regulatory standpoint, the impact of terrorism on financial markets raises two challenges: first, capturing the possibility for terrorist events from an operational risk perspective; and, second, developing an adequate framework for countering terrorist financing.

Crime Statistics: The ‘Data Explosion’ and its Implications

Crime Statistics: The ‘Data Explosion’ and its Implications
MIKE MAGUIRE

INTRODUCTION

This chapter explores a number of interrelated questions regarding the state of our knowledge about 'crime levels', 'crime patterns' and 'crime trends'. These range from what may sound like (but are not) straightforward empirical and methodological questions, such as 'how much crime is there?', 'how is it changing?' and 'how do we find out?', to broader questions about the relationships between, on the one hand, the kinds of data which are collected and published about crime and, on the other, public perceptions of ‘the crime problem’ and developments in criminological thought and criminal justice policy. A key message throughout is that statements about crime numbers or
trends should always be approached in a critical frame of mind. This is an area of shifting sands, where one has always to be aware of the creation of new offences, or changes in legal definitions or counting rules and practices. More than this, though, the possibility must be faced that the concept of a ‘true’ total of crimes has no useful meaning. Criminal offences may be carefully defined in law, but they are also socially defined and constructed: whether people perceive a particular action or event as a crime, let alone whether they report it as such to anyone else (including the police, or a survey interviewer), can vary according their own knowledge, awareness or feelings about crime, which in turn may be influenced by the general public ‘mood’ or the preoccupations of politicians and the media. Moreover, the collection and presentation of data themselves play a dynamic part in the crime construction process, both influencing and being influenced by current social concerns. It is nevertheless worth emphasizing that recognition of these issues does not mean that we have to adopt the extreme relativist position, espoused by many criminologists in the 1970s, that quantitative data (and especially the official crime statistics) tell us nothing about crime and that they should therefore be abandoned or ignored. On the contrary, they can tell us a great deal: the trick is to approach them critically, with a full understanding of how, why and for what purposes they were produced.

Most of the data and examples presented here relate to England and Wales, but the questions they raise are pertinent to all jurisdictions in which attempts are made to ‘measure’ crime. Since the last edition of the Oxford Handbook in 1997, there have been some significant developments in this country affecting the official crime statistics. These include various technical changes which together have considerably inflated the official totals of recorded crime: for example, the upgrading of ‘common assault’ and other minor offences to the status of ‘notifiable offences’, thus widening the range of behaviours included in the published statistics. Another development has been a doubling of the sample size of the British Crime Survey (BCS), which will for the first time provide survey data at the level of individual police force areas, thus enhancing the role of the BCS (which has also moved to an annual cycle) as a directly comparable ‘rival’ to the police generated crime statistics. Potentially most important for the longer term, however, have been proposals from the Home Office for a radical revision of its traditional approaches to the collection and presentation of crime data, the main aim of which is to produce a ‘picture of crime’ of more practical use to policy-makers. The proposals include combining data from a wider range of sources, providing more information about contextual factors (such as the locations of offences and the extent of damage or loss suffered) and, more controversially, a move from ‘offences recorded by the police’ to ‘calls for service’ as the basic building blocks of official statistics. All these developments and their implications will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter.

The chapter is set out as follows. The first main section explores some of the major changes that occurred during the last quarter of the 20th century in the collection and presentation of information about crime. It is demonstrated that a major ‘data explosion’ occurred, greatly widening the range of ‘knowledge’ about crime, especially about offences which had previously remained largely hidden from view, about the physical circumstances of offences, and the differential risks of victimisation among different types of area and individual. The production of (and investment in) new kinds of knowledge, it is argued, is dynamically linked to major changes that have taken place in public, political and media perceptions and representations of the ‘crime problem’ and how to deal with it – developments themselves associated with wider social and economic changes which have helped to elevate crime to a central position on the political agenda. The next two sections take a close look at statistics based on police crime records, and at data from the British Crime Survey, which are fast replacing the former as the key ‘official’ source of statistics used in policy-making, planning and performance measurement, as well as research. This is followed by a brief discussion of the ‘Simmons report’ (Home Office 2000), which sets out a vision for a radically new approach to the collection and presentation of crime data. Its recommendations, it is argued, have far-reaching implications, both nationally and locally, for how crime ‘problems’ and ‘risks’ are conceptualised, analysed, prioritised and responded to. The penultimate section examines the relatively neglected topic of data about offenders (as opposed to offences), including a brief look at the pictures which emerge from self-report studies in comparison with police, court and prison records. Finally, some concluding remarks are made about the broad implications of all these changes.

The full Chapter of this excellent article can be found in the third edition of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology.

