Charlotte's brother Alex is serving nineteen years. In a melee, he threw a phone and a punch. Not at the victim. Not as part of a plan. He was present, he was involved, and someone else — someone whose intentions he may or may not have known, whose actions he did not control — did something that the law decided he should have anticipated. Joint enterprise: the doctrine that presence, association, and a failure to dissociate yourself from what someone else is about to do is sufficient for a murder conviction. You do not have to pull the trigger. You do not have to know a trigger will be pulled. You have to have been there, and to have failed, in the judgment of a court, to have been sufficiently not there.
Charlotte became a solicitor because of it. The system that took her brother gave her a vocation — not because it inspired her, but because it demanded a response. That is one kind of thing a nineteen-year sentence does. It reaches forward into the lives of everyone connected to the person it takes, and reshapes them. The prison wall is not the boundary of the punishment.
It is worth asking what the nineteen years is for.
The Crown Prosecution Service will tell you it is for justice. The tabloids will tell you it is for the victims. The sentencing guidelines will tell you it is for deterrence, for public protection, for the coherent administration of the law. These are not lies exactly. But they are not the whole truth either.
There is a simpler answer, which neuroscience has been edging toward for some time. When we determine that someone is guilty, the prefrontal cortex is active — the rational, deliberative part of the brain, weighing evidence, applying rules. But when we decide how much they should suffer, something else lights up. The limbic system. The reward circuitry. The same neurological architecture that responds to food, to sex, to any other satisfaction. Robert Sapolsky, whose work on determinism has done more than almost anyone's to clarify what punishment actually is, puts it plainly: righteous punishment feels good. Not metaphorically. Neurologically. The dopamine is real.
We have built an entire legal and political infrastructure around scratching that itch. We have given it wigs and Latin and the weight of eight centuries of common law, and we have called it justice. But the circuit it satisfies is not the circuit of reason. It is the circuit of reward.
This matters because it means the system is not primarily designed to do what it claims to do. It is designed — not by intention but by the same evolutionary pressures that shaped everything else about us — to feel good to the people operating it. And feeling good is not the same as working.
Norway decided to ask a different question. Not: how much should they suffer? But: how do we ensure they don't come back?
The answers look different when the question changes. Norwegian prisons have individual rooms, not cells. Prisoners cook their own food, wear their own clothes, manage their own time within a structured community. Officers eat with the people they supervise. The explicit, statutory purpose of every sentence is that the person who leaves prison is more capable of living a productive life than the person who arrived. This is not sentimentality. It is policy, written into law, funded by the state, and measured against outcomes.
The outcomes are not difficult to summarise. Norway's reoffending rate is around twenty percent within two years of release. England and Wales reoffends at around forty percent within the same period. Norway imprisons roughly fifty-five people per hundred thousand of population. England and Wales imprisons around a hundred and forty. Norway spends more per prisoner and gets dramatically better results, because it has defined the result differently. It is not trying to make the punishment feel proportionate to the crime. It is trying to produce a person who does not commit another one.
Spain has gone further. Since the 1990s, it has run mixed-gender prisons — men and women sharing meals, vocational training, exercise, and group therapy, returning to separate sleeping quarters at night. There are currently twenty such cell blocks across the country, with over a thousand inmates participating. Voluntary. Low security. Individuals convicted of sexual violence are excluded. The explicit aim, in the words of the people running it, is to better prepare inmates for reintegration into a society that is not single-sex. It has been running for thirty years. It has not collapsed. It has expanded. Sexual offences have a reoffending rate in Spain of 5.3 percent.
The Norwegians have a phrase for the underlying principle: the import model. Rather than extracting people from normal life and placing them in a parallel punitive world, you import normal life into the prison. Spain has taken that principle and applied it to one of the most basic facts of normal life: that men and women exist in the same world. A fish is not improved by being removed from water. The surprise is not that people released from British prisons reoffend. The surprise is that anyone finds this surprising.
