This week, a judge in Lincolnshire took a novel approach to countering a budding white supremacist by sentencing him to… the magic of reading.
Ben John, a 21-year-old Nazi sympathiser long identified as a terror risk, who had been writing anti-immigrant and homophobic letters before graduating to downloading instructions on how to build a bomb, was found guilty in August of possessing material likely to be useful for preparing an act of terror. The charge carries with it a potential 15-year prison sentence.
John missed out on jail time “by the skin of his teeth”. Instead, he’s been set homework of reading the great English canon — swapping out white-supremacist literature for the work of Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.
“An approach like this doesn’t come from any formal deradicalisation framework, except perhaps if the texts contain ideas that might change someone’s perspective,” Dr Clarke Jones of the Australian Intervention Support Hub at Australian National University told Crikey.
“So I’m in two minds — on the one hand, is there any evidence that this will be effective? On the other, hats off to the judge for looking for alternatives to prison time; once a young offender is the criminal justice system it can a be a very slippery slope.”
While there are many commonalities, there is no “one size fits all” factor that turns someone towards extremism. “There’s a number of reasons someone would join an extremist group,” Jones said. “Feeling they don’t belong, distrust of the government and police, a lack of belonging in the family — any number of things that might lead them to seek protection and identity.”
Indeed, the judge observed of John: “You are a lonely individual with few if any true friends.”
And just as surely, there is no one thing that turns people away from those same groups. Even if there were a strong evidence base for literature as a way out, John is unlikely to read the line, “I shall do one thing in this life — one thing certain — that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die,” blink away a tear and realise in a moment what a pathetic lie had seduced him.
“People are not in the group one day and out of the group another day,” distinguished professor of sociology Kathleen Blee told the Southern Poverty Law Centre back in 2016. “Also, people have to exit on many levels. They have to exit in the sense of breaking their ties with people, changing who they’re hanging around with. They exit in terms of leaving the lifestyle, maybe the criminal actions or the violent actions they were associated with. And they exit in terms of changing their ideas.”
Beyond the effectiveness, of course, is whether one can imagine a young Muslim man, arrested after bellowing anti-Semitism and homophobia online and downloading a bomb-making manual, sentenced to brushing up on the classics.
“I certainly haven’t seen this with young Muslim offenders — in fact, it’s been quite the reverse,” Jones said. “Harsher sentences are the norm and those leaving prison have a harder time reintegrating due to strict control order being placed on them. I’ve worked on several legal cases to try and reduce the time offenders spend on Extended Supervision Orders.”
I’d still go for the lobotomy.
Following on from JMNO’s comment, I’m not too sure how “The Merchant of Venice” would assist in countering anti-SemitIcism; Charles Dickens had horrible views about Indigenous Australians; and Jane Austen’s writings on, for example, slavery, are so oblique as could be seen to endorse contemporary practice – don’t forget Sir Thomas must have been a slave owner. More contemporary writing would be better.
And the last couple of paragraphs are the real meat of the article.
I would suggest ‘The Book Thief’, ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ and ‘Shindler’s Ark’. Also ‘The Diary of Ann Frank’. There’s a lot of books more relevant than Austen and Hardy, and easier to read – I’m hoping our young Nazi can actually read. And I agree with Cusick’s idea of a written test.
True, “The Merchant of Venice” is not ideal fare for someone moved by hatred fo Jews but it is not entirely the wrong thing to read at all, when you ask why Shylock asked for his pound of flesh upon default of a loan to a Christian shipping merchant and when you consider his appeal “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If ou tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?” This speech was behind my feeling, when I was young, that Jews were persons like any others and led me to feel that the Nazi treatment of Jews was so appalling, that I remained vehemently opposed to racism all my life. The subsequent lines also show why I am opposed to the way the state of Israel treats Palestinians today: “If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge.If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute’. The state of Israel, supposedly a refuge from the villainy practised upon Jews by Christians and right wing nation lists, by denying Jews national rights and security, the Stat of Israel has come progressively to practise the same villainy on Palestinians. There is a bad end for Shylock’s attempt to get his due pound of flesh, which I do not sympathise wth at all, So “The Merchant of Venice” is not ideal reading for a white supremacist but many of the others, including “Pride and Prejudice,” will be helpful, whatever Jane Austin’s links with slave traders.
This is extraordinary & innovative. If nothing else the exercise will improve the culprit’s grammar & vocabulary. And, hopefully, will lighten him up.
fingers crossed – I hope this works
It’s an idea worth trying. But I question his choice of authors because even if the young man is well educated, he’ll have difficulty with the sentence structures and vocabulary. I just reread Austen’s Mansfield Park after a number of years away from her novels and I found her sentence structures quite taxing until I got used to them again. Modern communication requires short, simple sentences so someone brought up in this communication era will find the works difficult to understand, even if the stories might grab him, which I doubt.