Modern Wisdom - #211 - Chris Daw QC - Why We Should Close All Prisons & Legalise Drugs

Episode Date: August 17, 2020

Chris Daw is a Queens Council Barrister and an author. Does the current UK justice system work? Is it rehabilitating offenders? Does it even deter them? Why are drug laws not working and why is the recidivism rate so high? Chris has some radical propositions for a system he says is totally broken. Sponsor: Check out everything I use from The Protein Works at https://www.theproteinworks.com/modernwisdom/ (35% off everything with the code MODERN35) Extra Stuff: Buy Justice On Trial - https://amzn.to/33HpwCN Follow Chris on Twitter - https://twitter.com/crimlawuk  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, howdy friends, welcome back. My guest today is Chris Dorke UC and we're talking about the UK justice system, particularly just how broken it is as far as Chris is concerned. He thinks it's totally fucked. The things that we need to close all prisons that children can never be criminals, that we need to legalize drugs and that no one is either good nor evil. Now, I know that that sounds like the dreamy journal writing of a teenager that's just discovered Karl Marx, but Chris is a Queen's council barrister. So he knows his law. You could put it that way. He's

worth his soul and is highly regarded. The BBC use him as a commentator on lots and lots of law issues going on in the UK. It's a compelling argument. I provide the counter narrative today and he's got an answer for pretty much everything that I could throw at him. So I'll be very interested to hear what your thoughts are on this. Immediately the sort of visceral responses, fear of the other, criminals need to be locked up, don't we need to punish them blah blah blah. But if the goal is to have a society in which crime is minimized and well-being is maximized, I think it's pretty

difficult to make an argument against what Chris is saying here. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful, Chris Thor. What's QC stand for? So QC sounds for Queen's Council, so one of her Majesty's Council, which is a special kind of barrister, lawyer, and we're appointed to kind of basically be the elite of the elite when it comes to being a lawyer, basically, and even I say so myself, which I do. Are you the SAS of the... We are. They bring us in when it gets messy. You're the wet work black squad sent in under the cover of darkness. You've got it. We're the Navy SEALs. You've got to go messy. You have the wet work black squad sent in under the cover of darkness. You've got it. We're the Navy SEALs.

You've got to go underwater. You've got to get through mud. Yeah, it's basically anyone who's in the proper, proper shit. We're the ones who are supposed to take them out. The deepest kind of a smelliest kind. I love it. I absolutely love it. Okay.

So, just this is on trial today. I want you to give the opening speech. Approach the microphone, please, Christor QC and give us the opening speech. Why is justice on trial? Well, I'm putting justice on trial because I've spent 26 years as a criminal lawyer. And in all of that time, I think most of what I've done has been a complete waste of time, a waste of my life because the criminal justice system, that's the police, the prosecution, of people, locking people up in prison, chasing after people because they take drugs, all it does is make society worse. A lot of people up, they just go back in again, they can hit more crime when they come out and then it costs us a load of money when they're in there, 50,000 a year to keep someone in prison.

We're locking up young kids and some kids as young as 10 are going into the criminal courts, which is completely insane. And of course, we continue to prosecute people for drug crime when, as I say in my book, drugs have been taken for tens of millions of years by human beings. And no one's gonna, we're not gonna stop people. You can't change people's basic desire to get wasted. And that's gonna happen, it happens today,

it happened a thousand years ago, it happened 50,000 years ago. So as long as we keep trying to stop people doing things that like that, and they wanna do that, largely don't harm anyone else, we're gonna just keep on making the same old mistakes and we kill people with overdoses and gang wars and knife crime and stabbing and I'm just sick of it and the

time has come for someone in my position, you know, fairly kind of senior position in the profession to say, do you know what, why are we doing it? What's the point? And that's what the book's all about, what's the point of it? And I don't think there is to most of it, I think we need to change it all, start again. What do we need to know before we can get into this? Is there some background that we have to kind of lay, get the lay of the land about why crime and punishment's even important? Well, it's in the book, interestingly, so you don't need to know anything before we read the book, because as you know, I go right the way back to 28 million years ago when cannabis evolved on

the plains of China China and people started using cannabis in funeral rituals so they could all get wasted to get over the grief of losing their loved ones. And I go into all of that, why we got here, what prisons were like going back 10,000 years ago, what they were like in the Victorian era, you know, when kids were hanged at the age of eight, you know, for stealing apples, you know. So, or it's all in the book, but most of all, I hope you agree. In the book, it's just some real life stories and sort. You know, there's some tragic ones about people who don't buy in tragic circumstances, you know, drug dealers get murdered, and for what? And the point, I just, the answer to your question

is, I don't think, I think anybody that is a human being, and as ever, either been the victim of crime, has no someone who is, or has maybe committed a crime, or takes drugs, or no someone who does, anyone who's interested in crime, justice, punishment, will be interested in what's in the book. My mum is a crown court usher. Okay. I know many, many of them. They're the most important people in the room. They're the ones that keep the wheels oiled, aren't they? Absolutely do. And you know what? I had what's called a pupil barricade.

So it's like a trainee that was training under me a few years ago. And he asked me, month or so after I started training him. He said, come on Chris, give me the pills and wisdom. What's the most important thing? I said, keep the usher happy. If you keep the usher happy, I'm hoping. The usher happy. I hope so, because I tell you what, if you keep the usher happy, and I always have done,

you treat them with respect. And what happens is when you need to get your case on, because you're desperate to go somewhere else, the usher's, I'll make sure we get your case on next. And I'll bet your mum's one of the nice ones, Chris. She is an absolute star, yeah, absolutely above and beyond the college. She's the wetwork black ops equivalent, I think, for the Usher's, they send her in hands. Yeah, when there's red wine everywhere from an exhibit or whatever the hell needs to be sorted out.

So, okay, let's go. Hey, Chris, on the red wine subject, right? So, here's a story for you talking about that and here, and it relates to ushers. Many years ago, when I was first starting out in this job, sorry, I don't know what I've done here, but then getting interrupted by calls when I've switched them off.

Anyway, so many years ago, I was out with a very rotund, kind of red face, kind of barrister of the old model. And he and Sissy, we went out and drug a load of red wine at lunchtime in the middle of a murder trial. And the judge was sent in the usher to find us in the pub. And he said, I'm not coming back to court today, I'll come back tomorrow. And the after that state the message back to the high court judge that this particular QC wasn't wasn't for doing the afternoon session. And so how did that go down? That sort of thing never happens in my case in print. How did that go down?

To be honest, it was 20 years ago, 20 years ago, you know, the QC can get away with stuff like that. I'm not going to try it now though. It wouldn't work now. Prison. Talk to me about prison. What do you know about prison? Prison. Well, I've traveled all over the world. I've been to probably hundreds of prisons. Certainly dozens and dozens of them in my career because I have to visit clients there.