Gregg Caruso, whose quarantine model of criminal justice argues that containment is justified only as public protection rather than as moral satisfaction, puts it this way: the Norwegian principle of normality points toward greater integration — including mixed-gender institutions — where this is consistent with safety and rehabilitation. In places where prisons are violent and poorly resourced, the more pressing task may be to address those structural problems first. It is a point of some significance that this is exactly where Britain is.
One reason British prisons are where they are is that nobody is required to know anything in order to run one.
Norway requires its prison officers to hold a university degree. Spain requires the equivalent of A-levels and a rigorous competitive civil service examination. England and Wales requires no minimum educational qualification whatsoever to manage some of the most damaged and dangerous people in the country. The connection between undertrained officers and catastrophic reoffending rates is not coincidental. Norway's officers are trained as social workers as much as custodians. They eat with the people they supervise because that is part of the job they were educated to do. The goal — explicit, statutory, measured — is reintegration. When the person you are managing is a human being you are obliged to understand, the relationship is different from when they are a category you are obliged to contain.
The government is currently alarmed that a million young people are not in employment, education, or training. The Milburn review calls it a catastrophic systems failure. It is right about the failure. What it has not noticed is the solution sitting two inquiries away: fund young people who are currently doing nothing to train to degree level to work humanely in prisons. Address youth unemployment, improve outcomes for prisoners, reduce the long-term cost to the public purse. The prison system costs England and Wales around forty-seven thousand pounds per place per year. At forty percent reoffending, a substantial proportion of that is spent twice. The arithmetic of doing this differently is not difficult. We are choosing not to do it.
But there is a deeper problem with punishment than its inefficiency. Inefficiency is a technical objection. You can answer it by redesigning the system. The deeper problem is that the moral foundation on which punishment rests — the idea that people deserve to suffer for what they have chosen to do — may not survive contact with what we now know about how people come to do anything at all.
Robert Sapolsky's Determined, published in 2023, is the most thorough recent statement of a position that neuroscience has been approaching for decades: that there is no moment in the causal chain leading to any human action where something called free will intervenes. Every decision you make is the product of the brain state that preceded it, which was the product of your hormones, your childhood, your culture, your genes, your grandmother's diet, the thing that happened to you at seven that you don't remember clearly but that shaped the architecture of your stress response for the rest of your life. You did not choose your nature. You did not choose your nurture. You did not choose the interaction between them. The self that makes decisions is itself the product of forces it did not choose.
This does not mean that dangerous people should not be contained. It means that containing them is a practical necessity, not a moral satisfaction — and that a practical necessity generates a practical obligation. If we take nineteen years from a person for a condition they did not choose, in a body shaped by forces they did not control, we owe them something for the taking. The language of desert — he deserves it, they had it coming — is preferred precisely because it erases that debt. If they deserve it, we owe them nothing. If they were shaped by forces beyond their control, we owe them everything we can provide to make them whole.
I am not outside prison because I am a good fellow. I am outside prison because my nature and my nurture were different. That is the only honest place from which to think about any of this.
I should say that I am angry.
I am angry because a young man has been hurt — not by what he did, but by what was done to him in response to it. I am angry because the system that hurt him was paid for by my taxes and yours. We are not observers of this. We are funders of it. Every year, the cost of a single prison place in England and Wales is somewhere in the region of forty-seven thousand pounds. Alex has been inside for years. The arithmetic is not complicated. We are spending a very large sum of public money to keep a young man in a cell for throwing a phone and a punch in a melee, because someone else, whose intentions he may not have known, did something worse.
I do not know what justice looks like in a case like this. I am not sure anyone does. But I am fairly certain it does not look like this.
Ian Huntley is one of the most hated men in Britain. In 2002 he murdered two ten-year-old girls in Soham. There is no version of this in which what he did was anything other than monstrous.
In February 2026, he was beaten with a metal bar at HMP Frankland in Durham. He died nine days later. A man has been charged with his murder. The reporting was not uniformly horrified. In some quarters it was something closer to satisfied. He had it coming. The system had, for once, delivered something approximating what he deserved.
