Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim - Reinventing the Family: In Search of New Lifestyles

Stories of Crime, Guilt and the Loss of Innocence

To all those whose love, support and wisdom got me to where I am today.

I hold each of you personally responsible.

Contents

I take off my wig and sink into the sofa in the Crown Court witness suite. The ninety-year-old burglary victim sitting across from me looks up from his newspaper and beams a grandfatherly smile. Is there good news? Is it not going to be a trial? Is my burglar pleading guilty?

I stare into his trusting blue eyes and swallow.

The thing is... I begin, as I try to formulate my next sentence. The thing is, the defendant is saying, and as the prosecution barrister I have to ask you... She says that she knows you. I pause and look across to the Crown Prosecution Service caseworker for moral support. Professionally.

His smile doesnt waver as he crooks a wispy eyebrow. Well, Im afraid I very much doubt that Ive been out of the watchmaking world for twenty years!

No no, I cough nervously. Her profession. Not yours.

Im terribly sorry, but Im not sure I follow.

I take a deep breath. The defendant says that she didnt break into your house and steal from you, but that you invited her in for... services. And the money she took was payment for... rendering those services.

He remains unruffled. Im afraid not Id never seen that lady in my life until I caught her hopping out of my window with my wallet.

Hes going to make me say it. The kindly, snow-haired, twinkly-eyed bastard is going to make me say it.

The thing is, Mr Grace, she can give particular detail about your... she says that you have... apparently in order for her...

The police officer to my left comes to my rescue. Tom, she says that every time she blew you, you asked her to help take off your false leg. And shes happy to tell the jury all about it.

We all sit in appalling silence for what feels like a decade, nobody making eye contact. Eventually, Tom speaks.

I think, upon reflection, that there might have been a misunderstanding. If its all the same to you, Ill be on my way. Please pass on my apologies to Natasha.

As he shuffles out of the witness suite, the police officer and I lock eyes. Neither of us has told him the defendants first name.

I dont know what I expected a career as a barrister to be like. As an eighteen-year-old embarking upon a law degree, I knew very little about the nuts and bolts of our criminal justice system. Certainly it never occurred to me that the role might entail days like the above, sweating beneath my thick black gown in an unventilated witness room as the image of the nonagenarian Mr Grace expectantly detaching his prosthetic limb was seared for ever onto my subconscious.

But one thing I did know about the justice system was how I believed it should work. My views about criminal justice, in particular, were held more fervently than any others from a relatively early age. And while I dont know how usual this is for an adolescent, surveys regularly tell us that adults, at least, feel more strongly about crime than they do on almost any other social or political issue. Its perhaps unsurprising. Criminal acts, by definition, are wrongdoings against all of us they are the most serious breaches of our social code, the ones which cannot be left for individuals to privately litigate, but which call for the intervention of the state to dispense justice on behalf of us all. It is inevitable that criminal justice stirs interest and excites emotion, and it is only right as a matter of democracy that we all have our say on a system which we collectively own. In which we all hold a stake.

Which brings us to this book. Because, while we will look, through charting my own bumbling journey, at what our justice system is like from the inside, I do recognise that anonymous autobiography, if not strictly an oxymoron, does border sufficiently on the ridiculous for anybody claiming to write such a thing to be justly and righteously kicked in the shins. Allow me, someone who wont even give you their name, to tell you anonymised details of my professional life and charge you for the privilege has a vibe which, even for a lawyer, feels exploitative.

So, more than that, I want to talk about what we understand by justice. What we expect our criminal justice system to do. And how well it does that. In doing so, Id like to consider the following set of propositions:

• The justice system is too soft on criminals
• We should have a little less understanding, and a lot more deterrence
• Judges are woolly, out-of-touch liberals pushing a left-wing agenda and making us all less safe
• We waste too much money on ambulance-chasing lawyers, criminals and illegal immigrants
• The rights of criminals are put before the rights of victims and the law-abiding public
• Criminal justice needs less political correctness, bureaucracy and paperwork, and more bobbies on the beat and good British common sense

These are views that I hear a lot when I speak to people about justice. They chime with much of what we read in the popular press, and echo sentiments that we hear from the politicians with the loudest microphones. They are views that I have spent nearly a decade valiantly and self-righteously railing against, from my beginnings as an anonymous, rabbit-avatared Twitter account in 2015, through to blogs, newspaper articles, and, somewhat improbably, two whole books.

They are also, all of them, views that I myself used to hold.

But the things I saw and heard once I took the road to becoming a criminal barrister changed me. Almost beyond recognition. Certainties that had shaped me through my early decades started to subside. Truths which I had internalised as self-evident began to seem so much less obvious. And opinions that I would once have reviled became not merely thinkable, but my new creed.

It may of course be that mine is nothing more intriguing than a tale of subconscious conformity. Of a weak-willed youngster uncritically devouring the ideological gruel of their industry in a desperate search for acceptance, their conversion amplifying their zeal in the time-honoured clich. A hostage to institutional norms. A freethinker gone native. It is entirely possible that my metamorphosis was not special at all; maybe I was just one of thousands of quiet hang-em-and-flog-ems on a long-running ideological production line, bending and melting to identical pressures and forces as we were bashed and moulded into uniform shape.

But, doing my best to look at my transformation objectively, I think its more complex than trading one starter-pack set of values for another. I think the production-line analogy isnt actually too far from the truth; but rather than those pressures and forces arising in the form of social attitudes and rootless institutional mores, what is acting upon all of us is something blunter: experience. There is something that this job, this industry, does. Daily exposure to the criminal justice system makes certain uncomfortable truths impossible to ignore.

There wasnt a pinpointable Damascene moment. There was no single defendant whose story sent scales sliding from my eyes, or crying a late-night Eureka from the bathtub as I unexpectedly divined the solution to mounting internal conflict. There was nothing more dramatic than a series of experiences, clients, colleagues and immutable realities that forced me to examine and adjust what I thought I knew.