But I also spent a lot of last year researching the book and I traveled to the deep south of America and Alabama and saw some of the sort of hellholes of prison there and I looked into the very different kinds of prisons that they have in places like Norway and they're more sort of progressive kind of Scandinavian countries. And my kind of take on prisons, and as you know, there's a chapter in the book, and it's called, why we should close all the prisons. Because I think all of the prisons we have now in Britain are failing us because they are just universities of crime

that people go in, and I tell the story of a young man who went into prison, never taken a drug in his life, and he came out of heroin at it. And what are we doing when prison, you can get heroin in prison, get any drugs in prison, and they come out with no skills, they live in this alien environment behind these massive walls with barbed wire,

and you treat them like animals. We cage people in prisons as if they were wild animals and unsurprisingly when they come out, they behave in many cases like animals. And if you treat someone like an animal, they behave like one. If you call someone a criminal someone like an animal, they're a behavioral like one. If you call someone a criminal, and you constantly say that they're a bad person,

don't be surprised when they come out and do more bad things, because that's what happens when you treat people like that. So my kind of whole philosophy and that comes across in the book is knock them all down. All of these big Victorian prisons with the cell blocks and the heavy gates and the big, heavy cell doors and the bars the bars knock them down turn them into shopping centers or

apartments and start again and do something completely different because at the moment we just got a prison population that goes up and up we've got more and more people who are being locked up for longer and longer than ever before and yet we have got crime on the streets we've got murders we've got stabbing and we've got shootings the public don't feel safe so So if we carry on like this, we will end up like the Americans with 2.3 million plus people in prison in the States and off the chart levels of violent and serious crime. And that's the problem with prison. It just doesn't work. It does the opposite of what we want it to do. We want to send people to prison.

So they come out and don't commit another crime. But what happens is they come out and they commit loads more crimes. So why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? They're going to get quite good at tennis. Now, if you send someone to prison and they hang out with criminals all day and they learn about crime, they're going to come out and they're quite good at crime. But they're not going to be any use to anything else. I mean, your tennis guy isn't going to be any use at plumbing because all he's learned is tennis. And in prison, all they learn is crime. They don't learn anything else.

He's virtually no rehabilitation. Many of them have got serious mental health problems, serious psychiatric conditions or enormous emotional problems. One of the things that really absolutely drive me mad is the fact that the prisons consist of many, many people who were in the care system as kids. So your 15 times more likely to go to prison if you were in care as a child. Now what that means is that we're locking up people who have been in the care of the state for most of their childhood, and they are damn equal. And we need to care for them.

It's because you want to normalize them and make them feel part of society so they can live like the rest of us. But what we do is we send them instead of tennis camp, we send worse criminals than they were when they went in. If they're lucky, because many of them in there are self-harming, committed suicide, it's an absolutely animalistic and archaic institution, the way that we run our prisons in this country and they just got to be shut down. Because otherwise we're just going to keep, it's going to go up and up and we're going

to have more and more serious and violent crime. What's the purpose or what should be the purpose of prisons? Don't we need to be kept safe from all of the, all of the crimes, aren't there people dangerous people that need to be kept away from the general public? There are, and there's a very small number actually, because I mentioned in the book, that 69% of people in prison are in there for a nonviolent crime. They're in there for a drug offense or a fraud offense or some sort of theft offense. And only 31% are in there for a violent crime and many of them are fairly low level and trivial assaults. But when it comes to your right, there are psychotic, there are people who are seriously violent and dangerous and maybe they amount to 10 or

15% of the total prison population and yes we need to be kept safe from them. But 99.9% of them, even the most violent ones, even the murderers, will one day come out of prison. There's only about 60 in the entire 80-odd thousand in prison who will never be released. Almost every prisoner will one day be released. So you have to still think yourself, okay, you might have committed a murder. But why are we focusing on hammering you, punishing you, keeping you in terrible conditions in during your sentence? Why are we not focusing on the day you come out?

Because it's the day you come out that matters. The day you come out, it determines whether you're going to go and get a job, whether you're going to be able to keep and reconnect with your family, whether you're going to be able to pay rent or a mortgage and have somewhere to live. And at the moment, many people come out of prison with nothing, except the skills they've learned in crime camp while I've been in there. They're damaged individuals, they've got no connection with their family, they've got no job, nowhere to live. And if you do

that, people are going to just go straight back on the streets and they're going to go straight back to crime. So that's the reason we are making the problem of crime worse every day with every minute that anyone spends in our prisons. What about if you're a policy maker, I don't know who the job of this lies with, whether it's the Prime Minister or some government body or something, but what if you're that particular policy maker and you say, right, we're going to shut down all of the prisons and then someone gets out and they cause a riot, they go on a murdering spree or there's someone who kills someone.

That is the sort of press nightmare that is sufficient to probably stop this from happening, no? Well, that's what's happening now, time and again, people are coming out of prison and going on to commit violent crime Including murder within a short time of their release. So I talk in the book I tell the story of the tragic case of the two young people who were killed on London Bridge last year and Usman Khan who was their killer had been in prison for eight years

Eight full years 24 hours a day in a high security prison. And within a year, he went out and killed two young people, stabbed them to death on London Bridge. So that's what's happening now, Chris. At the moment, the system is that we chuck people back onto the streets, and they go out and commit terrible crimes. And my argument is, if we've done something different with him for those eight years, and it's a big opportunity, if you've got eight years with someone to work with them. I mean, if you've got eight years of tennis camp, just imagine how good your backhand would be, right? So, I mean, I'm making light of it, but the fact is that it's just common sense that if you spend eight years keeping someone in terrible conditions and they mix with other

terrorists and other criminals and you do nothing to try and change their thought processes or give them any other alternative a way to spend their life. Then they're going to come out and sadly in that case it was a terrible lesson. And the interesting thing about that case for me, and again I talk about this in the book, is that Jack Merritt, who was one of the two young men who were killed by Osman Khan, his father David, after Jack's death, he came out publicly and said, don't use my son's death as an excuse for longer prison sentences because my son didn't believe that long prison sentences don't work at work and I don't believe that they don't work. And when you have

the father of someone who's just been stabbed to death while long-term prisoner saying, that don't blame the shorter sentences, you need to start looking at doing something different. When a father in his grief is prepared to say that, then people need to start listening. Yeah, you're right. That's someone who's very much prepared to put their principles before their emotions, right? Well, I mean, well, and the evidence, because it's the evidence that matters to me. The evidence is that prison doesn't work. The evidence is that when you move to a system like the Habitat Norway, where you very rarely

use prison, but when you do, you make it as normal as possible people living normal housing units, they've got kitchens, they cook, it's not a great big kind of, you know, Shawshank redemption scenario, then in Norway, only 20% of prisons come out and reoffend, and they're the most violent ones because they don't send the others to prison in the first place. In our system, it is up to 75%. So the Norway system, where you treat people humanely and you normalize the conditions works, the American and to a large extent, the British model of kind of oppressive prison regimes with pywhals and fences and all the rest of it doesn't work. It makes crime worse and it makes people's

lives worse. So just use the evidence, use common sense apart from anything. I think upon reading the book, the thing that struck me was that I believe the public's idea of what the purpose of the current litigative makeup, the current sort of crime and punishment justice system in the UK is decoupled from what actually works to a degree where it's going to be very, very difficult to is some form of penance to be paid by someone they've done this thing, stolen, robbed, defrauded, hurt, assaulted, whatever it might be. Therefore, they should have some liberties taken away. They should be put into some form of discomfort, that this is some kind of recompense, right, for them to come back. And I think that there are some people out there who would want that even if it didn't result in less crime because of a sense of, at its truer sense, how they believe justice to be performed. Does that make sense?

It totally makes sense. And what you're describing in a nutshell is the Old Testament idea of an eye for an eye. And of course, if you take the eye of someone who's taking your eye, it doesn't actually bring your eye back. And actually you end up with someone who's lost their eye and is probably deeply resentful against the system and will go out and take someone else's.

