Ben Jarman. Photo: Courtesy of Ben Jarman.
Trials and errors: Rebecca Hardy catches up with Ben Jarman after his Swarthmore Lecture
‘Some of my early drafts were quite ranty.’
What has the response been from Quakers since you delivered the Swarthmore Lecture?
Really positive. I had a couple of emails sent to me on Saturday that just said ‘wow!’ and I had a really satisfying, interesting and slightly difficult ‘Q and A’ – not in a bad way, but people were sharing issues that the lecture raised. Overall, I’ve been really happy with the response.
It’s an emotive issue…
I think that goes with the territory. I sometimes forget that. I did a lot of research seven years ago and I remembered a man who’d been through a therapeutic unit talking about terrible experiences in childhood. He was in prison for murder. He said it was important to talk about it, but you can’t expect that it’s normal for people to want to talk about it. I remember thinking that at the time. I think he’s right. It’s not normal to want to talk about this stuff – and people don’t want to hear it, and shouldn’t be forced to – but the cost of what is lost if it becomes difficult as a society to have these conversations (where do they belong, and what kind of experiences do [inmates] deserve to have when we’ve done all we wanted in prison to them?). I kind of wanted the lecture to be able to talk candidly about difficult things, and one of the unwanted gifts that came [from the terrible experience of] Fishmonger’s Hall is that I can talk credibly about it from both sides.
If you have a life sentence, the rest of your life is determined by it, and not talking about it doesn’t accept the gravity of what has happened.
When I was planning my PhD research, my reviewers said to me that, if you are asking people about the offence, you need to be really cautious. I understand that. I’ve worked in prisons before and I know people volunteer information about themselves that you don’t ask for. It’s not necessarily a touchy subject in prison for everyone, but outside it is… and it is awful thinking about [certain cases]. I’m thinking about the dreadful case in Southport. It’s almost unbearable to think about it.
What was your introduction to Quakerism?
My first impetus to go to a Quaker Meeting was that a friend of mine was a victim of a serious crime and found it extremely difficult to come to terms with. It was that clichéd thing of not understanding why bad things happen to good people.
I was twenty-three or so. I found it really upsetting and, also, around the same time, two close friends of mine died. I had a lot of questions and when I went to other churches, I was really struggling. I tended to be given answers to questions I hadn’t asked. A friend of the friend who’d been a victim of crime said she was a Quaker, and I asked, ‘does it help?’ She said it was good to have a regular space where she could go and be quiet, and let it all sink in. I went along and, very soon, I started going to Young Friends General Meeting and it went from there.
Did it help?
It helped a lot, and I went to Meeting an awful lot. It became very important to me. For a long time Quakerism has meant the most to me in times of crisis. I grew up going to churches but Anglicanism stopped doing much for me from my teens, except church music. It’s the space in Quaker Meetings that I like.
How did you feel when you were asked to do the Swarthmore Lecture?
Really anxious! Surprised! I got sent an email from Simon Best from Woodbrooke in autumn 2022 saying the committee had discerned the broad topic and asking me for feedback and names. I sent feedback on the brief, saying that I thought they were approaching it from too narrow an angle. I sent something quite long and carefully thought-out, but didn’t hear anything for half a year. I forgot all about it, and then they got back to me in the middle of 2023 inviting me to do it. I was really surprised – I didn’t think of myself as a very good Quaker. I haven’t gone to Meeting since my son was born, and I’m not good at putting my hands up for committees. So I was a bit uncertain that I had enough to say. I was working full time, trying to write a PhD, and my son was a baby. But I knew a Friend who previously did the Swarthmore so I asked them if they’d talk with me about it. That helped.
The final draft was only finished two weeks before the lecture. Some of my early ones were quite ranty; it felt like a huge thing to be asked. It pushed me out of my comfort zone, but I felt honoured, and I’m happy how it went.
If you could distil your message into one thing you wanted to get across, what would it be?
I think it’s that the way the system deals with people who have done bad things, and that the only thing that’s considered important is whether they are a risk or not, neglects other considerations which are really quite important. I think it matters if someone regrets what they have done. It’s not the only thing that matters, but I still think that it’s important. I think people’s voices and hearing what happens to them when they serve very long prison sentences is important too, and their experiences do deserve consideration.
What’s one thing that you hope Friends might be inspired to do after hearing the lecture?
I said at the end that something Quakers have to offer in the world is the practice of silence and listening, and when we are at our best, our social activism is rooted in this listening and respect for the person. So I don’t think that every person who heard the lecture is going to want to hear people convicted of serious violence describe [their experiences], but I would hope that they might think there is something more going on here; that it is subtle and more nuanced; and they would approach the topic with a bit more willingness to listen, with the sense that it might not be as simple as they might think.
The other thing I like about being ‘up close’ is how the abstract concepts we use to approach these issues are important but are mainly ‘policy words’. It’s not necessarily meaningful to say to someone, ‘we think you did this because of a personality disorder, or x, y, z’. It’s important to meet people where they are, on their own terms.
Bearing in mind we have a new government, if there is one thing in the criminal justice system that you could see changed, what would it be?
My answer’s partly conditioned by the fact that I know that the criminal justice system is operating at far too large a scale to do much with the funding, and it’s not going to get a massive injection of cash. There’s plenty that should be fixed about how prisons are run, staffed, and the physical conditions and so on, but the simplest change there should be is an across-the-board reduction in sentence lengths. Looking at the example of Leon in my lecture: anything positive that’s going to come out of his sentence has already happened, but when I met him in 2019 he was sixteen, seventeen years from any time when release was possible.
It’s a difficult thing for governments to accept because politically it looks as if they’re being soft but, if you just keep people in for less time, you can already do what you’re going to do with them but there’s a stronger incentive, from their point of view, to do their best. If you just impose a sentence, you’re not just interrupting someone’s life, you’re actively wrecking it. In terms of any promise of rehabilitation, it looks like you’re giving with one hand. But it’s being taken away by the other hand.
