Beverly Allitt

OK I rant about this on every thread about long sentences but I will again. While life tariffs, just like life sentences, have no possibility of rehabilitation or reform. Which is anathema to the justice system. So we shouldn't have them unless we want the justice system to be about revenge, rather than rehabilitation, prevention and safety. I'd rather it was about the latter.

Long sentence don't reduce offending and make juries (very slightly) less likely to find someone guilty. They remove the possibly of rehabilitation therefore making violence inside MUCH more likely. Why bother not stabbing a prison guard when you are locked up for your whole life anyway? Might as well do anything you please. What more can be done?

They make us feel better. Like we are really taking it seriously. Like it in any way means things are made better. But it doesn't. Nothing can bring those children back. We want the sentence to be as severe as we can imagine it. Instead of working to reduce the antecedents of offending. That's too much like hard work and most of us pay attention when there's a really dreadful case, bay for blood, then go back to our lives. When children are killed everyday by poverty, neglect, abuse pollution, and other mundane things.

I've worked with murderers (including multiple murders) and I'd guess that not a one of them differentiated between 30-40 years and a whole life tariff when they offended. They weren't deterred.

I know it makes people feel better to read the news, say they'd like whole life tariffs because that sounds serious, and not think very much about the justice system again until another case makes the front pages. What it actually takes to reduce violence is a serious look at trauma, adverse childhood events, DV and sexual violence and all the other things that make people more likely to offend.

@msmonstera

She wasn’t stupid but she was cocky and arrogant. She felt like she wouldn’t get caught, particularly after the consultants were made to apologise to her.

I read up on BA and her mental illnesses. I just cannot fathom what went wrong with LL. She can't be stupid even if she is a psychopath. So many lives lost and ruined, including her own. I just don't get why.

@MrsTerryPratchett how do they make prisons unsafe??

@MrsTerryPratchett

They hardly make prisons unsafe when such a tiny minority of prisoners receive them. What was LL? The 4th woman to receive one? Personally I think it’s the best outcome for someone as sadistic as her and it’s easy for you to say that when it wasn’t your child she killed.

Nice to see that the people who spent three years deciding they were epidemiologists, briefly international relations experts at the start of the Ukraine war, are now giving us their reckons as lawyers and judges. Must be exhausting.

FWIW I don't think full life terms are a good idea in almost any cases. They don't make us safer, they make prisons significantly less safe and they are likely to be done not for justice but to appease the mob. A very bad way to run a justice system. Politicians love to talk about them because appeasing the mob and keeping us all stupid is their metier.

That isn’t how the justice system works. The families don’t get to decide on charging, sentencing etc.

Beverly is in a hospital for the criminally insane as she was diagnosed with munchausens by proxy. So I doubt she is ever getting out.

Definitely not. Friend of mine worked there for a time and said it was horrible - and she got to go home at the end of the day.

Yep when I wss a student mental health nurse I had a placement in a medium secure unit it was grim ,I imagine it would be far worse in a high secure unit like rampton.

@FrownBrown

BA was in prison for a short while before hunger strike. I have family members who have worked in high and medium secure so I know they’re not picnics. Either way it’s a grim life really with no autonomy. I do hope she stays in prison though.

Even if BA was released, it would just be into another prison of her own making. She has spent over half her life in detention, would be released back into a world she doesn’t understand and which doesn’t want her, and spend the rest of her days looking over her shoulder. I’d imagine after so many years continued detention is probably the preferable option for many offenders.
I agree that the chance of her ever being released are very, very slender.

At the time she was sentenced, only the Home Secretary of the day had the power to impose WLOs. Judges have only recently been given that power.

Not really that easy to fool experienced practitioners but can happen.

But posters are being very, very silly if they think a secure psychiatric hospital is an 'easy ride'.

It's really not.

Likely. OP, if you're reading, it would be the non-cowardly thing to do to return to the thread.

Psychiatrist soham das on you tube talks about the difference between the two cases. He explains it very well.

Do people really not consider the fact that the rules/laws/regulations have changed over the past 30 years?

Don't worry, BA will never be released back into society. She's classed as mentally unwell. She will be committed for life.

I don’t think we should be in the business of retrospectively changing sentences of historic cases. That’s not a justice system I want to live with.

However being eligible for parole doesn’t mean she’ll get out. Parole officers very very carefully consider risk factors and work closely with other professionals exposed to those eligible for parole. If they feel Allitt remains to be a risk, they won’t release her.

Cowardly?! For not ordering something that they weren't able to do?

Ignorant post.

At least when Allitt is released she can't actual have children now. She absolutely shouldn't be released
Like Letby, her motive was unclear but Munchausens by Proxy was mentioned. I was surprised that wasn't the case with Letby. They are both wicked inviduals never even showing a shred of remorse and should be in prison until they die.

I thought she had too. But not all that she was convicted of.