But you're right, that that is fundamental to the approach to justice. I talk about in ancient times, you're going back to the Mayans and the Romans, the idea that you take a life or you impose serious harsh prison or harsh conditions or torture or something like that as a penalty for committing a crime, it goes back a long, long, long way, it goes thousands of thousands of years. But the example I give of why that doesn't matter and why we need to change our ways now is because back in those times,

people thought that slavery was okay. You know, it wasn't that long ago that there was slavery in the United States. And you know, the fact of matter is just because we've always done something, doesn't mean we have to always carry on doing it. Any more than we were carried on having slavery, why do we carry on having prisons that don't work and that are deeply inhumane and deeply destructive to the fabric of our society as

was slavery and as were many of the other things that we don't do anymore. So we've come a long way in some respects and we've changed certain things, but the reality is in Britain we still criminalize 10-year-old children. And when you just think about that for a second, it's absolutely catastrophic for the young people involved and for the society that we're sending them out into when we've done it. What's your alternative?

We're going to close the prison to what people are going to do. Well, my take on it is very straightforward, that you look to the examples of prison systems that do work. You use them as sparingly as possible. So for the 61 percent, sorry, the 69 percent of prisoners who are non-violent, I would send very, very few of them into a custodial environment or a prison environment at all, because most of them are capable of working and of contributing to society, paying taxes and looking after their kids. And the way in which you, if you have

to restrict their movement for a period of time, we have the technology to do that now. We have, you know, retina scans, we have voice recognition, we have fingerprints scans. You can imprison people in their own homes if you have to, and you can allow them the liberty to go out and work, as part of the day, and you can allow them to have restrictions, to go to one place, but not to others. There's all this technology is available, and it would cost a fraction of keeping someone

locked up in an actual prison, which as I say, is on average 50,000 pounds a year to keep someone in prison. For a fraction of that, you could have the technology to monitor them wherever they go, you know where they are, you know what they're doing, and you can allow them to normalize their lives again with a degree of control as much as necessary. The probation officer can check in via Zoom every day. What are you up to? What's happening?

But at the moment, they trudge along to the probation office once a month. There's no supervision and unsurprisingly, they're either back on drugs or they're back selling drugs or they're back committing crime, but use the technology instead of the walls. That's the point I'm making for the vast majority of non-violent and not inherently dangerous prisoners. And for the rest and the ones that have to be in prison because they represent a risk to the public, as they might commit a rape or a murder or a serious avial robbery, keep the prison conditions as normal as possible. Have them living, not in cells, in cell blocks with jangling keys and all the rest of it, have them living in normal residential blocks of accommodation, with kitchens to prepare their own food, with rooms, and you know, yes, you've got to secure the perimeter for the most dangerous people,

but you actually don't need a 40-foot high concrete or brick wall to secure a perimeter these days. Again, when you have all of the technology we have, you know, to thermal imaging and everything else, to make sure that people can't escape, all you need is a fairly unobtrusive fence of sufficient height to stop people getting out what you don't need. And therefore, people will move around relatively freely inside. Yet, only the absolute tiny number of immediately violent people who are likely to harm anyone

that comes in their sight will need to be secured in what might look like a cell. But you keep as normal as possible. And the reason for that is, going back to the point I made earlier on, if you treat people normally, they are much more likely to behave normally when they come out of their environment. So it's not something that you can do overnight. I'm not suggesting that you start next week with the bulldozer, knock every prisoner,

let everybody out. It would take, it would be a rolling program of replacing one group of prisons with another and replacing in policy terms instead of locking people up using all of the technology which is all available to keep them secure in their homes or in another environment might be a hostile it might be somewhere else depending on their circumstances but don't put them behind these monstrosities of concrete walls and great big brick walls where their soul and their spirit will be sacked and destroyed and they'll come out violent and angry because that's what happens now. Is making the consequences of committing a crime by prison now being at home with your family

potentially still being able to go to work with more liberty and access to fresh air and so on and so forth whenever you want. Does that not act as less of a deterrent? Is that not going to cause people to have less fear about committing crime in the first place? Well, the evidence all suggests that it doesn't because in every form of sentencing, the least punitive sentencing and the most normal, the lifestyle of the person who's been sentenced, the less likely they are to commit another crime. So the one form of punishment, the one form of sentence

that has the largest rate of recidivism or reoffending is prison. Everything else has a lower rate of recidivism. And it's not surprising, is it? Because as I say, if you are normalized and allowed to live in society with whatever restrictions are needed, you have continuity of your life. You can maintain very important things. You have continuity of your life.

You can maintain very important things. All of us take for granted, are you mentioning your mum being usher, all of us take for granted that we have the sort of family network to most of us do. Anyway, we have our parents, or we have our other half, or kids, or a wider network of family and friends.

People in prison have none of that. Most of that disappears, well, particularly when people are serving very long sentences. So the point about keeping people in the community is those are the things that keep most of us grounded and most of us on the, you know, even if we have tough times and we might be feeling getting angry about stuff, we've got people around us and we've got support mechanisms. And that's why keeping people out of prison unless it's absolutely essential, is so much more successful at keeping people in the long run from committing more crimes.

And it's an absolute cast iron statistical fact wherever you look in the world, that the worst outcomes are the most punitive prisons. They create the most recidivism, the most reoffending. So again, if people want to have an eye for an eye and the public do vote for it, you know, when a politician says, oh, we're going to increase sentences for criminals, the public clap and they vote for it. So obviously people make that choice with their eyes open, realising, as you've appointed you made earlier, Chris, well, maybe people won't care.

Maybe people won't care if we double the risk that someone can commit another murder, provided we punish them harshly. Well, if people are prepared to accept the risk that someone can commit another murder, provided we punish them harshly. Well, if people are prepared to accept the risk that their son or their daughter will be murdered because we are giving somebody a harsh sentence in prison, then people need to accept that, but that needs to be put on the table as part of the debate. And politicians need to acknowledge that the sentence is in there, and the long, long sentences for things like drug crime, they need to say, okay, we're going to do this because you want us to, not because it works. And then we'll see what the debate looks like when people are honest.

At the moment, there's no honesty. You hear the home secretary pretty pretty, you hear the prime minister before the election, get tough on criminals, crack down, make them, you know, quiver in their boots. Criminals don't quiver in their boots at the thought of being locked up in prison, because they don't think they're going to get caught. That's the most important part of criminal justice and deterrents. None of my clients, over 26 years, went out one day and thought, said, I'm going to get caught for this and I'm going to get 10 years, but I'm going to do it anyway. They don't think they're going to get caught. That's why prison isn't a deterrent. That's why it isn't a deterrent in

America where you can get life without parole for selling an ounce of weed in some states. You know, people don't get up in the morning and think, I know you can get life without parole for selling an ounce of weed in some states. You know, people don't go up in the morning and think, oh no, I could get life without parole for this. I'm going to go and sell the weed anyway. They say, I'm going to go away with it. And most of the time they do. And that's why deterrence in prison doesn't work because people don't think about getting caught.

What you need to look at is why are people out there doing these things in the first place? And they're out there in most cases because they have broken lives and broken lives based on a broken childhood. And that's why I'm so keen on reforming the way we deal with children in particular when they get caught up in the criminal system. Let's talk about why children never criminals. Because I, one of the things that I just don't understand is the mentality that says, that you have to be 18 to be wise enough and mature enough to vote. You have to be 18 to make a choice to drink alcohol or to smoke cigarettes.