Frederick and Rosemary West

In the psychotherapeutic worldview to which all good liberals subscribe, there is no evil, only victimhood.
In the psychotherapeutic worldview to which all good liberals subscribe, there is no evil, only victimhood. The robber and the robbed, the murderer and the murdered, are alike the victims of circumstance, united by the events that overtook them. Future generations (I hope) will find it curious how, in the century of Stalin and Hitler, we have been so eager to deny man’s capacity for evil. Every now and again, however, a case arises that stirs a faint memory of this capacity—forgotten soon afterward.
The case of Frederick and Rosemary West is an example of this phenomenon. It began with public levity, passed through a brief stage of appalled disgust, and is now principally a commercial opportunity for publishers and tour operators. But rightly considered, it reminds us of what men are capable, once all restraints are removed; and because the Wests’ crimes were so much worse than can be explained by their personal circumstances, the case reminds us also of what should be obvious, but alas is not, that no conceivable perfection of society will ever render redundant all external restraints upon human conduct.
As soon as the police had dug up the first human remains in the backyard of Number 25, Cromwell Street, Gloucester, in February 1994, bookmakers all over the country started to take bets on how many bodies would eventually be found there. There is nothing that lifts English national morale as effectively as a really gruesome murder, and murders do not come any more gruesome than those that took place on Cromwell Street.
In the end, nine sets of human remains were uncovered at that address, including those of the daughter of the proud houseowners, Mr. Frederick and Mrs. Rosemary West (born in 1943 and 1953, respectively). The remains of their stepdaughter were found at their previous address, Number 25, Midland Road, Gloucester, while those of Mr. West’s first wife, Rena, and those of one of his mistresses—pregnant at the time of her demise—were discovered in two fields near Mr. West's birthplace, the picturesquely named village of Much Marcle. As Agatha Christie once so perceptively remarked, there is a deal of wickedness in an English village.
Before he hanged himself on New Year's Day 1994, in Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, Mr. West confessed to a confidante—who has since been offered more than $150,000 to relay the confidences, as yet unpublished, to a newspaper—that he had killed at least 20 others. It is difficult, however, to place much credence in his confession, for Fred was never very good at figures and, according to members of his family, could never remember exactly how many children he had, or their names. I have heard a rumor that the true number of his victims was nearer to 60 than 20. Admittedly, the bearer of the rumor was a man with reason to be nervous: he was a doctor whose office extension had recently been completed by Fred, a small-time builder. Fred had obligingly offered to prepare the foundations for the extension while the doctor was away on vacation: a thoughtfulness that, in retrospect, may have been motivated by more than a mere desire to spare the doctor the noise that building works inevitably entail.
Another acquaintance of mine turned down Fred's offer to build him a conservatory: the builder's manner put him off. Indeed, there was something distinctly odd about the murderer's appearance: he looked like an intermediate stage in the transformation of man into werewolf. Extremely hirsute, he was short and had a limp from an early motorbike accident; he had the traditional bad teeth of the English working class, but his eyes glittered brightly, and there is no doubt that, despite his poor education, bucolic accent, and limited vocabulary, he was able to exert a hypnotic charm over susceptible and inexperienced young women.
Rosemary's appearance was rather more ordinary. She put on weight early and looked matronly before her time. There was nothing in her face or bearing that suggested a voracious sexual appetite or uncontrolled sadism. While she was in prison awaiting trial, she looked every bit the fond grandmother who knitted socks for her grandchildren.
It is unlikely we shall ever know for certain how many lives Fred and Rose cut short: an entire county would have to be dug up, and since the relatively limited excavations so far undertaken by the police, comprising 200 square yards at most, have already cost $2.25 million, a really thorough investigation would bankrupt the nation. Whatever the true number of victims, the Gloucester of the Wests is now as firmly etched onto the national consciousness as the Whitechapel of Jack the Ripper. Rose’s trial monopolized the attention of the public as 0. J. Simpson's trial had done in America, though only through the medium of the press: cameras (quite rightly) not being allowed in British courtrooms, to preserve whatever little remains of the majesty of the law.
Gloucester is a small cathedral city of about 100,000, where the city council has conclusively demonstrated that with the right combination of 1960s urban planning and an undiscriminating welfare policy, the degraded inner city conditions of much larger conurbations may be successfully reproduced in small country towns. The ancient but decayed medieval city center has been replaced almost in its entirety by concrete buildings that would have gladdened the hearts of another famous couple, the Ceausescus. As for Cromwell Street itself, once decent and even elegant nineteenth-century housing has degenerated into near-slum, where a shifting population of drifters rent dismal rooms by the week, and everything looks uncared for: the paint peels off the woodwork, the stucco crumbles, and litter-the packaging of junk food-flutters in the breeze. On the end wall of another terrace of houses nearby, a muralist has depicted the glorious march of the British masses from unemployment during the Depression to single parenthood in the nineties, headed by a Rastafarian with dreadlocks who holds aloft a banner saying “Give Us a Future”: by which is meant, according to the smaller banners held aloft behind him by the single mothers, more generous welfare payments. Next door to the Wests’ house is a mean little Seventh-Day Adventist Church, whose noticeboard offers passersby “peace and sanity in a mad, mad world.”
Number 25, Cromwell Street, does hold out promise of urban renewal, however. Some have suggested that it be turned into a memorial for the Wests’ victims. Others, more commercial-minded, have suggested that it be made into a waxwork museum, which would undoubtedly transform it into one of the principal tourist attractions of these islands, stimulating the economy of Gloucester as a whole. Some idea of Cromwell Street's touristic potential can be gauged from the fact that, even two years after the first uncovering of the bodies there, a steady and never-ending stream of the curious passes the house: this despite the windows' having been filled in by cinder block, and the doors securely fastened against entry, so that there is nothing whatever to see. Local storekeepers are now so accustomed to the prurience of strangers that they direct them to Cromwell Street even before they have opened their mouths to ask the way.
The revelations during the recent trial of Mrs. West (she was found guilty on three counts of murder on November 21, and on a further seven the following day) were deemed so deeply shocking that even the British gutter press, no enemy to sensation or salaciousness, unanimously declined to print the grimmer details. The jurors were offered psychotherapy after the trial, and some of them may have accepted; the crime reporters present rejected a similar offer with contumely. This solicitousness on the part of the authorities for the emotional welfare of witnesses to the trial was in marked contrast to their previous indifference to the evidence that the Wests were murdering their way through a multitude, almost—but not quite—unmolested for a quarter of a century.
The Wests committed their murders both for practical reasons and for sexual gratification. At first, Fred killed alone. The dismembered body of his pregnant mistress, who was last seen alive in July 1967 (when Fred was 24), was discovered buried in a field in June 1994. As far as is known, she was the first person he had killed-apart from a three-year-old child whom he had, accidentally, run over in a van and crushed to death in Glasgow. He killed his mistress because his first wife, a prostitute and petty criminal from Glasgow, with whom he lived only intermittently, was becoming jealous.
He then killed, dismembered, and buried his first wife in 1970. By this time, he was living with Rosemary, who was 15 when they had first met at a bus stop. Her parents had been so alarmed by her liaison with a man ten years older than she (though her father had himself sexually abused her) that they delivered her up to the care of the local social services department, which, however, permitted her to continue to see Fred. Aged 16, she gave birth to their daughter, Heather, whom they were jointly to murder 16 years later.
In 1971, Rosemary West killed Charmaine, the eight-year-old daughter of Fred’s first wife by an Indian bus driver in Glasgow, who lived with the Wests when she was not in the care of the local social services. Fred was then serving a prison sentence for minor property offenses. “Darling, about Char,” Rosemary wrote to him in prison. “I think she likes to be handled rough. But darling, why do I have to be the one to do it. I would keep her for her own sake, if it wasn’t for the rest of the children.” The rest of the children, at that stage, were Fred’s own daughter by his first wife (Charmaine’s mother) and the Wests’ first child.
When Charmaine no longer appeared at her school, the teachers and her friends (one of whom had witnessed Mrs. West beating her severely with a wooden spoon while her wrists were tied behind her back with a leather belt) were told that she had been taken away by her real mother—who by then had been decomposing for two years in a field. No further efforts to trace Charmaine were ever made: a child had simply vanished without trace.
Fred and Rose were married in 1972, Fred describing himself in the marriage register as a bachelor. Soon thereafter, they first sexually assaulted Charmaine’s half-sister, Anna Marie, then eight years old, Fred’s daughter by his first wife. They took her down into the cellar, her hands already tied and her mouth gagged; Mrs. West sat on her face while Fred raped her. They told her that she should be grateful to have such caring parents and that it had all been for her own good. They kept her out of school for a few days and told her that if she informed anyone of what had happened, she would receive a severe beating. Thereafter, she was repeatedly and regularly strapped to a metal frame, erected in the cellar by Fred, so that his wife could indulge in lesbian sexual acts with her. At school, Anna Marie would often refuse to participate in sports, lest the injuries inflicted by her parents on her be revealed; but no one realized that anything was wrong or thought to intervene.
It was in late 1972 that Fred and Rose first abducted a young woman from the streets. The presence of a woman in the cruising car reassured their victims that nothing was amiss with the offered ride. Their first such victim was sexually assaulted in the car by Rose, then punched unconscious by Fred, then tied up in masking tape, then dragged into the cellar of Number 25, Cromwell Street, then further assaulted by Rose, then raped by Fred (while Rose was upstairs making a cup of tea for them all, a peculiarly English touch to the story), and finally released on condition—to which she assented—that she return in the near future for more. Instead, she went to the police.
The police convinced her that it would be better to charge the Wests with indecent assault rather than with kidnap and rape: that way, the Wests would plead guilty, and she would not have to make a traumatic appearance in court. In the event, the Wests were fined $75 each, a leniency of sentencing that even the most ardent of liberals would, I trust, find unfortunate in the light of subsequent events.
It was after their lucky escape that the Wests got down to some serious killing, deciding that if their sexual playmates were going to go to the police, it would be better to dispose of them altogether. They abducted a number of single girls—six at the very least—whom they sexually tortured, binding them up with masking tape (and, in one case, inserting plastic tubes into her nostrils so that she could continue to breathe—a technique they learned, most probably, from a pornographic magazine later found in their possession), finally killing, dismembering, and burying them in the cellar that was later used as their children’s bedroom.
These were by no means the Wests’ only activities. They took in lodgers, to many of whom Mrs. West, with her husband’s active encouragement, made love, and some of whom heard the nocturnal screams of the tortured downstairs; they refrained from intervening, however, because they accepted the Wests’ explanation that the screams arose from their daughter’s nightmares. Occasionally, the police would raid Number 25 and would prosecute some of the lodgers for possession of small quantities of marijuana—an ironic attention to detail, under the circumstances.