But this is precisely where the argument has to hold, or it holds nowhere. Either prisons are safe places or they are not. You cannot build a humane system with an exception carved out for the people you hate most. The exception is not a concession to realism. It is where the inhumanity lives — and once it is permitted there, it does not stay there. A prison culture that tolerates the murder of Ian Huntley tolerates murder. The name of the person being killed does not change what the culture is.
Sapolsky's determinism does not ask us to forgive Ian Huntley, or to feel warmly toward him, or to forget what he did to Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. It asks us to notice that the man who swung the metal bar, and the journalist who reported the death with quiet satisfaction, and the reader who felt that satisfaction, are all operating from the same neurological reward system. The limbic system does not distinguish between deserving and undeserving targets. It registers the suffering of an enemy and calls it justice.
A man was killed in a British prison in 2026. We built the prison. We paid for it. We are responsible for what happens inside it. If we cannot extend the protection of a safe prison to Ian Huntley, we have not built a safe prison. We have built a slightly more comfortable version of revenge.
This essay began with Alex. It ends there too.
He is serving nineteen years. He threw a phone and a punch in a melee, not at the victim, and the doctrine of joint enterprise did the rest. The cost of his imprisonment, at current rates, runs to tens of thousands of pounds a year. The cost to his family is not measurable. Charlotte became a solicitor because of it — not inspired by the system, but galvanised against it. That is what nineteen years produces, beyond the wall.
I started thinking about this because of a legal opinion about where trans prisoners should be housed. I am disagreeable enough to have followed the argument to where it led, which is here: that the question of who shares a prison wing with whom is the wrong question. The right question is whether the prison is a safe place. For the woman who fears the man in the next cell. For the man who fears the woman in the next cell. For the person whose identity fits neither category comfortably. For Ian Huntley, beaten to death with a metal bar in HMP Frankland in February 2026, whose killers — the one who swung the bar and the culture that looked the other way — were operating on the same reward circuitry as every other system of punishment this essay has described.
Make it safe. That is the obligation. Not: arrange the categories more carefully. Not: find a legal framework that protects us from the harder question. Make it safe — for everyone inside it, without exception, because the exception is where the inhumanity lives.
Alex did not choose his nature. He did not choose his nurture. He did not choose the melee, or what happened in it, or the doctrine that made him responsible for what someone else did. I did not choose mine. The difference between us is circumstantial. He is inside. I am out here, spending his money on his imprisonment, and angry about it.
In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that the law on joint enterprise had been wrong for thirty years. The case was R v Jogee. The error, the Court said, was in the mental element: defendants had been convicted on the basis that they foresaw a co-defendant might commit an offence. The correct test was intention — a substantially higher bar. Thirty years of convictions rested on a legal mistake.
The Court of Appeal then set the threshold for appeal. To overturn a conviction on the basis of Jogee, a defendant must show not merely that they might not have been convicted under the correct direction, but that they would not have been. The difference between might and would is small in grammar and vast in practice. The standard refers back to the original trial. The original trial applied the wrong law. The circle closes.
Innocent until proven guilty is the foundation of English law. The prosecution must prove guilt; the defendant need not prove innocence. Joint enterprise quietly reversed this. Once you were present, once you were associated, the jury was invited to infer what you knew and what you foresaw. No one can read another person's mind. The prosecution certainly couldn't read Alex's. But the standard required the jury to try — and the Court of Appeal now requires Alex to prove what they would have concluded if they'd been asked a different question. Speculation about speculation, and Alex bears the cost of both.
The organisation JENGbA — Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association — has been fighting these cases since 2010. They are still fighting them.
Alex is still inside. Charlotte is still fighting. Every taxpayer in the country is still paying for his imprisonment. And whatever Alex might have contributed — to his family, his community, the economy — remains uncontributed. The system that put him there cannot read minds. It just prefers not to admit it.
David Partridge, Bridport. mail@stpd.net · stpd.net
This site is updated when something stupid needs saying. Started February 2026. For what might actually work, see snsbl.org