And there are all sorts of other age restrictions, you know, for different activities. You have to be 21, a thing to drive a lorry, for example. But somehow or other, at the age of 10, you know, just think about 10-year-old child. I mean, I know if you know, if you have kids in your family, I mean, I've got four kids, including an 11-year-old and an 9-year-old, actually. And the idea that either of them would have the kind of maturity to understand what crime, if yes, they know right from wrong on a basic simple level. But the idea that you treat them the same having the same understanding of crime as an 18 year old or 70 year old, it's just ridiculous. It's just absolutely, and I explain the book

how there are countries, and even Saudi Arabia has an older age of criminal responsibility than us. They're hardly a beacon of civilization when it comes to criminal justice. But Luxembourg is the beacon for me because in Luxembourg, what I advocated in the book is the law. In other words, you can't be convicted of any crime unless you are 18 or over. It's the same age to vote, and it's the same age that you're capable of deemed capable of committing a crime. And in their system, if a child commits what would be a crime for

an adult, they don't call him a criminal, they don't call him a prisoner, they just call him a child. And they say, okay, a 10-year-old or 11-year-old or even a 50-year-old has done a bad thing, what they do is they work with them in an educational environment. They don't put them in a prison environment. And our young offenders institutions are prisons in all but name, and they are hellholes for those young people inside them. Who are called young offenders? They're labeled young offenders. At the point I was making, you label someone with something, they will be that thing.

They will act to that description and that label. And young offenders become adult criminals and often they go in and out and in revolving door for 20 or 30 years and they cost us millions, both in terms of door for 20 or 30 years and they cost us millions both in terms of the cost of locking them up and the crimes they commit and we just keep on doing it. So if you divert children from 10, 11, 12 years old when most of the sort of the more hard core kind of element that end up in prison start their life of crime or their life of involvement with the police, if you divert them at 10,11-12 away from the criminal justice system and into the education system and the welfare system, then you have a chance of saving them from that revolving door for the rest of their life. And saving the rest

of us, a load of money and a load of grief. Does that mean no such thing as a criminal record for people under the age of 18? Absolutely not. There should not be a criminal record for someone under the age of 18. And again, it goes back to the same point we were discussing earlier about. Yes, there's a hard core of people in our society who are inherently dangerous. They might assault people, rape people or hurt people in one way or another. Amongst children, that group is tiny. A tiny number of 10, 11, 12-year-olds are already so dangerous that they have to be physically secured from others.

It's a tiny, tiny number. But even those, they're not going to spend their life locked away, so you still have to be humanely working on what it is that is going to make them change the way they're living their lives. And as I said, many of them that get caught up in the system, probably, you know, the majority, in fact, in the early part of the criminal justice, the youth justice system, many of them are just a product of a horrific childhood

and an experience of being in the care system. And we're responsible for that, Chris. You, me, the rest of us, the adults that vote for the way in which society organizes itself and decides what the care system is and what it looks like. the rest of us, the adults that vote for the way in which society organizes itself and decides what the care system is and what it looks like and decide how much money to spend on it and decide how much we care about it, we're responsible for those kids and we need to take responsibility not just throw them in youth prisons and then in adult prisons

in later life. Got you. What about drugs? Why are you proposing that we legalize drugs? All drugs? Every drug should they be available on a street corner? No, not on the street corner, but yes, to all drugs. So my model for the licensing and regulation of drugs, I don't use the word legalization because what you don't do is allow drug dealers to just sell drugs freely because that's one of the worst elements of the drug market we have now is that the market is in the hands of violent criminals and I've represented many of them.

And they care about only one thing and that is profit and getting as many people as possible to take drugs. So you take the market away from them and you have license regulated supply networks which are highly regulated by the state just as pubs are. If you're a serious criminal, you can't get a license to run a pub. You can't get a license to sell alcohol. Alcohol is a highly regulated product. You have to have warning labels, you have to have a percentage of alcohol on the label. People have to know exactly what they're getting when they buy alcohol, and my model for regulation is exactly the same as alcohol.

So you have age restrictions on certain products, which might be different for different products, but at the end of the day, the idea is, and I tell the story, that probably the most tragic section of the whole book is the story of Martha Fernbach, who was a young girl, a 15, who went out one Saturday, and with her friends, who were all sort of teenagers around the same age, they decided to take some MDMA, some ecstasy and effect, some MDMA powder. And they'd done it a couple of times before and it was okay. But on this occasion, Martha ended up with a bag of MDMA powder that was 91% pure. And she took enough, she had an idea what she was taking because there's no label on it,

she took enough to kill a horse, and she died within a couple of hours of taking or a couple of days I should say of taking the MDMA powder. And the interesting thing about that, I mean, it's a horrific thought that a 15-year-old has got this see-through packet. You know, if she asks someone to go to the oscillisers for her to buy a bottle of wine or whatever she might want in terms of alcohol. If she might get very drunk but she knows what she was doing, she'd know what was going into her body and she might make bad choices like many of us did as teenagers. But when it comes to drugs, you just get a

see-through packet from a dealer in a back alley and you don't know whether it's 91% or 1% or 0%. And it's the equivalent of sending a child into a pub and saying drink this drink and we're not telling you what's in it and it might kill you but we don't know until you drunk it and that's the way that we're allowing drugs to enter into people's bodies in our society and and that is all based on an absolutely ridiculous belief that we can stop people taking drugs by making it a crime. People have been taking drugs as I say in the book, for hundreds of millions of years,

it's the beginning of evolution of the modern human. There is evidence of people taking psychotropic, psychoactive plants, people have been taking drugs of one kind or another for the entire history of human evolution. So the whole idea that you're gonna stop people doing something so fundamental as taking drugs is ridiculous. And if you can't stop people doing something so fundamental as taking drugs is ridiculous.

And if you can't stop people doing it, you need to make it as safe as possible. And you need to also not only make it safe for the users who are overdosed in massive numbers because of the very features I've just pointed out. But you also need to wipe out the crimes that these people commit. Because to keep up a habit of street drugs, of heroin or crack, or even a heavy cocaine habit, it costs hundreds of pounds a day. And the only way that drug users can get hold of hundreds of pounds a day is to commit crime or to sell themselves on the street. And many, sadly, many drug

users are in the sex industry, often in a very, very poor state of mental and physical health and selling themselves to strangers, just to fund a habit where they should be getting those drugs in a much more humane license system. And I saw it in action in Switzerland, as you know from the book, you know, I saw the heroin-assisted treatment program where, you know, they treat heroin users as if they have a medical condition that needs to be helped. They don't treat them as criminals that need to be kind of marginalized from society and locked up. And one of the wonderful things, Chris,

and I'm sorry to go on about this, because it's one of my major passions, but one of the things that the head of that heroin assisted treatment program told me was that the users of that service, mostly long-term chronic heroin addicts, they already think that they're shit when they go in there, they don't need the police or the courts

or someone else telling them they're shit, they feel like shit already. And that's one of when they go in there, they don't need the police or the courts or someone else telling them that shit, they feel like shit already. And that's one of the many reasons why sadly they've become addicted to heroin. It's only when you show your compassion and kindness and give them proper medical care and give them safe heroin, safe needles, you test them for HIV, you test them for hepatitis, you give them health care, that's when they start to feel less shit about themselves and that's when they start to take fewer drugs. And the success of that program in getting people off drugs by actually giving them heroin is quite unbelievable compared to any comparable criminal justice outcome, where the success

of getting people off drugs is negative. In fact, more people take drugs when they've gone through the system than before they went in. It's crazy. We're killing people. We're killing people in this country. It's so circular. The crime is needed to pay for the drugs which are overpriced because the dealers are, there's too much costing implications in terms of transportation and the ability to play the quality to be fucked around with which means. So I first heard about the Switzerland's heroin program from Johann Harry's

chasing the stream. Yeah, I did a call with him recently, a non-line event with him. He's a great guy. Yes, yeah, past modern wisdom guests and a wonderful, wonderful fellow. I imagine that you two had a really good conversation. We did, yeah, we did.