The Wests also ran a brothel (patronized by the local police, according to rumor), in which Mrs. West was the sole prostitute. The Wests repeatedly placed advertisements in local magazines seeking W.E.—i.e., Well-Endowed—West Indian Males for Sex with Housewife. (Of Mrs. West’s eventual eight children, only four were by Fred, and four by her clients, three of them being of mixed race.) Initially, Mrs. West entertained men only for pleasure, both her own and her husband’s; but with so many mouths to feed, she soon turned professional. Fred enjoyed watching and listening to his wife at work, and installed an intercom system so that he could hear her wherever he happened to be in the house. He also installed spy holes and videotaped his wife on many occasions, later showing the films to his children on one of the seven video machines in the house (all of them stolen, for Fred was a petty thief as well as a mass murderer, with 11 convictions for theft). He also offered tapes of women being tortured to the local video store, but the store owner declined the offer and went to the police instead, who, anxious in the then-new permissive moral climate to demonstrate that they were as broad-minded as anybody, did nothing.
This was far from the only missed clue that something strange was going on at Cromwell Street. The Wests’ sadistic treatment of their children led to 31 attendances at the emergency department of the local hospital, for conditions as disparate as peculiar puncture marks on the feet to female genital injuries allegedly caused by having to stop suddenly while riding a bicycle. One daughter, age 15, attended the hospital with an ectopic pregnancy (Fred was the father, of course), but although this meant that, legally speaking, a rape must have taken place, the age of consent being 16, no one thought to investigate further or even to ask the simple question as to who the father was: for to have done so would have been regarded as implicitly judgmental.
Rosemary was so angered by her son one day that she grabbed him round the throat and throttled him nearly to unconsciousness. There were bruises on his neck afterward—clearly finger marks—and the blood vessels had burst in the whites of his eyes; but when he was asked about these signs at school, he said that he came by them while playing in a tree with a rope around his neck, when he accidentally fell. This was regarded as a perfectly adequate and acceptable explanation. He regularly appeared in school covered in bruises.
The Wests switched from male to female lodgers. Mrs. West, being bisexual, found them as much fun to be with as men; and Mr. West (who, incidentally, had often boasted of his ability to perform abortions and may actually have performed a few) regarded them as more reliable payers of rent than casually employed males, especially if the girls were single, pregnant, and in receipt of welfare.
But most of the Wests’ victims were picked up by the wayside. The majority of them—though not quite all—were rebellious and difficult teenagers from broken homes, who had either run away from home or had been in the care of the social services. One, however, was a university student of medieval English, the niece of the novelist Kingsley Amis, while another was the daughter of a well-to-do Swiss businessman, hitchhiking her way to Ireland. Extensive searches by the police failed to find them: there was nothing to connect them to the Wests.
More typical were the cases of Lynda Gough and Juanita Mott. Lynda was a rebellious and headstrong girl from Gloucester who suddenly left home, leaving behind a note for her parents: “Please don’t worry about me. I have got a flat and will come and see you sometime.”
Three Saturdays later, having heard nothing from her daughter, Mrs. Gough managed to trace her via her friends to Cromwell Street. By then, Lynda had been tortured, raped, cut up, and buried. Rosemary West came to the front door wearing Lynda's slippers; moreover, Mrs. Gough recognized her daughter’s clothes hanging on the washing line. Mrs. West told Mrs. Gough that her daughter had departed for the seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare, leaving her belongings behind. After a further lapse of time, Mrs. Gough and her husband searched Weston for Lynda but of course did not find her. They sought the help of several organizations, including the Salvation Army, but never reported her as missing to the police. Thereafter, they made no further efforts to trace their daughter: perhaps they did not really care, or thought that their daughter, who had attended a school for the mentally backward, had the right and duty to make a life for herself, at the age of 19 (the age at which she disappeared), untrammeled by parental guidance.
Juanita Mott was the daughter of an American serviceman whose parents split up when she was very young. She left both school and home at age 15; three years later, having already lodged with the Wests earlier, she accepted a lift from them and was abducted by them, suspended from the beams in their cellar, and then murdered. She, too, was never reported as missing.
As the number of the West children grew, and as they matured, it became more difficult to conduct burials at home. The abuse of the older children, however, escalated, so that their son, then age 13, ran away from home and stayed for a while with friends. When he returned home, he was beaten and told that he would soon be old enough to have intercourse with his mother (the normal thing for a boy, his father told him). Heather, the eldest daughter, then age 16, vehemently rejected the advances of her father, and was told that this meant she was a lesbian. She was then tied up, raped, killed, and buried in the backyard rather than the cellar. The eldest son was asked to help with the digging, under the impression that it was for a fishpond. The Wests explained Heather’s disappearance to the other children as her decision to work away at a holiday camp. She was the last person to be buried at 25 Cromwell Street, and her parents set up the family barbecue precisely over the site of her grave.
Five years later—and probably many murders later—the Wests were arrested for the rape of a 14-year-old girl. The court case collapsed because the girl ultimately refused to testify in public; but during the police investigation, an immense quantity of pornographic material, including 99 homemade videos, was found at Cromwell Street. The police destroyed the videos, apparently without ever having watched them; they may well have contained recordings of the murders.
The detective in charge of the investigation (who was later officially reprimanded when she tried to sell her story to a publisher for $1.5 million) had by now uncovered evidence of terrible abuse and wanted urgently to interview Heather. No one, however, knew her whereabouts, though one of the children had told a social worker that there was a family rumor that she was buried under the patio. The social worker did not think to inform the police; but in any case, the detective was by now highly suspicious. She attempted to convince her superiors that there was a good case for searching—indeed, excavating—the West house, but they procrastinated for more than a year, worried about the expense of it. Meanwhile, Fred had gone from Gloucester Prison, where he had been held on a charge of rape, to a bail hostel in Birmingham (where, he later boasted, he had killed a woman), to complete freedom after acquittal in court. It was not very long, however, before the game was over, this time for good.
After their final arrest, on February 25, 1994, the Wests chose different paths. Fred confessed—though only gradually and teasingly, with many different versions, no doubt to taunt the police—while Rosemary maintained a posture of injured innocence. When she was asked by the police why, if she were innocent, she had not reported her daughter as missing, she replied, “So I have to snitch on my own daughter now, do 1?”—thus revealing that, for her, to resort to the help of the police when a 16-year-old daughter was missing was a form of betrayal, rather than the natural response of a worried mother.
Both the Wests showed a sentimental streak, however, confirming Jung’s aphorism that sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality. Fred was writing his memoirs at the time he hanged himself, which he entitled “I Was Loved by an Angel”; and he gave his son advice in his letters from prison, letters that incidentally throw a lurid light upon the level of education in England: “Working all day and night like I did ... you cud end up in hear, all ways no What going on in your home pliase son all Ways spend as much time With your Wife and children as you can and love your Wife and children, there the most valuable thing you will ever have in your life so look after it son.” His suicide note included the following suggestion for the epitaph on his tombstone, as if his death had brought to an end a modern version of Romeo and Juliet:
In loving memory FRED WEST ROSE WEST Rest in peace where no shadow falls In perfect peace he waits for Rose, his wife
Rose, on the other hand, turned to poetry. From prison she wrote to her daughter, whom she had repeatedly beaten, raped, and abused:
I love you like the birds and bee’s I love you like the flower’s sweet,I love you like the deep blue sea’s,And memories dear to keep.
It was as if the pair of them believed that the utterance of a cloying sentiment or two could establish the purity of their hearts, irrespective of their actions.
Of course, speculation began at once in all the British newspapers as to what social and psychological forces might have molded this extraordinarily depraved couple. For example, both of them came from large and poor families in which violence was commonplace. But none of their siblings approached Fred or Rose in their ferocity or cruelty, even if some of Rose's brothers were petty criminals. Fred was brought up in a rural cottage without electricity; at the age of nine, he was required to slaughter animals. His brothers were raised in similar fashion, however, and they did not end up slaughtering humans. And if the so-called cycle of deprivation explained everything, or indeed anything, how are we to account for the strong moral sense their eldest and worst-abused children appear to have developed?
No doubt there have always been deeply perverted people, and it was a mischance that two of them such as the Wests should have found each other. But reflecting on their story, it is difficult not to conclude that their path was smoothed by the increasing uncertainty during the last three decades as to the line between acceptable and unacceptable conduct, or even whether such a line exists at all. Increasing sexual permissiveness was taken by the Wests, whose libidos were a great deal stronger than their powers of reason, to entail a complete absence of limits; they told those whom they raped that what they were doing was only “natural” and therefore unobjectionable. And they operated in an atmosphere in which, increasingly, self-discipline was not accepted as a necessary condition of freedom—in which everyone's merest whim was law. Moreover, the majority of their victims were young people cast adrift without the guidance of adults, of whom they believed themselves to have no need, and of whom they were in any case highly intolerant.
The West case revealed how easily, in the anonymity of the modern urban environment, and in the midst of crowds, people may disappear; and how such disappearances are made all the easier by a collective refusal—in the name of individual liberty—of parents to take responsibility for their children, of neighbors to notice what is happening around them, of anyone to brave the mockery of libertines in the defense of some standard of decency. And the various public agencies—the police, the schools, the social services, the hospitals—proved no substitute for the personal concern that families were once supposed to have provided, but that, in a permissive climate in which tolerance all too often shades into indifference, many provide no longer. The failure of these agencies was not accidental, but inherent in their nature as bureaucracies: the state is not, and never will be, a substitute for an old-fashioned Mum and Dad.
I meet adolescents each day in my hospital whose conduct renders them vulnerable to any Wests who might present themselves. These adolescents think they are streetwise, but if so, they are streetwise, life foolish. Last week, for example, I spoke to the 14-year-old daughter of Indian parents, who had repeatedly run away from home because her parents insisted that she go out not more than one evening a week and return by ten at night.
“I want them to be like an English family,” she said to me.
“And what is an English family like?” I asked.
“They look after you till you're 16,” she replied. “Then you find a flat on your own.”
I sincerely hope she never meets her West: for were she ever to do so, no one would come to her rescue. All that is necessary for evil to triumph, said Burke, is for good men to do nothing; and most good men nowadays can be relied upon to do precisely that. Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.

