Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, I rise to support these amendments. I believe I am the only professional writer—that is, one who lives solely by her writing—to have spoken during the course of the Bill, and therefore what I have to say may be of some help. At Second Reading, my noble friend Lord Borrie cited memoirs by Ian Brady, Mary Bell and Dennis Nilson—he mentioned him again this morning—and went on to speak of the prison diaries of a former Member of Parliament and of a fellow Member of your Lordships' House. The noble Baroness, Lady Stern, spoke of Silver Threads by John Williams and John Hoskison's Inside: One Man's Experience of Prison. Perhaps, though, the most famous and distinguished example of a criminal whose memoirs, novels and plays can be said to stem entirely from his experience of crime and imprisonment is the French author Jean Genet, who has already been mentioned by my noble friend Lord Soley. Genet, who was born in 1910, was a social outcast who, as a novelist, transformed erotic and even obscene subjects into what has been called a poetic vision of the world. He began his life of crime as a child. His mother abandoned him to the care of the assistance publique. He lived in state institutions and spent five years in the notorious reform school at Mettray. There he lived through the degrading experiences that were later described in his novel, Miracle of the Rose, in which he pondered the meaning of imprisonment. After deserting from the Foreign Legion, he wandered around Europe, to be charged in various countries with vagrancy, theft, and homosexuality, which was then a crime. Here it may be apposite to say that Genet’s obscene or pornographic work is never gratuitous or designed to excite or titillate. Much of it explores man’s solitude and the meaning of shame and abjection. More time was spent in prison, but in 1939 he began to write, and the outstanding nature of his work attracted the attention of Sartre, de Beauvoir and Gide. Under French law, automatic life imprisonment ensued after 10 convictions and, when Genet was convicted of burglary for the tenth time, Gide, Sartre and Cocteau, among others, successfully petitioned the President of the Republic for his reprieve and release. Genet subsequently wrote a poem that praised criminals’ values and in which a prison cell becomes a centre for dreams and meditations. His autobiography, The Thief’s Journal, followed. This, about his youth and what he called a forbidden universe, is a prime example of the kind of memoirs that we are talking about here—a convicted criminal profiting from the publication of a record of his experiences. My noble friend Lord Borrie pointed out at Second Reading that the publication of a criminal’s memoirs may in some cases have beneficial outcomes in the rehabilitation of the offender. He cites the learning of new technical or language skills or the discovery by an ex-prisoner of artistic talent. This absolutely applied to Genet, who is a fine example of what redemption can achieve if not by imprisonment then by writing about the prison experience. In 1966, Genet largely gave up writing and spent his time giving lectures and supporting various radical causes. Concern for the victims of criminals is a theme that runs through this Bill, although the victims are not to recover compensation. To return to my own theme, those who suffered from Genet’s crimes were mostly the people from whom he stole. I do not know whether any of them believed that his large output of distinguished literary work compensated them, but I do not see how anyone could be injured by the work itself. I can, however, see the damage that may be caused by censorship. If kleptomania exists, it looks as though Genet suffered from it—some pathological condition that impelled him to steal. For a story is told that he was so addicted to theft that he stole diamonds from his hostess while at a literary party. Such a condition may well be true of many compulsive thieves whose early lives were as tragic as Genet’s. This is a matter only for speculation, as is the possibility that what Genet wrote may have been restrained if, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, has put it, he had come under the dampening effect of measures such as these.