It was, I mean, anybody that he's prepared to speak truth to power as he has done over every seven years is someone that needs to be listened to. No, absolutely. He's a real sort of voice for it. So again, with this, there's just each of the chapters, closing prisons, children being criminals, legalizing drugs, good and evil,

internet of crime, like all of the stuff in your book is increasingly difficult red pill to swallow about what the common hell narrative, perhaps either by press or by our own perhaps either by press or by our own perception, our own uninformed perception of what is effective policymaking and what is effective justice. Those two things continue to just be further and further apart. Had it not have been for me reading, chasing the screen by Johan. I would have looked at why should we legalize drugs as a fundamental title. But having read that, and then I'm like increasingly more and more and more people that I respect and who have done the work and have the stats to back you up,

agree with you. Yeah, and we're actually trying it a little bit. Well, I think we're dipping our toe in the water. I say we, but the Scottish are dipping their toe in the water with a heroin assisted treatment program on a small scale. But the truth of it is that I would love the home secretary or the prime minister to go and visit that clinic and that I went to in Geneva.

And indeed, some of the other facilities that I visited in Switzerland, like the consumption rooms, where people can take their own drugs, which is not ideal for my point of view, but at least they can take their drugs in high-dunic conditions, they get given clean needles, they get given the opportunity to wash, to access healthcare. I prefer that they were all in a treatment program, but at least they are kept safe and much safer than they would be in Britain. But I would love our politicians to go and

visit some of those programs instead of just standing on their soapbox saying drugs are terrible, drug crimes are terrible, and we need to just crack down on it all the time. Because every time you crack down we've had all these raids recently. Even during lockdown, drug crimes going up and up because drug dealers are relentless. They're never going to stop because there's so much money in it. They are very ingenious. And I've had drug trafficking clients who are major dealers, you know, who are bringing in tons of weed a month or tens of millions of cocaine a month into the country. And they are some of the most bright, sophisticated, and business-minded people I've ever met. Because it is a business. And as you say, it's a logistics business.

It's about how do you get hobbies in Afghanistan turned into heroin and then transported in packets or in vehicles or by any other means. How do you get that to someone's vein in London or Manchester or Carlisle? And every time you move it from A to B, there's a layer of profit. And there's someone who has to be bribed and this.

You can produce pharmaceutical heroin for almost nothing. It's a very cheap product to produce and that's why people say, oh, but you're giving them thousands of pounds worth of heroin a week for free. You're not. You're giving them, you know, maybe less than a hundred pounds a week because it doesn't cost that much to produce most drugs. What costs money is to illegally transport them from where they originate to someone who wants to use it in a Western society.

That's why you go into the markets in Pakistan or Afghanistan, you can buy a kilo of heroin for about a thousand dollars. By the time that reaches the streets are Britain, it's a hundred thousand. And that's why it's so much. That's why pure kilo of heroin goes up from a thousand dollars to a hundred thousand by the time it's been transported and cut onto the streets. So the government could license heroin production as they have done of course and heroin is produced for pharmaceutical reasons and they could produce it for next to nothing. And we would cut out all of that criminal profit and we would get rid of those criminals once and for all. You would do it. You're going to have off licenses on the sort of treatment facilities like pharmacies where people can get MDMA. I think that it would make sense to have the

premises initially operated directly by the state and there are different types of premises. So rather than private business making a profit from it. I think because the government has to be able to supply, sorry, government has to be able to supply, control the price. Because if the government can't control the price, then you may create the room for the criminals to remain in the market. So the government has to very precisely control the price. And of course, without the whole price is very, there's no restriction on pricing in alcohol, it can go up, it can go down. But I think you need to be very careful.

So, and you need different kinds of facilities. So with heroin, which is a drug almost entirely of addiction, it's not a drug that people take, most mostly on a night out or a weekend or a weekend club in whatever, with heroin you would have medical facilities to dispense heroin in the Swiss model. With other drugs, I don't call them recreational drugs because drugs are just drugs, and people use them for even so-called recreational drugs like XC cocaine and cannabis are often used by people

who have serious issues. They may have addictions, they may have other kind of psychiatric or emotional problems that cause them to try and mask pain, just as people do without a law. So, yes, and there are others, there are fairly, fair number of drug users who just use drugs for recreation. They go out the weekend and has a relatively little ill effect. They carry on with their life and their work. And I think those drugs that we might call recreational drugs, you would access them through a licensed dispensary. And initially I think it would have to be a

government-run one because I just don't like the idea of private business getting into the profit model for drugs. I don't think it works for drugs. And I'm not sure we would have a profit model alcohol industry if we'd started, you know, if we started again. But I would have licensed dispenser is. And you'd go in, you'd have to tick a couple of boxes, sign a couple of forms, and you make it relatively straightforward to get the drugs. But you would nevertheless, everybody that got drugs,

they would have access to, you know, help lines or even face-to-face counseling if they felt that they had a problem. And that, you don't get that from drug dealers. Drug dealers, they say, okay, we'll give you your drugs, tick this box. Here's a number in a card, if you think you've got a problem. Ring this number and we'll get you to see someone tomorrow who can give you some data.

They need to have a drug deal. Drug dealers really should try and improve their service if they can. You have to care. You know, Apple, Apple care. I'm going to, do you want the extended warranty on this, on this bag of MDMA? Yep. A lot of different ways that we could go about it. Apple care, I'm gonna, do you want the extended warranty on this on this bag of MDMA? Yeah. A lot of different ways that we could go about it. So here's, just as you're speaking and having really enjoyed the book, here's my suggestion

or here's my thoughts on what I think drives this point home and what I think is missing. And it's an emotive way to grab people's attention. And the reason I say that is I have a buddy, Alex O'Connor, who's a vegan philosopher. So he justifies veganism from an armchair philosophy perspective. And he has wholly convinced me of the moral position of veganism. And yet, I don't have as much of a visceral response as when I see chicks getting thrown into a grinder. Now, I don't disagree that you need the philosophical... Where do you go out, Chris, where you see chicks

getting thrown into a grinder? Where is this place? Very, you're socialite. Well, I'm from Newcastle, Chris, so you get some weird stuff up here, mate. You get some really bizarre stuff. Poppite in the whole thing, mate. It full works. Full, full works, yeah, exactly.

St. James's Park is a hell of a night out. And... I'll bring a bag of chicks and we'll get out next week. We'll throw some extra grain. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, so... Smokin' weed. I...

He's convinced me of the moral framework that underpins it. But it does not drive that point home. This is something, as much as I'm not a huge fan of his podcast, but it's something that I think Russell Brand has done fantastically with some of his stuff on TV is how he's repurposed sort of moved the window of how people view drug dealers. I think a lot of the general public, especially like the kind of classic British middle class, just see it as

people having a low-key party 24-7. They're heroin dealers, they're in a smoky, hazy room somewhere. It's like a real budget version of probably what damn Bill Zarian sees. The reality appears to be much, much more disgusting. Well, yeah, drug dealers are mostly the great majority of so-called drug dealers. They're actually just low-level users who are just selling on behalf of someone else or they're cutting their own drugs just to try and get enough for themselves. Many of them have got serious health problems. I tell this tragic story in the book of a guy who's a heroine user and he got caught up in low-level dealing

and he got beaten to death for allegedly stealing a caravan. Yeah, allegedly stealing a few hundred quid from his boss basically. He was also a low-level dealer himself and that's what happens in a criminal market. And so yes, I talked about what you might call this big time drug dealers who are, who represent like anything. You know, there's only one chief exec of, you know, Tesco's. Most people are shelf stackers and work on the tilts. And the drug market