Harold Fred Shipman

On Monday, 31st January 2000 the jury at Preston Crown Court convicted Harold Shipman of 15 murders and of forging a will.
Kathleen Grundy, an 81-year-old widow, ex-Mayoress of Hyde, was a patient of the GP whom she respected and trusted. She had followed him when he set up his solo practice and shortly before her death had even considered making a £200 donation to his practice fund. She was found dead on 24 June 1998 after she failed to arrive at the Age Concern club where she helped serve meals for other pensioners.
Mrs Grundy's daughter, Angela Woodruff, a solicitor, was told of her mother's death in a phone call from the police. She called the surgery where Shipman's wife Primrose answered the phone and took a message. When Shipman called back, he told Mrs Woodruff a post mortem was not necessary because he had seen her so soon before her death.
Mrs Woodruff's suspicions were not aroused until a few days later when she was contacted by the Hamilton Ward legal firm handling her mother's will. Her own law practice in Warwick, which specialised in probate, had usually dealt with her mother's legal affairs. The original will had been lodged with the firm in 1986. Hamilton Ward had received a new will the same day that Mrs Grundy died. The new will was badly typed. Mrs Woodruff told the Shipman trial in October:
"My mother was a meticulously tidy person. The thought of her signing a document which is so badly typed didn't make any sense. The signature looked strange, it looked too big. The concept of mum signing a document leaving everything to her doctor was unbelievable."The will also failed to mention a second house that her mother owned. She contacted the police after speaking to the two witnesses she believed to have signed the document.
The police exhumed Mrs Grundy's body and found traces of morphine. They also recovered the Brother typewriter used for writing the will from Shipman's surgery. Shipman told Mrs Woodruff, and maintained in court, that Mrs Grundy had been suffering chest pains shortly before her death. Mrs Woodruff, however said that she had spoken to her mother a few days earlier and found her as lively as ever. She had been looking forward to a weekend outing to Derbyshire, she told the court. Shipman visited Mrs Grundy at home on the morning of 24 June, ostensibly to take a blood sample. It was then that he injected her with a lethal dose of diamorphine. To cover his tracks Shipman had changed Mrs Grundy's records to make a false medical history.

Shipman was born in Nottingham, 14 January, 1946. When he was 17 his mother, Vera, died of lung cancer at the age of 43. In 1965 he went to study medicine at Leeds University. In 1970, Shipman graduated from university and started working at the Pontefract General Infirmary. By 1974 he had become a GP working in a practice in Todmorden, but he soon began to have blackouts.
At first it was thought he had epilepsy but it turned out that he was addicted to the morphine-like drug pethidine. He was fired from his job at the Todmorden practice. Shipman admitted to charges, of making out drug prescriptions to himself, forgery and fraud. His only explanation was that he had become fascinated with drugs while at college. He was convicted at Halifax Magistrates' Court in February 1976 and fined £600. The senior partner at the Todmorden practice, Dr Michael Grieve, said:
"If Fred hadn't at that point gone straight into hospital, perhaps his sentence would have been more than just a fine. I think it's perhaps the fact that he put his hand up and said 'I need treatment' and went into hospital, and then the sick-doctor routine takes over."The General Medical Council at the time did not see fit to strike him off.
Although he was barred from taking any job which gave him access to drugs, he managed to find work as a clinical medical officer at Bishop Aukland Hospital. In 1977, Shipman re-emerged as a GP in Hyde. His new colleagues at the Donnybrook Surgery respected his work, although some felt he could be arrogant and patronising towards his patients. His patients loved his friendly bedside manner. He supported local schools and the St. John's Ambulance Brigade and was regarded as a pillar of society. In 1992, he split from the Donnybrook practice to set up on his own, round the corner in Market Street. It is rumoured that he left behind a massive unpaid tax bill, but took with him a very large list of patients. His wife Primrose worked as a part-time receptionist.
Suspicions about him started to emerge in 1997. Staff at Masseys undertakers had begun to notice that they were performing a lot of funerals where the deceased were older ladies who lived alone, were not noticeably ill previously and had been found dead either by Dr. Shipman himself or shortly after he had visited them. At the same time doctors at the Brooke Surgery, a joint practice across the road from Shipman's surgery were also concerned about the number of deaths at his surgery, compared to the number of deaths at their own surgery. These concerns were passed via the local coroner to the police. As, however, there was no firm evidence to back up these suspicions, the police were unable to question Shipman about them.

Angela Woodruff did her own detective work to determine that her mother's new will was forged. Armed with this evidence, the police were able to arrest Shipman on suspicion of fraud and question him. The police exhumed a number of bodies from Hyde Cemetery. In the end Shipman was charged with a total of 15 murders.
The earliest murder of which Shipman was convicted occurred on March 6, 1995. Marie West was injected with diamorphine whilst her friend waited in the kitchen. Shipman claimed she had died of a massive stroke. Police found her medical records at the doctor's home.
Irene Turner had recently returned from holiday with a cold when she was visited at home by Shipman on 11 July, 1996. The doctor killed her with a morphine injection. As she lay dying, Shipman told a neighbour to pack clothes for Mrs Turner as she needed to go to hospital. No ambulance came and Shipman claimed she had died from diabetes.
When Harold Shipman was discovered in the home of Lizzie Adams by one of her friends on 28 February, 1997, he claimed he had phoned for an ambulance, then pretended to cancel it when it was clear the 77-year-old dancing teacher was dead. Phone records show no such calls were made. Shipman said she died of pneumonia. Her medical records were found in a carrier bag in his garage.
On 25 April, 1997 Shipman called on Jean Lilley A neighbour saw him leave and went to see her friend, but found her dead. Shipman said the 59-year-old had died of heart failure. A pathologist found no evidence of severe heart problems and found cause of death to be morphine poisoning.
Dr Shipman killed Ivy Lomas, 63, at his surgery on May 29, 1997. He then saw three other patients before telling anyone she had died. He also altered her medical records two days later. Shipman told police and his receptionist conflicting stories of how she had died. The court heard how the GP had considered Mrs Lomas a "nuisance", because she was such a regular attender at the surgery.
Muriel Grimshaw was found dead in her home on 14 July, 1997 by her daughter. Shipman claimed she had died from a stroke and hypertension. He then altered her medical records to hide her cause of death.
Marie Quinn was killed by an injection of morphine at her home on 24 November, 1997. Shipman told her son that she had phoned him saying she thought she'd had a stroke. The doctor said she was dead by the time he arrived at her home. Phone records show no such call was made. Nor was there any evidence that Mrs Quinn had suffered from problems he said she had.
Kathleen Wagstaff died on 9 December, 1997. Shipman claimed he had received a call to attend Mrs Wagstaff - but records show no such call was made. He also said her death was due to heart disease, but no evidence found.
Bianka Pomfret phoned Shipman for a home visit on 10 December, 1997, and was later found dead in her chair. Shipman claimed she had heart trouble and had died of coronary thrombosis and ischaemic heart disease. Experts found Shipman had altered Mrs Pomfret's records, in the hour before her body was discovered, to generate a backdated history of heart disease.
Norah Nuttall was visited at her home on 26 January, 1998. Less than an hour later her son returned to find his mother slumped in a chair. Dr Shipman said he had called an ambulance; when Mrs Nuttall was found to be dead he pretended to make another call to cancel it. Phone records showed the GP had neither ordered nor cancelled an ambulance.
Pamela Hillier was an active 68-year-old who had been stripping wallpaper the week before her death. She was found dead on 9 February, 1998, by paramedics who said the police should be told. Dr Shipman said she had died of a massive stroke and there was no need for a post mortem. Police computer experts found he had made 10 changes to her medical records in the two hours before her body was found to support his diagnosis.
Maureen Ward, 57, had been suffering from cancer but was not in ill health at the time of her death on 18 February, 1998. Shipman reported her death to the warden at the flats where she lived, saying the cause was a brain tumour. Shipman murdered her using diamorphine, before reporting that her sudden death had been caused by a brain tumour. He then altered her medical records to suggest her cancer had spread to her brain. A cancer specialist who had seen her a month earlier told the court there were no signs that her cancer had returned.
Winifred Mellor, 73, was found dead in her chair on 11 May, 1998, having been complaining of a sinus problem. Shipman was reported to have visited her earlier in the day. After a cursory examination, he claimed she had died of coronary thrombosis - despite the fact she was fit enough to go on a two-hour walk only weeks before her death. Shipman altered her medical records to make it look like she had complained to him of chest pains.
Joan Melia, 73, visited Shipman at his surgery on 12 June, 1998, suffering from a chest infection. He made a house call to her the same day and she was later found dead in her chair. The GP did not bother to examine her before issuing a death certificate for pneumonia aggravated by emphysema. A pathologist later found evidence of morphine but not of serious lung problems.
Kathleen Grundy was the last of his victims to die. She was in good health and very active the day before her death on 24 June, 1998. She was visited by Shipman early that morning for a blood sample and was later found dead, sitting on her settee. When her body was exhumed one month later, high amounts of morphine were found. There was no record of any blood sample having been taken and Shipman also falsified written and computer records to make it look as though Mrs Grundy was a drug abuser.

