Fighting a battle on different fronts

I am a legal aid lawyer. Often, I act for prisoners. I didn't always plan to do this for a living but things do not always go to plan. I trained as a lawyer in the early 1990s, and when it came to deciding what work I wanted to do I turned my back on a fairly lucrative offer of a job doing entertainment law because I thought that, once I had got over the excitement of meeting pop stars, I might get bored with drafting contracts. I also felt a compulsion to do something to contribute to a society which I felt had been rather good to me.

I started my working life as a trainee solicitor in a high street firm in east London, and was shocked by the sheer level of desperation and need that I encountered on a daily basis. I acted for mothers whose children had been taken into care against their will, for estranged fathers who wanted to see their children, for people who could not work but had been unlawfully denied welfare benefits and for people who had suffered injuries which had been caused by someone else. In those days you did everything. None of those clients had any money and all received legal aid. In 2013 none of them would get legal aid, as it has been removed for all those areas of work. People with legal problems like these, who cannot afford to pay for a lawyer, will all have to try to deal with them alone unless they are able to find someone willing to help them for nothing.

I was encouraged to specialise in a particular area of law and I started going to police stations and magistrates courts to represent people who had been accused of criminal offences. Some were guilty, some were not. It was not my job to work out who fitted into what category. It was my job to hear their account of what had happened, to give them legal advice and then represent them to the best of my ability.

Growing population

Some of my clients got sent to prison. Some had done dreadful things and I dearly wish they had not. In the most part, they did too. Many of the people I acted for had been abused and had grown up in and out of care homes. They were damaged by the abuse they had suffered and were angry and confused, struggling when they were sent to prison. Some of them contacted me and asked me to help them. I discovered that there were rules in prison and laws designed to prevent prisoners from suffering unduly beyond the loss of their liberty, worked out what the rules were and tried to ensure that they were followed. In many cases they '¨were not.

I discovered that there were people in prison who did not know when they would be released. Some of them accepted that they had done terrible things to other people and had tried to understand why so that they would not do them again. Some got help from prison officers, psychologists, and teachers, but many did not. Some had done very well and believed they were ready to give life outside prison another go.

I have acted for many prisoners and visited almost every prison in the country. They are human beings, often with more challenges in their lives than many people face and a large number suffer with mental health problems, learning difficulties or other disabilities. Almost all of them have no money. There are a few exceptions. Some have serious problems for which there should be a legal solution. There are very intelligent prisoners who are capable of representing themselves, and there are '¨very many who are not and need a lawyer to help them.

The prison population has more than doubled since I started working as a lawyer, from around 40,000 in 1994 to 83,842 on 30 June 2013. Of these around 79,000 are men and 4,000 women. Almost 10 per cent are under the age of 21.

Chance of release

At the end of 2012 there were 13,577 prisoners serving 'indeterminate sentences'. A prisoner serving an indeterminate sentence does not know when they will be released - all that they know is the earliest date on which they could be released.

Every prisoner serving an indeterminate sentence will only be released from prison when a panel of the Parole Board decide that it is "no longer necessary for the protection of the public" that they should continue to be confined in prison. This is a rigorous process. A large dossier of reports about the prisoner and the progress they have made is prepared and witnesses, including the prisoner, give evidence at a hearing held at the prison, which will be considered by that panel. Prisoners are allowed to have a lawyer to help them understand the process and to advocate for them. These hearings are an unusual mixture of law, psychology, social work and informed guesswork. Boards themselves are made up of judges, psychologists and psychiatrists, former probation officers, former police officers and many other professions.

Good parole lawyers will have read the parole dossiers, spoken to their clients about the reports, done some investigation about things which matter, explored the feasibility of release plans and what might be needed to make them work. They will have considered the relevant law, given their clients realistic advice, asked the Parole Board for some directions to try to make the hearing more effective and will then travel to the hearings to advocate for their clients.

Necessary experience

In the past few months, there have been a raft of announcements about proposals for further cuts to legal aid, 'competitive tendering' for criminal legal aid and new categories of legal work for which legal aid will no longer be available.

There is a real debate to be had about what the state can and should afford to pay for legal aid, how it should be delivered and how to ensure that good quality lawyers do the work. This is not what has been happening. There needs to be a recognition that people who cannot afford to pay for legal advice, assistance and representation in court which they need should be allowed to have it and there should be a sufficient pool of well-trained lawyers who are paid enough that they are prepared to carry on doing a job which can be very challenging and which requires a variety of skills, not just legal skills.

There needs to be a recognition that sufficient numbers of experienced people need to stay in the job and can pass on what they have learned to those with less experience and expertise. As brilliant as some students are, you cannot hand over the job of providing skilled legal representation to someone who has not done very much real legal work before. There are inherent dangers and false costs savings in creating '¨a 'factory model' for legal services which does not pay serious attention to the quality of the work.

I know lots of legal aid lawyers who are brilliant and highly committed to what they do. Most of them are very capable of doing legal work in the private sector which would pay many times what they can earn doing legal aid work.

Legal aid lawyers are a dying breed. Many people will not notice the gradual disappearance of legal aid lawyers unless and until they are unlucky enough to need a lawyer and cannot afford to pay for one. Legal aid lawyers do not need your sympathy, but the people they act for do.

Copyright & permissions