Ian Huntley, who murdered two 10-year-old girls, is getting special treatment in jail to prevent him from committing suicide: Why?
Now, this I really don’t understand
Ian Huntley, a former school caretaker who killed two 10-year-old girls in Soham, Cambridgeshire, and was jailed for life in December 2003. is receiving special treatment to stop him attempting suicide. Huntley, 33, has tried to kill himself three times and the prison authorities are reportedly keen to avoid another attempt.
Officers guarding Huntley at maximum-security Frankland Prison in County Durham have been told to play games including Scrabble and chess with him. He is allowed to wear sports clothes – not prison uniform – and has a cell with a television, CD player, and a Nintendo Game Cube console inside.
No, this is not going to be a law & order rant, with a ‘Hanging is too good for him’ theme – and yet, I can’t help thinking that the Frankland Prison staff is going a bit overboard here. Yes, I think that even a useless piece of shit like Ian Huntley deserves to get the kind of care and treatment offered to all other prisoners.
When the state claims the right for itself to incarcerate its citizens, it should follow certain procedures and should be held responsible when it fails to do so. However, there lies the crux. ‘Due care’ should mean just that. Prison staff should not be allowed to get away with given less than that but should also be discouraged to offer more than that.
I don’t think that it’s the prison’s, the state’s or, in fact, anyone’s business to keep people alive at all cost. One could make an exception for hospitals treating people who have not or cannot express their own wishes on this matter: doctors are pledged to save lives after all, and on the whole that’s a good thing but prisons, to put it crudely, are not life-saving devices.
I won’t even go into the sheer cost of keeping a 33-year-old life-without-parole prisoner like Huntley alive, and bending over backwards to provide him with every kind of luxury too, to prevent him from killing himself. On a personal level, the costs involved would disgust me but that aspect, I think, should not be part of a formal consideration.
However, if Huntley, after being treated with due care and as fairly as other prisoners, still finds his surroundings depressing enough to kill himself, I’d say, fair enough and let him do just that. Most people would agree it would be inhuman to force feed people who desperately want to die by sticking tubes in their throats. I would argue it would be equally absurd to go all overboard with the luxury treatment to keep someone from killing himself.
Finally, and this is a matter of principle, Huntley broke the law – and did so in a grotesque and horrible way, killing two 10-year-old girls and lapping up the attention from the media, during the hunt for these girls, offering advice and help. Still, never mind the exact nature of the crime, he did commit it, was found guilty of it in court and then sent to prison.
Prison life is not meant to be a mere continuation of life as we are used to, be it now in a closed environment. Of course, as I said earlier, prisoners should be treated humanely but prison life is not like outside life – and it is not the job of the prison staff to cushion prisoners from the reality of prison life, as they now try to do in the case of Huntley. Because that is exactly what is happening here: they are doing all they can to try and create a life for him inside that resembles life on the outside, in order to keep him happy enough so that he won’t kill himself.
In effect, the prison staff is not only cushioning him from the reality of prison life but also from the consequence of his own actions: the murder of these two girls. In a surreal but no less immoral way they are, in fact, letting him get away with murder.
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