The Harold Fred Shipman case is unusual. This was not the culmination of police enquiries into unsolved murders. Until Shipman was arrested, few suspected that any murders had taken place. Although many of the relatives and friends of these victims were unhappy about the way Dr. Shipman had treated these women, until he forged Kathleen Grundy's will, they did not know about how others had died in similar circumstances. There was no-one to compare notes with. Even when the undertakers and other doctors noticed an anomolous number of deaths, because Shipman had forged medical records, there was no evidence to warrant a more thorough investigation. Once the facts were known, many more put two and two together about events surrounding the deaths of their own relatives. Police considered further charges. Estimates of the number of people killed by Shipman ranged from a conservative 76 to over 1000.

The demise of the probation service

Introduction

This article sets out to analyse how theory and discourse have impacted on a large
and established criminal justice institution. The probation service in England and
Wales has historically been the most liberal arm of the criminal justice apparatus.
Empirically, it is no less effective – although not significantly more so – than any
other criminal justice organization.1 However, the probation service has, to date,
borne the brunt of New Labour’s mission to modernize.
In an attempt to make sense of often competing epistemological or ontological
assumptions associated with crime, gender, power and knowledge – all of which
are relevant to this article – it is acknowledged that there are no theory neutral
facts (Bottoms, 2000); that organizations are gendered; and of the ongoing power
of the male discourse. The approach adopted in this analysis uses a range of
theoretical standpoints in an attempt to reach a better understanding of recent
changes within the probation service (although it should not be forgotten that even
in taking a wide-ranging approach gaps and omissions still remain). The approach
then is to try and synthesize theory:


It would . . . seem appropriate to seek to synthesise the valuable findings and
insights of various scholars, even those of very different disciplinary backgrounds,
or of different political persuasions from our own. As Anthony Giddens (1984: xxii)
puts it, if ideas or data seem ‘important and illuminating, what matters much more
than their origin is to be able to sharpen them so as to demonstrate their
usefulness, even if within a framework which might be quite different from that
which helped to engender them’. (Bottoms, 1993: 59)

Layder (1998) defines this as ‘adaptive theory’ and uses the metaphor of scaffolding
to describe it. There is a pre-existing theoretical scaffold, which has a relatively
durable form and adapts ‘reflexively’ rather than automatically to new
thinking and research. This scaffold should not be regarded as immutable; it is
capable of accommodating new information and interpretations by reconfiguring
itself. This article therefore attempts to synthesize and adapt existing theoretical
writings in order to gain a better understanding of how power, knowledge and
discourse can ultimately bring about the end of an organization’s ethos, approach
and being.
The article is set out in several sections. First, ‘Correcting the correctors’ discusses
crime as a social phenomenon; how the probation service has been put in the
curious situation of being both ‘surveiller’ and ‘the surveilled’; that the probation
service had to change in order to meet the new requirements of surveillance, and
that in this transformation, the traditional probation approach has been abandoned
and new concepts of punishment, enforcement and discipline embraced.
The section on ‘Recent history’ looks at how the probation service has adapted
over the last 10 to 20 years to changes in policy, procedures and practice. ‘Understanding
discourses: Deconstructing meanings’ turns to the meaning of ‘modern’
and the continuing demand by central Government to modernize. This section
looks at the power of language, and knowledge as ‘language games’ of cooption
and annihilation. The section on ‘Feminist poststructuralism and the correctional
service’ builds on the preceding sections and brings in feminist poststructuralist
theory to develop our understanding of gendered organizations, gendered
language and gendered power. The ‘language games’ of cooption and annihilation
are not free of this gender dynamic and the changes which have occurred
within the probation service can be seen as co-opting staff into the male punishment
discourse, annihilating the previous, welfarist approach. The final section
‘Technologies of the self’ looks at how these changes within the probation service
have required individuals to refashion themselves to meet the organizational
requirements made of them as surveiller and surveilled, and how change, even
as radical as that experienced by the probation service, may be considered or
experienced as natural or self-defined.
Correcting the correctors
The Probation Service, possibly because it has been perceived as the most liberal
of the criminal justice organizations, has escaped the degree of critical attention


given to the courts, police and prison service. Some, such as Foucault and Garland,
have included the operations of the probation service within the breadth of their
writings on ‘the practice of the power to punish’ and the ‘penal–welfare complex’
(Foucault, 1991 [1977]; Garland, 1985). The probation service for England and
Wales has evaded some of the depth and breadth of academic analysis one would
expect of an organization which employs nearly 19,000 staff and deals with
190,000 offenders a year (National Probation Service website, 2005). This is not
to suggest that the probation service has not been adequately analysed; a number
of commentators have focused on its workings (Harding, J., 2003; McWilliams,
1987; Mair and May, 1997; Nellis, 1999, 2000; Rumgay and Cowan, 1998;
Newman and Nutley, 2003; Raynor, 2003). However, considering the important
role the probation service plays in working with offenders it has not attracted the
level of academic, or indeed popular attention, of the police or prison services.
Any analysis of the probation service needs to be within the understanding that
the instruments and organizations of penality are not wholly about reducing crime
but are social phenomena that have multiple purposes. ‘Crime’, as a concept, is
not simply descriptive of certain kinds of human behaviour. Rather, by defining a
given behaviour as ‘criminal’, a society attaches to that behaviour an important
element of censure. Acts that are censured in this way can and do vary from society
to society, and in any one society over time. Crime is ultimately a normative
category (Bottoms, 2000). Although legal punishment is carried out to punish
offences, the definition of the offence, their prosecution and punishment is culturally,
socially and historically defined. Furthermore, studies on the operations of
any of the criminal justice organizations are studies of the socially excluded
(Braithwaite, 2003; Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1969). As one of the main agencies
of surveillance and control – of what Foucault termed the ‘normalizing gaze’ – the
probation service has played a central role. Whereas imprisonment physically
removes offenders from society, the probation service must keep ‘us’ safe from
those ‘others’ within our midst. Yet at the same time the probation service is itself
the object of multiple gazes. Foucault’s assertion (1991 [1977]) that examination
is a form of control has particular resonance. Recent changes within the probation
service have heralded increased surveillance and control over the work of
probation staff. Targets have been set, evaluations required, cost-benefit analyses
undertaken, new entry arrangements and management structures put in place;
new organizational discourses have emerged. As these discourses have developed
they themselves have impacted upon the probation service until the pluri-paradigms
(Hassard 2002) of punishment, risk management, public protection and offender
management ushered in such conceptual and ethical changes that the current
organization and structure of the probation service is no longer tenable. Foucault
(1991 [1977]) wrote of the ‘theoretical disavowal’ which claimed not a desire to
punish but to cure and improve; of the ‘shame in punishing’; and, that ‘it is ugly
to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing’ (p. 10). Our own current
historical specificity is one in which punishment, enforcement and instilling discipline
are no longer the shameful or ugly constructs they once were. Instead, as
changes in the probation service have occurred, punishment and enforcement
have become explicitly what the probation service does.