is the same. There's only one guy who's really making it big. Everybody else, along the way, has a miserable life where they're much more like to die young, they're much more like to get serious health problems. So the whole industry is built on misery as it stands at the moment. Do we have a equivalent of RICO in the UK? Not so much. We don't specifically have legislation that targets gang activities as a whole, but we have plenty of laws that cover organized crime activity, but they're usually related to specific conduct, like supplying class A drugs or serious fraud or people trafficking. So we don't go down the American federal model of trying to criminalize

whole gangs just for being gangs. We focus on them committing specific crimes, but it amounts to much the same because most organized crime activity is around the drug market by volume, by the number of people involved and by the value of the transactions. So, and we spend a vast amount, we spend billions on criminalising the drugtay trade, on investigating and prosecuting drug dealers, and we spend a tiny fraction of that on health services for serious long-term drug users. And that's an absolute scandal, because if we did try to help users with real medical programs that have been proven all over the world to work, we'd have a not only – we

have a kinder society, but we'd have a much safer one, not just for them, but for all of us. And that's the real tragedy, that we're doing all of these things, we're criminalizing mostly fairly hopeless people for selling a few, you know, an ounce here or a few grams there,

and sometimes get a send in the way for five, six, seven years for selling, like I say, an ounce of Coke or something like that. Why? What's the point of that? What does that achieve? I'll tell you what it achieves. It takes one deal off the street, takes one ounce of Coke, or even if it's a hundred kilos. All that happens is if you get a drug drought because there's been loads of enforcement activity, the price goes up. So the profits go up. And you know, it's a blinding mind. Adam Smith turning over in his grave here yeah absolutely absolutely and we're we're we just don't get it and and and that's why lockdown drug primers up because there was a big Instructional yeah absolutely I'll tell you why and there was a big it there was a load of drug violence and gang violence going on during lockdown

And I know that from speaking to those who are kind of directly involved in policing those activities And the reason was because there was an interruption in the supply chain because it was very difficult to move anything during lockdown in the first weeks of lockdown. So what happens is that people are then selling stock or what little they can get through at much higher prices. And that means there's even more of a premium on territory. If you can sell your kilo for 300 grand on the street instead of 100, you need to make sure no one else is selling on your streets because you want the 300 grand. So that's why the stabbings and the murders carried on during lockdown. They carried on

because people could get even more profit than they could ever get before. And if that doesn't tell you that you're doing something wrong, that you're locking down the whole of society, but the drug market still operates. If that doesn't tell you that the war on drugs is always going to fail, then nothing will. It's a fuck it. It's a robust market. Grace, if we could, if we could, and since time began, if we could harness the innovative power and the logistical and operational talents. I've got a number of

different tasks that need doing inside of my company that would be fantastic for someone with the lateral thinking that is really common in the drug market apparently. What did you learn about the dark web and the internet of crime? You had a look at that. Yeah, I did. And it's fascinating topic. As you know, it may well lead into another book, I suspect. Because I was absolutely fascinated by it. I talked in the book in that particular, in the epilogue of the book about my involvement in one of the original internet-based, kind of internet-piracy cases many years ago, which looks very quaint compared to the dark web now. It's a cute cottage industry that.

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

I'm on the rabbit hole there. Down the rabbit hole. I took a left, I took a left turn at Google, so I bloody hell don't do that again. I know. I mean, you'd have to deliberately do it, you have to download the right software, you have to have the right browsers, everything else, and you wouldn't get there by accident. That's the whole point. It doesn't, it's not accessible via ordinary browsers or via ordinary internet connections. You have to do it via VPN, etc. Or you can't get there. But once you get there, all of this darkness is there. All of this unregulated criminal market, and you know, the fact that you can buy firearms where they promise they will send the components

They will break it down into how many pieces they'll send your firearm with bullets They'll break it down into 10 or 20 pieces and get it through customs without detection If you lose one of the pieces that'll send you a replacement and you then reassemble the firearm You get bullets included in the deal and Bob's your uncle You're on the street with it with an AK-47 within sort of 48 hours of place in your order and it's your uncle, you're on the street with an AK-47 within 48 hours of place in your order. And it's a scary, scary world. And it made me think that much of my 25 years plus in criminal law looks like, it doesn't look like it's the last quarter century.

It looks like it was a century ago. But when I started out, people still very regularly went out with shotguns and balaclavas and committed arm robbers. That hardly happens now because of DNA evidence and tracking of vehicles and AMPR, which is a number plate recognition systems. You know, it's very true. And of course, they have special dies on all the bank notes, so you can hardly ever get away with arm robbery. But on the internet, on the dark web, you can get away with almost anything. And it's really absolutely scary. But it's also fascinating. I found it fascinating,

because it was a world that I didn't really know, and it very rarely meets into the hands of the criminal courts, because people could operate from anywhere. While I was on there, my VPN was moving location, to avoid any form of detection. And one minute, it looked like I was in South Korea, then I was somewhere else, and you seemed possible to practice. Venezuela, you know, and, and, and, and, you know, there's gonna be a real challenge in our society.

So, so definitely looking ahead to a potentially another book, and I might book so many published a day, so maybe this is looking ahead too quickly, but, but I'm gonna go to Russia, and some of these other places where they have these sort of deep web, dark web rather, kind of hackers and so on, who are masterminding hundreds of millions and billions, in fact, of dollars a year in trade, in drugs and crime and people. There's lots of child prostitution, and it will be fascinating to see what's happening,

but also in the next book I may look at how law enforcement is responding to it and whether in fact, as I say in the book, it's a battle that can ever be won. Or if it's not fucking Kansas anymore, this is it. No, you're absolutely right. Absolutely not. And I think you're correct as well that, as with everything at the moment, if you look at the amount of wealth that someone like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates has been able to accrue leveraged by technology, it's orders of magnitude more. The next closest, like, what, or textile man, cotton manufacturer from like the 1800s or something,

like, you know, what, what are we comparing this to? Because the amount of leverage you can get on technology is so disproportionate. And then, if you roll that forward, it's not like criminals, as we've identified, they're fucking smart, like really, really scary, scary smart. And... Some of them, not all of them, Chris. I'm sure you've encountered your... The ones that don't get caught are the smartest.

And so they never come across my desk. They never come across my desk. But even the ones who do, you're absolutely right. I made the point. I mean, I had a drug dealing client. He was importing, I think, a couple of tons of weed a week. He was one of the largest sort of impulses of weed. And he did get himself caught.

And he only got caught, actually, because the police had put surveillance devices in his house. And we're recording all of his conversations, even in his house, house which is really quite unusual and was unusual then to get a warrant for a domestic sort of property like that. But I remember sitting down with him, I went to him in prison many, many times and eventually he, you know, we did a deal and he got a relatively light sentence, but I remember saying to him, you know, at the time, you know, you're such a clever guy, you've got, you're all over this, He knew every page of the evidence. He was incredibly articulate, fiercely intelligent, but he dropped out of school at 14 and ended up just going, going, sort of, kind of,

bombing around the committee and crime. And then just the only world he knew was crime. And so he applied that fierce intelligence and that, and he had enormous business sense. You know, that kind of, you know, how the best entrepreneurs can spot an opportunity and can motivate the truth. I can never stop. For it, isn't it? It's a brain that aligns with the operation. Yeah.

