By Deborah Orr
IT WILL not be of great consolation to the 14-year-old girl who was raped twice at knifepoint by Darren Harkin last February, or to her angry family – and nor should it be.
But Harkin’s is likely to be a landmark case, one that will reveal worrying failures of “joined-up thinking” in the Government’s reorganisation of the criminal justice system, particularly when it is dealing with the criminal behaviour of the mentally ill.
The 21-year-old, who savagely killed his baby stepbrother in 2000, when he was 12, was this week detained indefinitely at the maximum security Broadmoor Hospital, from which this young man is unlikely to escape. Harkin cannot be blamed for his crimes, or punished for them. He has been diagnosed as both autistic and schizophrenic, and one tragic aspect of this case is that it will not help to soften attitudes in general towards people struggling with these little-understood disorders. But quite clearly Harkin is a danger to others, and needs to be contained.
Yet for a year, until he walked out and abducted his victim, Harkin had been under the care of staff at Hayes hospital, in Pilning, a village near Bristol. The hospital is run by the National Autistic Society, houses 12 patients, and runs a regime aimed at rehabilitating people with Asperger’s syndrome, who are “detainable” under the Mental Health Act 1983, in the hope that they can be returned to the community. The hospital is staffed with autism not schizophrenia specialists.
We are told that an independent inquiry has been investigating, among other matters, how Harkin managed to abscond from Hayes hospital early this year and perpetrate the attack. Yet there is no real mystery about this. Hayes hospital is a low-secure unit. As such, it is defined as a place where “security arrangements are provided to impede rather than completely prevent those who wish to either escape or abscond. Low secure provision will have a greater reliance on staff observation and support rather than physical security arrangements.”
Staff observation had confirmed that Harkin had asked a member of staff to have sex with him, which had prompted a decision not to allow him to be alone with a female staff member. He had also been put on 24-hour watch after punching walls and lunging at carers. These incidents should have alerted staff to the fact that Harkin was not a suitable patient for a low-secure unit. Instead they appear to have stepped up security in an ad hoc fashion.
Professor Louis Appleby, who is the Government’s “mental health tsar”, told the Today programme yesterday that he is worried about the number of escapes from mental health units, which he says are running at 20 times the rate of escapes by offenders held in prison. However, since he, alongside Richard Bradshaw, who directs prison health at the prison service, signed off the document that contains the above description of security attitudes at such units, the reasons behind the statistics cannot be so very elusive to him.
The real question, certainly, is why Darren Harkin found himself in such a place at all. The crime Harkin committed while he was under the hospital’s care, along with some of the evidence submitted at his trial, makes it clear, in sad retrospect, that he was placed at Hayes in error. Again, we must wait for the results of the inquiry. But we are told that Harkin fulfilled government criteria for transfer to a low-secure unit.
Yet it is clear from the procedure for the transfer of prisoners to and from hospital under sections 47 and 48 of the Mental Health Act, that such criteria need not be in the least exacting, or actually comprehensible, even when a transfer from prison is under consideration.
In fact, the document says, a detainee can be considered for transfer to a low-secure unit if they fulfil any – not “all” but “any” – of the following criteria: acute illness; mix of offending and non-offending behaviours such as challenging behaviour; self- neglect and deliberate self-harm; history of non-violent offending; risk predominantly to others; and low risk of abscond.
The list is hazy, because it assumes that assessments are being made by people who know and understand their patients. How Harkin’s case was handled, from his arrest as a child, through the juvenile system, and into the adult system, is likely to offer a telling illustration of how far from its fine ambition – of appointing under the National Offender Management Service a single person who oversees a detainee’s journey through an ever more complex system – the Government has drifted.
(c) 2008 Independent, The; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.
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