Recent history

By looking to the recent history and the language associated with the probation
service, we can start to disentangle how these changes in its ethos and practice
came to pass. The differences between competing views of justice within legal
discourses are articulated in language and in the material organization of state
institutions that control the meaning of justice, punishment and rehabilitation
(Weedon, 1997). During the 1990s the probation service was disparaged for
being soft on crime. Internally, it was struggling to come to terms with its own
complexity and to find a language adequate to the penal challenges it faced
(Nellis, 1999). The social work origins of the service were challenged until in 1995
training was taken out of the Diploma in Social Work and more vocational opportunities
for ‘on the job’ training were offered (Nellis, 2000; Rumgay and Cowan,
1998). The intention of the Review of Probation Officers Recruitment and Qualifying
Training (Home Office, 1995) was clear – a new type of probation officer
was needed if the public were to feel protected from offenders. The majority of
probation service recruits were young, female graduates, and this appeared to be
a problem. In order to foster a feeling of protection for the public a tougher, more
controlling approach to probation was required. Men with armed forces experience
were seen to have the right kind of skills and mindset and were encouraged
to apply (Nellis, 2000; Newman and Nutley, 2003). Even if this was not to be
borne out in reality, the message was clear.
The landscape of penality had changed throughout the 1980s and 1990s as
the prison population grew, populist criminal justice rhetoric was employed in both
the media and parliament and high profile cases left their mark.


the various policy changes and events between 1989 and 2003 against the prison
population (Home Office, 2003a).2 The prison population has reached an all time
high and England and Wales now take pole position in the European imprisonment
rate league.
The Prison Works speech by then-Home Secretary Michael Howard coincided
with the murder of Jamie Bulger by two 10-year-old boys. Public protection was
to become central to a number of criminal justice related discourses. It was not
long before the ethos and language of rehabilitation, which had once been the
foundation of the work of the probation service, was to sound and become
obsolete. This focus upon public protection has had a significant impact upon the
probation service and its structure and organization (Nellis, 2000). The probation
service had to become more ‘correcting’ and controlling. Control was also exerted
upon the probation service through National Standards for monitoring, quality
assurance and validation of the work of probation practitioners. Evaluations of
various programmes managed by the probation service were undertaken. These
frequently included control samples and the use of psychometric testing such as
the Crime-Pics II assessment tool that ‘measures’ changes in offenders’ attitudes
to crime. Structured, standardized and accredited group work programmes became
the new intervention because:
Research shows that the main causes for why people continue to commit crime are
weak problem solving skills, poor decision making skills, weak personal control
and poor social skills. (Thames Valley Probation Service, 2005)
Cost savings were required by the probation service and cost benefit analyses were
often included as part of evaluation research on the probation service. Workloads
increased for probation staff as their role shifted from service provider towards
case management.
The public protection discourse provides prisons with a central place within the
criminal justice system. The features of imprisonment – regulation, control, monitoring
and surveillance – have gained supremacy across all criminal justice
agencies and have required radical changes that have been both surreptitious and
wholesale. These changes have resulted in the ‘new politics of law and order’, not
only of mass imprisonment but also on-the-spot fines, electronic tagging, zero
tolerance, pervasive CCTV surveillance, and paedophile registers (Garland,
2001). There is a need of ‘seeing to be done’ through breach proceedings, returns
to courts and possible imprisonment for failure to comply with community orders.
Form and appearance have become all (Schofield, 1999). The organizational
requirements of case management and enforcement have become a priority as
this new ‘knowledge’ has been created.
The justifications for reorganization have included failures of the past, increased
efficiency, centralization and regionalization, and have been wrapped up in the
public protection, risk management discourse. The very newness of the National
Probation Directorate, tautologically, became the reason for ongoing reorganizations.
The review of all ‘correctional’ services by millionaire businessman and
government trouble-shooter Patrick Carter concluded the paradigm shift and
organizational changes started with the Review of Probation Officers Recruitment
and Qualifying Training (Home Office, 1995), which were accelerated in 1999
when Joining Forces to Protect the Public (Home Office, 1999) was published.
Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime (Carter, 2003) suggested the setting up of
the National Offender Management Service and finally made explicit and apparently
inevitable, the long touted restructuring of the probation and prison services:
Prison and probation need to be focused on the management of offenders
throughout the whole of their sentence, driven by information on what works to
reduce re-offending. Effectiveness and value for money can be further improved
through greater use of competition from private and voluntary providers. (Carter,
2003: 6)
In 1998 Judith Rumgay and Sharon Cowan wrote of the fierce resistance probation
officers had made to any shift of focus from the supervision of clients onto enforcement,
and that: ‘the probation officer as case manager has yet to emerge in the
flesh from the shadows of policy’ (p.135). However, it has not been long for such
a transition to be realized. Reducing the discretion of probation officers has been
a necessary prerequisite in achieving strategic agency and the formation of a new
correctional service. Behind a façade of effectiveness, equity and even humanity
we can detect distinct concentrations of power and knowledge (Clegg, 1998).
Within the probation service the ongoing push for the ever greater effectiveness
promised by the ‘what works’ agenda can be viewed instead as having created a
seismic shift in the knowledge base of the probation service from social work principles
and offender focus, to enforcement and offence focus:
What passes for ‘ordinary work’ in professional-bureaucratic settings is a thickly
layered texture of political struggles concerning power and authority, cultural
negotiations over identities, and social constructions of the ‘problems’ at hand.
(Forester, 2003: 45)
Understanding discourses: Deconstructing meanings
Analysing language has been a key feature of much postmodern and poststructuralist
work. It has been described as:
An analytical strategy that exposes, in a systematic way, multiple ways a text can
be interpreted. Deconstruction is able to reveal ideological assumptions in a way
that is particularly sensitive to the suppressed interests of members of
disempowered, marginalized groups. (Martin, 1990: 340)
Deconstruction of the language that surrounds the probation service provides a
valuable insight into concentrations of power, knowledge production and the
creation of new meanings. The two key chapters in Joining Forces to Protect the
Public (1999) are ‘A Modern Probation Service’ and ‘A Modern Prison Service’. In
the chapter on the probation service the term ‘modern’ is used three times more
than in any other chapter.3 Judith Butler’s contention that ‘if conditions of power
are to persist, they must be reiterated; the subject is precisely the site of such reiteration’
(cited in Mills, 2003: 261) is particularly convincing in this instance. In
order for government to ensure compliance to its modernization endeavour there
has been a reiteration of what is required. For the probation service (as with many
other public services) encouragement to modernize is the exercise of power.
However, exhorted by the constant call for change – to become part of the
modernizing project – the probation service has instead been exhausted by it.
Changes in the discourses and language of punishment have opened up and
altered the probation service. A new approach to punishment has developed.
Webs of practices, discourses, and institutions have been adopted, imitated, and
transformed to the point that they have become knowledge and common-sense
(Calas and Smircich, 1999). This has included the adoption of a new evidence
base, a new way of producing knowledge best known as ‘what works’. All previous
knowledge is swept away; new, scientifically rigorous, cost effective, activities which
work is the new knowledge; and within this knowledge is an entanglement of
power relations. One of the strongest messages of the modernization agenda
implemented by the Government is of change as positive, inevitable and progressive
(McKendall, 1993). The unveiling of the modernizing endeavour of ‘what
works’ in offender management requires rationalism, evidence, classification,
normalization, efficiency and measure. A veneer of managerialism and scientific
legitimacy has been constructed for ‘offender management’. This has been
referred to as the intensification of modernism (Nellis, 1999). The inevitable
conclusion of the ‘what works’ agenda is that the new correctional service will see
and know everything about offending, and about ‘correcting’. Never again would
a head of Home Office Criminal Research be able to say: ‘Criminal research . . .
has been a failure’ (Garland, 2001: 131). The concept of actuarial justice (Feeley
and Simon, 1994) which is based on the hope that efficiency, management and
cost-effectiveness will depoliticize criminal justice debates, focusing less on individual
offenders and shifting towards standardized, packaged responses that can
apply a technique or strategy to groups of offenders to deal with their ‘criminality’
has been realized.
The National Probation Service has only been in existence since April 2001.
Part of the rationale for this restructuring and the appointment of a National
Director had been to allow for it to be represented by ‘one voice’ (Nellis, 2000).
One possible interpretation of the ‘one voice’ is that it was an attempt at minimizing
voices other than the politically appointed one of the National Director. In
powerful discourses, knowledge production, its ownership and delivery (or not) is
paramount. Knowledge can be considered as ‘language games’ for as long as
these games are played with the intention of annihilation or cooption (Calas and
Smircich, 1999). For the National Probation Service it appears that the language
games of corrections, punishment, public protection and risk management have
brought about both its annihilation and cooption. This may appear a bizarre
conundrum – how can something that has been annihilated be coopted?
Let us turn to the latest chapter in the history of the probation service: Managing
Offenders, Reducing Crime (Carter, 2003). This was a review of ‘correctional
services in England and Wales’ at a time when few people collapsed the prison
and probation services into one apparently monolithic correctional structure. It had
been argued that: ‘even without merger the fusion of prison and probation
cultures remains, probably, the greatest threat to the service’ (Nellis, 1999: 311);
and that the ‘inherent tendency of prisons to be damaging places’ (Dunbar and
Langdon, 1998) has been forgotten as prison and probation services become part
of the same organizational structure to offer ‘seamless sentencing’. This places
imprisonment as the norm and not the unusual. Resettlement back into the
community following imprisonment, a removal from society, family and friends,
work and home, is now to be achieved ‘seamlessly’ (Home Office, 2001). The
separation and isolation of imprisonment is minimized. It is not seen as relevant
that prison regimes are impoverished and damaging, assaults common, and
opportunities for purposeful activity such as education and training, visits and sport
limited. In 2002–2003 the highest ever number of suicides in prisons in England
and Wales was recorded (Solomon, 2003). By placing prisons at the centre of the
criminal justice system the organizational culture of the probation service has been
challenged, defeated and finally annihilated. The demise of the probation service
occurred in the very instance in which the creation of a correctional service, the
National Offender Management Service, was agreed.
Feminist poststructuralism and the correctional service
Through using adaptive theory to synthesize and adapt existing theories we can
try to gain a better understanding of how power, knowledge and discourse impact
upon an organization. By adopting a deconstructionist approach, we can begin
to understand how power and knowledge not only shape change, but are precursors
to it. If context is given rather than made then the question of language in
the constitution of knowledge is relevant. Language constitutes social reality. Poststructuralist
theories offer a set of theoretical tools that can help our (social,
cultural, historic) understanding of power relations in relation to class, gender and
race. Although the most powerful discourses in our society, such as the law, have
firm institutional bases, these institutional locations are themselves sites of contest,
and the dominant discourses of social institutions undergo constant change. In
any society, one set of legal discourses will be dominant reflecting particular values
and class, gender and racial interests (Weedon, 1997). In relation to the new
correctional paradigm, gender, and the reification of the masculine, has been
evident. How the dominant justice discourse intersects and interacts with gender
interests provides a useful area for analysis.
Despite the fact that the most significant feature associated with crime is gender
(Cain, 1990; Carlen, 1992; Messerschmidt, 1986; Newburn and Stanko, 1994;
Walklate, 1995), masculinity continually fails to be problematized within any of
the key criminal justice organizations. The male offender is the ‘norm’ from which
the female offender diverges:
Sex status is of greater statistical significance in differentiating criminals from
non-criminals than any other trait. If you were asked to use a single trait to predict
which children in a town of 10,000 people would become criminals, you would
make fewer mistakes if you chose sex status as the trait and predicted criminality for
the males and non-criminality for the females. (Sutherland and Cressey, 1978: 89)