But he had no education and he had no formal education of any kind and he just decided to apply his mind to a business that was illegal and he made millions from it until he got caught. Unfortunately for him, because he was cannabis, rather than cocaine or heroin, he ended up doing, I think, about four years,

whereas if it had been cocaine or heroin, and this no doubt was part of his calculation, actually. But if it had been cocaine or heroin, he would have got 25 or 30 years for the same thing. So, you know, and even that was, he was taking the calculated risk, as to which drug to deal, you know, and even that was a, he was taking a calculated risk. Yeah. As to which drug to deal, you know. I think the dark web stuff, I went really, really far down the rabbit hole of the Russell

Bridge case. He was the guy behind the original Silk Road and I've done my fair bit of rabbit hole tumbling about that. So I would absolutely love to find out some more stuff if you go to Russia and find out some stuff from these deep web hackers, that's not. Please, become as well, Chris. Mate, I am in it.

If you want to road trip me out to Russia, I have no, there has never been a flight I haven't got on that someone suggested, haven't bottled a dare since 2001 2001 and I don't intend on doing it now, Chris, do you see? No. What's the most common criticisms about your proposals? Can you steal man the other side of this argument? Yeah, definitely. So the argument I get most is what about the victims?

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

And they don't go far enough for me because they still allow criminals to deal drugs. But they decriminalized users users and they made users part of the health care system. Drug use fell, crime fell, and health outcomes improved. So those arguments are made. And in Safari's children are concerned, I always get this. What about the Jamie Boulder case? They know right from wrong at that age and therefore they should be able to take the consequences.

So people have this kind of view and it's not an unusual one and I'm quite happy to accept Chris that I'm probably in a minority of about 30% of the population that's prepared to kind of listen to evidence and to think about these things without getting carried away with the gut and the emotion of just a question. Being just passionate about it's hard man, Like even me as someone I've never, the closest I've ever come to a court is when I've picked my mom up from work if a car's been in MOT. Like I don't have any of my family who've ever been in, you know, I am the absolute epitome avatar for that person, that middle class British person who hasn't got fucking clear what's

going on. And for me, I'm, as you're talking, and as I was reading the book, and these proposals come up, and everyone that's listening may have noticed this as well, I have to check my immediate visceral emotional reaction, because there is something that's been programmed into me to fear the other, right? It's quite tribal. Yeah. The way that I, oh no, keep them away. Don't want them on the street. Don't want them, don't want them out. Like who's them? Who am I talking about to myself when I say them on the street?

Do you mean those other humans born in the same country as you with the same rights as you that did a thing? Like is that genuinely the way? So, you know, all of this, the proposals that you're putting forward, I think upon reflection, like with real nuanced thought, they do make sense and land,

but there's a challenge, as we know, like look at Trump run 2016 on Build That Wall and Make America Great Again, the simple visceral response often is actually the one which is able to elicit the best output, the best outcome from the audience. Well, totally. So that's the point that I make is that I talk in the book about some appeal judges that I interviewed and criminal judges that I interviewed in Alabama. None of them would go on the record, which perhaps understandable, but they're all elected judges. So their judges, unlike ours, who are appointed,

their judges are elected directly by the public. And I sent to one of the course of appeal judges, you know, you've given people the death penalty. You've sent people of 18 years old for life without parole for a drug crime. You regularly sentence people to 100 years in prison for crimes that are not even violent crimes. There might be, you know, fraudulent or white color crimes. I said, you know, looking at your system, you have these millions of people, 2.3 million people in prison in the States.

And, you know, as you know from the book, I call it the city of incarceration, be the fifth largest city in America, if you put them all in one place. It's just a, just think about the numbers. They're actually minor. That's a traffic. But I said to this judge, I said, you know, so you're doing all of these things, but

your level of violence and murder in particular, it's the highest in the world, and your rate of imprisonment is the highest in the world. And he said to me, he told me, and he said, I know, I know, it's crackers. Or you need that word. He said, it's crazy, it's completely crazy. And I said, oh, but why do you do it then? I don't understand. You've got your, sitting on that bench. Yeah, how is it going?

You're the guy. And he said, two things. He said, the sentences are dictated by guidelines. And I'm not allowed to, to, to, to move from them. The guidelines are set by effectively, the legislators, the politicians are elected. And he said, secondly, if I came out on television and said, I'm in favour of legalising drugs, reducing the prison population and starting to have a much more benevolent youth justice system.

He said, I'll be out of office in five minutes. No one will vote for me. So his point was, it's all very well you're saying, and he's, he acknowledges that it's all wrong. But if he wants a job, he's got to carry on playing the same old tune. Just as I'm sure many southern politicians in the states after slavery was abolished you know they didn't want that they didn't like it and it was kicking the screen was fought by a civil war to get to get slavery abolished you know and that was only 50 years ago. We're going to have to have a civil war to get some justice reform.

You know, I wonder if we keep creeping towards American levels of imprisonment, and we are, we doubled our own prison population in a generation in Britain. If we keep creeping that way, I wonder whether the British people will actually then look at the increasing rates of murder on the streets because that's what will happen. And start to say, hold on a minute, it wasn't like this 20 years ago and they'd be right. We doubled our prison population but we've got doubled the number of murders because I'll guarantee that's what will happen. And just then maybe people will start to say to their politicians when it comes to an

election, what are you actually going to do about it that works? But we're sick of our kids being stabbed and shot. when it comes to an election, what are you actually going to do about it that works? But the whistler's not that bad. That's the same. It's the, that works. That is the important distinction to make because the natural uneducated, uninformed view is get tough around crime. Yeah. But what people mean is we want less crime.

Well, that's what people want. Yeah, that's what they mean. What they mean is we want to punish and harm criminals. We want to lock them up in the willous conditions, make it tough for them. That's what they want. So that's the presumption of that is that that is going to act as an effective deterrent so that there is less crime. However, as you've said, there are some people who want this retributive

approach to the way that justice is enacted, especially those who perhaps are the victims or the families of victims of crime. But from a society-wide perspective, you're right. It's what can we do that reduces overall crime, which in turn reduces overall suffering? Like what are the options? So I mean, where do we start then? Is it, this seems a little bit self-defeating in a way if the policymakers of the people who can begin this change rolling down the hill,

but by proposing these particular policies, they then get unelected by an uninformed public. Is it a bottom up public information campaign that's needed? Is it top down? I think it is. And I think I think it's a combination of the two. I mean, if we had an inspirational political leader, what do you mean? Chris, is the voice of a, is the voice of a generation? I'll start my sentence again. If we had an inspirational political leader who was prepared to get behind the idea of

serious criminal justice reform and was popular and populist in the way that for example Tony Blair was back in the 90s. And unfortunately he didn't do enough in my mind on this topic. But if we had an inspirational political leader to come from the left or the centre left and win a big majority in Parliament who was prepared to back this agenda, that's one way it can happen. So that's the top down model. But the bottom up model is how it happened in Switzerland. So in Switzerland, what happened was, why do they reform their approach to drugs? It was because there were heroin users dropping dead in the streets, shooting up in parks, assaulting people as they went about their daily business, and the people of Switzerland said, you've got to clean up our streets and make our streets safer. So they took the drugs away from the streets and they put them into

consumption rooms and treatment programs and they then saw the streets became safer for the public and when that happened people will prepare because in Switzerland they have amazing systems they have referendums for everything everything happens by referendum. So it's only when the Swiss people decided that their streets were too dangerous, that they've loaded literally by referendum to bring in heroin assisted treatment, to bring in the consumption rooms,

to stop criminalizing low-level drug dealers. And in the end, they gave drug users in Switzerland the same disability rights as any other disabled person. And they treat addiction to drugs or alcohol or gambling or anything else as a disability to be treated and to be given support from the state. And that was the bottom up. So it can happen either way, it can happen with an inspiration and they had inspirational Prime Minister, a president rather in Switzerland, who was prepared to back this agenda and she did get support in elections and she did get support in referendum. So it worked

in both directions in Switzerland. And I think that, for my part, to answer your question, I think it could happen either way. I would rather it happen because it would happen more quickly if we got an inspirational leader who would back rational reform, because then that person could introduce it and make it happen quickly. It takes much longer for a groundswell of public opinion to drive the political classes, and we're not seeing that I'm afraid at the moment. We're also not going to see for, there's no way that I can sit unless something catastrophic happens, there's nowhere I can see a left-gleening government getting in for at least a number.

Well, that because you're a young man, Chris, and you think that you think that where we are now is where we'll be forever. No, I mean, I'm talking at least the immediate future. We've got four years, and then you would have to have the biggest swing in history to reverse what just happened only six months ago. Well, you're forgetting the Corbin factor in that. I mean, you had a deeply unpopular with the majority of the electorate, very left-wing Labour leader, who was never going to win election if he stood 100 times.

We now have a younger, more palatable leader of the Labour Party, I say we, but in the country we have a younger, more palatable leader of the Labour Party, I say we, but in the country we have a younger, more palatable Labour leader, in fact one of my professional course, a QC and former head of the prosecution service in England. I'm not so sure how many people positively voted for Johnson, and of course there was also the Brexit factor in the last election, it was pre-COVID. I don't think you could read into the facts that Johnson won a majority in very particular circumstances against a very unpopular and very left-wing Labour leader, the fact that then extrapolate that through to the next election.

Okay. I think I ought to play for in the next. I mean, you know, my goal with regards to this conversation is just to get the reform on the right track. I, so I would love to hear anyone that's listening if you think that you have an alternative to what Chris is suggesting here. I'd love to hear it, but being honest, it seems like a statistically sound and sound and humanely comfortable and compassionate approach to moving forward. There's few arguments that I can come up with in my mind that aren't just those quite infantile, visceral like, but what about this? You know, it's just like a throwing around point. It doesn't, I don't have anything. So with that in mind, when you can't rebut an argument, that's usually that presumably is when you win a case. Yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, one of the most moving

conversations I've had in the last couple of years was with the family, so I made a documentary series for the BBC last year, which went out on BBC One. It's still on iPlayer, actually, if anyone wants to catch it. What's called crime? It was called crime, are we tough enough? And it's on BBC iPlayer. And it's five episodes, and we looked at different aspects of criminal justice policy, and we travel all over the country, I went into prisons and we interviewed prisoners and I interviewed the family of a young man

who had been stabbed to death outside of pub in his 20s, and his mother and father and his brother, we sat around their dining table with a picture of their son Michael who died in the background. And they were telling me that they want that, so the killer of their son had not long got out of prison for another assault, and he was released on license, and he'd been arrested a couple of other times, and wasn't recalled to prison,

and therefore was it liberty one evening to stab their son to death? And they were saying he should have been in prison for longer, should have got more prison time and then he wouldn't have killed our son. And it was a very difficult conversation, as you can imagine, Chris, because I come from it, as you know, from a very different perspective to that. But I said to them, can I just ask you to look at it in a slightly different way, which is that the killer of your son, who was caught in sentence to life in prison, by the way, but I said to them, the killer of your son had been in

half prison since he was about 15 and he was in his 20s by the time he committed the murder. And I said, is there an argument that you should look at it the other way round? And that is that whatever happened to have in prison didn't work and the prison system actually chucked him out onto the streets, a more violent person than when he went in. And to their credit, as I would see it, they did have, they were willing to reflect on that, even though they were massively still grieving. Their son had been dead for a couple of years, and they had a grandson, he had a young son himself, who's left fatherless by thisless by this murder. But they

were prepared to take a deep breath and say, we're listening to what you're saying. And if you can get people like, so Anne Marie Cobain, who's the mother of Martha Fernbach, the 15-year-old, the girl who died, she's a huge advocate for the legalisation and licensing of drugs, having lost her daughter to drugs that was supplied on the streets. And I think if you're going to get people to make the argument, you'll probably, and I hope I've used some of those voices in the book, but if you're going to get people to make the argument and you're going to get the public to listen, I think possibly you need to have voices from people like that, people who actually are the victims and and I talked about David Merritt Who Jack Merritt's father who's prepared to say not in my son's name don't have longer and longer sentences because it doesn't work I think and when you get victims families saying that then maybe the public will listen. I think you're right That's what I was getting out earlier on when I said that the emotive response to

animals pigs being gassed in chambers and that to me drives home the philosophical position that I understand and depends veganism the same as this. I need to, everybody needs to genuinely believe in the stats and in the justification for the policy that you're putting forward. That's not what is going to deliver the hammer blow. That's not the nail in the coffin. The nail in the coffin is the grieving mother that says, if X, then Y, because people remember that. And man, I, Chris, I think it's an oddly revolutionary book that I didn't think would have come out of someone who's job, I mean, is your job, are you putting yourself out of a job here?

Well, I'd like to. If you weren't needed anymore, is that the end goal? Is this just an early retirement plan? Well, I can tell you now, and people have said to me, you know, are you support criminals because they're your livelihood, et cetera? Well, actually, nothing would give me greater joy than to retire from being a criminal lawyer because there weren't enough people being put through the criminal justice system. And we had a much lower rate of crime and we had a much safer and happier and fairer and more humane society. I'm very lucky, of

course, because I have several other jobs, for example, writing books and presenting TV programs and various other things. So I'd have something else to go to, but I'm absolutely, you know, I would nothing would bring me greater happiness than to make myself redundant. What a way to finish. That's so good. Look Chris, just this on trials and awesome read, anyone that is thinking of getting it, it will be linked in the show notes below of course. Also you're pretty big on Twitter, you're putting out some really interesting stuff, what's your Twitter? It's at CRIMLOR UK and you're right, I get involved in quite a number of debates and different points but I also am using Twitter as a way to try

to make the arguments and to persistently bang the drum. And it does get a lot of, you know, we get a lot of people that can't, I mean many, many people as the nature of Twitter, you know, call me names and tell me everything I'm saying is insane. But there are plenty of people who are policymakers, MPs, who follow me on Twitter, who comment favorably on what I say on Twitter. So my sort of basic position is, use the voice that you've got. We should all be, you obviously have a platform. I've got slightly different platform in different ways. And you've got to use the voice to stand up for what you believe in, having you Chris, because otherwise, what's the point of having freedom of speech if you don't

use it? I couldn't agree, Mom, man. You want to do something, not be someone. If you become someone, it's only because you've done something. We will, I'll have linked you, fantastic Twitter, Justice on trial in the show notes below. I'll also try and find if I can get a shareable link to Crime Are We Tough Enough on BBC iPlayer if not just so. You can, you can get a link for that And you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel, which is Crystal QC.

And I put all sorts on there, including career support for people who want to be lawyers, particularly who come from backgrounds like mine, of comprehensive schools, and everything else, we need to get more people coming into the profession who have experienced every walk of life, and there's loads of guidance on the YouTube channel about that as well. I love it.

And then we can get the vlog of me and you heading into Russia to go and see the dark web hackers. I mean, and we drink a lot of vodka as well, I imagine. Whatever you say, man, whatever you say. Look Chris, thank you so much for your time, man. This has been fantastic. Everyone that is listening, let me know what you think. Are we going to be able to reverse the criminal justice system in the UK?

Is that have America got it as wrong as Chris says they do? Let me know, comments below or get at me, you know what, follow me at Chris Wellex, on all social media. But Chris, thanks for your time, man. You're welcome, thanks for the chat, really, good to hear. you