In relation to those who work within criminal justice agencies, women make up
32 per cent of prison service staff; 21 per cent of police staff and 19 per cent of
the judiciary (Dept for Constitutional Affairs, 2005; HM Prison Service, 2005;
Smith et al., 2002). However, the number of female probation officers was 59 per
cent by the end of 2001. For senior grades, women held 30 per cent of senior
posts in 1991, but 46 per cent by the end of 2001. The number of female Chief
Probation Officers has increased from 8 per cent in 1991 to 18 per cent in 2000.
Within this timeframe, therefore, the number of female Chief Probation Officers
rose from 15 to 43 per cent (Home Office, 2002). Concerns regarding women,
employment, career opportunities and the ubiquitous glass ceiling are therefore
less likely to be found within the probation service. Indeed, a woman held the post
of Director General of the National Probation Service until 2004. The more
straightforward essentialist gender analysis offered in many other organizations,
of men in the majority, especially in the more senior posts, and of endemic, structural
gender inequality is less relevant here. But to deny the gendered nature of
this, or any other organization, would be a mistake. Organizational structure is
fundamentally gendered (McCorkel, 2003). Discipline and control is organized
according to highly gendered sets of expectations regarding the ‘best’ way to deal
with offending. The practice of punishment and surveillance is organized within a
wider field of social relations (Foucault, 1991 [1977]) which are themselves
gendered concepts. If we look beyond the statistics, and towards the language of
corrections and the social phenomena of penality, the power of the discourse of
hegemonic masculinity can be located. Masculinity is implicit in the construction
of the correctional service in that it will be rational, targeted, evaluated, controlling
and rigid. It will act as ‘our’ protector and embrace the punishment ethic –
no longer afraid to be the punisher. Punishment becomes our protection.
In the demise of the probation service and the rise of a correctional service we
are witnessing the masculinization of an organization. Although it is a challenge
to remove our understanding of ‘men’ and ‘women’ from the terms masculine
and feminine it is a necessary prerequisite as we consider the reification of the
masculine in the new punishment ethic. The panopticon as the arch-metaphor of
modern power must be infused with an understanding of the power of the male
discourse (Bauman, 2000). Let us turn, for example to the ‘what works’ agenda
and the creation of ‘positive knowledge’ which swept away all that was understood
from the past (Calas and Smircich, 1999) through the use of new managerial
technologies whose aim is to render offenders knowable, calculable and
comparable (McKinlay and Starkey, 1998).
This valuing of the masculine, however, cannot be simply reconstructed into a
valuing of the feminine as this simply reinforces gendered stereotypes (Martin,
2003). Masculinity and femininity are socially constructed. The feminine is nurturing,
empathetic, sympathetic, cooperative, emotional and passive – and evokes
the traditional probation service as service provider, trained within the social work
ethic. The masculine is decisive, competitive, rational, effective, firm and active –
and evokes the new probation service as offender management, keen to discipline,
enforce, measure (Connell, 1987). ‘What works’ has produced a change in the
knowledge pool upon which professional practice had been based (Newman and
Nutley, 2003). Such shifts in professional knowledge and social relationships
shook the pre-existing professional and organizational identities of the probation
service and finally eroded its professional boundaries. The ‘what works’ discourse
is symbiotic with other contemporary discourses such as managerialism and
modernization. It collides with the political rhetoric of the ‘Third Way’, orientated
towards pragmatism and away from ideology. Nothing matters apart from what
works – not ideologically nor organizationally.
The probation service’s professional knowledge had been in a state of flux,
caught between traditional social work based practice with a focus upon the
‘client’ and the new discourse of offender management, coercion and enforcement.
Joint working, blurring of professional boundaries and the eventual creation
of new organizational structures therefore became more of a possibility:
Discipline, crucially, is conceptualized not as an expression of already existing
power but constitutive of it . . . this is why knowledge of institutions becomes so
vital. (McKinlay and Starkey, 1998: 1)
‘What works’ is apparently a simple, common-sense concept – the most effective
interventions with offenders should be used to inform policy and practice. As
a discourse it can be understood as a set of ‘prescriptions, norms, techniques and
rules’ (Newman and Nutley, 2003: 552) through which particular forms of practice
are legitimated and constructed. Common sense has an important constitutive role
to play in maintaining the centrality of gender difference as a focus of power in
society and is gendered in favour of the male: not all discourses carry equal weight
or power (Weedon, 1997).
Within the language of penality we can find the gendered language of hegemonic
masculinity with its concentration on efficiency, evaluation, and enforcement.
By using discourse we can attempt to understand the relationship between
language, social institution, subjectivity and power:
Power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations
. . . as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations,
transforms, strengthens, or reverses them . . . and lastly as the strategies . . . is
embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various
social hegemonies. (Foucault, 1998 [1978]: 93–4)
Feminist poststructuralists draw attention to how gender, and the reification of the
masculine, is an intrinsic site of power. The question of language in the constitution
of knowledge relates to the institutions that define what knowledge is, and
the language through which knowledge gets made; and these too are infused with
the masculine. If language is the place where actual and possible forms of social
organization and their likely consequences are defined and contested, then how
that language interacts, intersects, informs and is informed by masculinity must
be considered (Weedon, 1997).
A longitudinal study concerned with the context, content and process of change
in one probation area between 1990 and 1998 demonstrates how language is
the site where meaningful experience is constituted, and determines our perceptions
of the possibility for change:


Probation officers were clear that the ‘what works’ principles represented the
knowledge base that they were expected to espouse if they wished to progress
within the organisation. (Newman and Nutley, 2003: 553)

From this statement we can see how the new knowledge has power and how that
power has seeped ‘into the very grain of individuals, reaches right into their
bodies, permeates their gestures, their posture, what they say, how they learn to
live and work with other people’ (Foucault, 1991 [1977]: 28).
The increased technicality of ‘what works’ has been associated with increased
credibility of the service and is aligned with a sense of rationality – which is itself
aligned with the masculine. For individuals within the probation service to talk
outside of these terms of references would be to surrender power, as they would
not be able to progress within the organization without using the appropriate
language. The marginalization of the traditional probation service activities and
practices of support, listening, and engagement, has led to these types of
approaches being devalued and discounted. Tacit experiential knowledge is irrelevant
in the face of the ‘evidence-based’ knowledge of the ‘what works’ agenda.
The type of work that gets rewarded in organizations is also a gendered
phenomenon (Fletcher, 1995). Within the new correctional service this means the
rational, enforceable, ‘scientific’ knowledge of ‘what works’. Man constructed as
a rational being, as opposed to the emotional woman, is an important feature of
this discourse. Yet ‘rationally orientated organizations are fundamentally contradictory’
(Meyerson and Martin, 1987: 321). Rationality is not based on an objective
standard developed by disinterested observers but is a technique of persuasion
founded on criteria designed to protect the interests of the powerful; rational
criteria are themselves fundamentally conflictual. The idea that we can find ‘what
works’ through evaluation, measure, standardization, punitiveness, enforcement,
managerialism and coercion systematically fails to see human beings as social
actors who can embrace, ignore, contradict, undermine, produce, create and
obstruct the role ascribed to them by legal discourse. The reliance upon an
‘evidence-base’ to produce knowledge is particularly suspect. Knowledge is
subjective, and the more the objectivity of ‘evidence’ is elevated the more subjective
it becomes. What is being evaluated, who undertakes it, who funds it, what
purpose it has, who defines the measures, whether findings will be published, and
what the evaluation’s impact will be, are all part of the vector of subjectivity in
which the knowledge and power of the ‘what works’ evidence base has been
produced.
The gendered aspects of the punishment debate can also be found within the
concepts of protection and correction. It is the hegemonic male who protects, and
ensures obedience. To instil a sense of obedience through correcting (often
through punishment) the wayward behaviour of others, he at the same time
protects (even whilst punishing). Public protection as such a key feature of the new
correctional discourse evokes the need for this hegemonic male.
The new language of corrections has been evolving, and in its evolution it has
become necessary for a correctional service to be created. The Intensive Control
and Change Programme; the Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme
and the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements have not had to wait for the
new Correctional Service – they have in fact defined, elided, brought into existence
the new organization.
The masculinization of the probation service has resulted in the mechanization
of practice, with little room for innovation, autonomy or creativity. Technocratic
assessment procedures and pre-set supervision programmes are the norm for a
standardized and homogenized approach.
This process of managerialism can also be found in many other public sector
bodies such as the health service and education. Service delivery organizations
are now receiving greater direction about practice than ever before. The probation
service is just one organization affected by central government’s directions to
modernize.
Technologies of the self or the internalized
panopticon?
In order to make sense of huge shifts in operations it is necessary for workers,
managers, and clients to affect change upon their own way of being. The struggle
between existing power/knowledge configurations is conducted by finding new
ways to fashion an ethical way of being (Starkey and Hatchuel, 2002). The
changes the probation service has gone through will be reflected in changes in,
or by, individuals working for, and managed by, the probation service. In ‘The
History of Sexuality’ Foucault describes the exercise of power, authority and liberty
in the context of moral codes and techniques of the self (McDonald, 2004). These
techniques may explain the apparent willingness of individuals to subject themselves
to systems of power even if this appears to go against their own best interests.
If we wish to analyse power within the concrete and historical framework of
its operation, Foucault concluded that:
We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and
code . . . it is a question of forming a different grid of historical decipherment by
starting from a different theory of power. (Foucault, 1998 [1978]: 90)
Technologies of the self are the specific practices by which subjects constitute themselves
within and through systems of power, and which often seem to be either
‘natural’ or imposed from above. They can be considered the continuously
evolving mechanics of our very ‘self’ dictating what we think, say and do, based
on our daily experiences. For example, in order to ‘get on’ in the probation service
there came a time when the language one adopted had to fit the prevailing
dominant discourse of enforcement, discipline, corrections and offender management.
So, the concept of ‘espousing’ the principles of the ‘appropriate’ knowledge
base became part of the technology of the self. Resistance is of course possible –
and one of the attractions of Foucault’s work on the technologies of the self is to
argue that individuals do have power – they must however, recognize and wield
it. Starkey and Hatchuel (2002) believe that this shift in Foucault’s work – from
surveillance and discipline to freedom and agency raises the ‘tantalizing prospect’
that we are freer than we feel. In developing a technology of the self, people may
take pleasure in their work, believing that this is what defines them as who they
are. Furthermore, disciplinary structures that make clear what is required, set down
targets to be met and the process by which these should be measured, may be
experienced as preferable to autonomy which may be experienced as alienating,
unclear and ill-defined.
Alternatively, technologies of the self may involve the ‘self’ being lost within
organizations as power operates to both constitute and constrain the subject
through ‘the internalized panopticon’ (Harding, N., 2003) and where ‘as individuals
we are incarcerated within an organizational world’ (Burrell, 1998: 25).
Obedience becomes central to the analysis of the production of power in organizations
and most importantly within the context of the demise of the probation
service and the rise of a correctional service. The struggle with existing power/
knowledge configurations is in finding new ways to create an ethical way of being.
To be an ethical being in the National Offender Management Service will require
new ways of perceiving the role, its purpose and the best ways these can be
achieved; just as when the change from the probation service to the National
Probation Service required a similar shift in perception. How probation workers
create their ‘selves’ in the process of change would be an interesting area for
future analysis.
Ensuring compliance and enforcing obedience is the job of the new correctional
agency and simultaneously a feature of its own creation, a feature of the
cooption and annihilation process the probation service has gone through. The
new punishment ethic based upon the ‘what works’ knowledge base has required
new ways of working through ongoing evaluations, setting of targets and
measures, demanding cost efficiency and increasing managerialism. This has
meant that probation staff have to be seen to be exercising control on offenders
under the guise of public protection. And, an inevitable corollary of demanding
compliance in others has been the process of checking that obedience has been
the outcome (Jackson and Carter, 1998). Technologies of the self may be an
attractive, ‘tantalizing’ prospect. They allow individuals to transform themselves
into the person with knowledge, in control, satisfied, even happy with their lot. The
contemporary probation officer can look at the offender and site the ‘causes’ of
their offending within the individual; weak at problem solving, poor at decision
making, with weak personal control and poor social skills. However it may also
be manufactured through intricate controlling mechanisms that ultimately produce
norms, constitute interest and shape behaviour (Gordon, 2002). In such a process
it is not only probation staff, but also offenders, who create a technology of the
self.

Conclusion

The creative flexibility that had been the cornerstone of the probation services
(Rumgay and Cowan, 1998) has given way to a standardized and homogenized
approach to punishment. Removal from social work training in 1995 was to be a
small but important death knell in the traditional operations of the probation
service as provider of services and support. The social work principles of acceptance,
individuality, non-judgement, controlled emotional involvement, self determination
and confidentiality (DuBois and Miley, 1996) were no longer required
as the new punishment ethic – with no shame in punishment and enforcement,
coercion and control could flourish.
The knowledge base on working with offenders and reducing crime has shifted
from the probation service to a new correctional service with a focus upon punishment,
control, coercion and enforcement: features that can be seen as fundamentally
masculine. This shift away from the traditional principles of the probation
service can be seen as the reification of masculinist work practices, approaches
and ethos. This analysis, which has adopted an adaptive approach to theory on
crime, gender, power and knowledge, supports the poststructuralist rejection of
the idea that there is one dominant system of knowledge in which ultimate truth
can be found. Knowledge changes over time and space but is always dependent
on power and domination (McDonald, 2004). Contemporary forms of power and
knowledge have created new forms of domination that have been played out in
the recent history of the probation service and the emergence of the National
Offender Management Service. Poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity,
discourse and power have provided a useful way for understanding this experience
and relating it to social power. Moreover, the importance of discourse and
language in landscaping the penal terrain cannot be underestimated. Indeed, the
requirements for obedience and compliance through the operations of enforcing
increasingly severe community sanctions, may have led to the rise in the prison
population as punitiveness and punishment became normalized across all
criminal justice agencies.4
Although Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self have been criticized for
failing to recognize the ubiquitous nature of power or adequately explaining how
individuals can resist the mechanisms of control (Gordon, 2002), his analysis does
expose that what we accept as truth and evidence are in reality themes that have
built up at a certain historical moment and that, if we choose to, ‘this so-called
evidence can be criticized and destroyed’ (cited in McKinlay and Starkey, 1998).


Notes
1 59 per cent of ex-prisoners will be reconvicted within two years and the police
detection rate for all recorded crimes is 24 per cent (Home Office, 2003b;
Simmons and Dodd, 2003). The two-year reconviction rate for all offenders
commencing community penalties in 1999 was 56 per cent (Home Office, 2003b).
2 Police Bail Campaign: to increase the use of bail rather than using custodial
remand; Narey Measures: to speed up progress through the criminal justice
system; Narey’s indictable only measures: to speed up progress for indictable only
offences as well.
3 Nine times compared to three times in the prison service chapter.
4 In the last two years the prison population has increased by nearly 10 per cent
(Hollis and Cross, 2003).


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