Picture Shows: Murderer Ian Huntley
It was something that might be somewhat expected that someone would kill the child murderer Ian Huntley who carried out the horrific Soham murders back in 2002. Child murderers are not popular in British gaols and he had been attacked several times prior to the fatal attack that removed this man from the planet. Unlike some out there I’m not going to praise Ian Huntley’s murderer because that individual is also an evil bastard who should never be on the outside again.
I’m generally against the Death Penalty on the grounds that you really cannot trust the state and in particular the British state to put the right person to death for the right crime. Although all societies have deficiencies in their justice systems, a country like Britain. whose political classes have no qualms about hiding horrendous crimes like the Rape Gangs or which is rapidly tearing down as much as possible the idea that we should all be equal before the law, cannot be trusted with the death penalty.
But saying that Ian Huntley was clearly guilty of a terrible crime and in an ideal world should have faced the ultimate penalty. Only his family would have mourned if that had happened.
However that is not how Britain has decided to deal with its worst criminals. It has been decided that there are some people who are so bad and so irredeemable that they should never ever be among the public again. Ian Huntley was one of those who probably would never have been released.
If you lock someone up whether that be for a short time or a long time, for a serious crime or some bullshit like a hurty words offence, the state then becomes responsible for that person. They have to feed them, house them, guard them and also keep them safe. His Majesty’s Prison Service has failed in at least two of these duties in this case. They failed to keep a person, obnoxious as he was, safe and they failed to guard their charges sufficiently enough to stop one murderer killing another murderer.
This case brings up a whole load of questions about how badly are our prisons managed? How well staffed was the prison workshop which was where this attack happened? Were there sufficient numbers of appropriately trained prison officers present? Why was a high profile prisoner who had allegedly taunted others about his crime by wearing a similar football top to that worn by his victims in of the most famous pictures of them, being allowed to mix with other prisoners who would clearly be out to harm him? Why was the man who allegedly murdered Huntley also be there when he also was a man with serious criminal convictions and a record of violence?
This incident was not the only one in Britain’s prisons of its type and this is not the only scandal to affect Britain’s prison estate. We’ve had female prison officers working in men’s prisons being turned to crime and dereliction of duties by prisoners, mistaken releases of prisoners, some prisons being alleged to be dens of corruption with prison officers doing deals with prisoners to bring in contraband and male prison officers working in female prisons sexually harassing inmates. Britain also has a death in prison every four days just by suicide alone and our prisons have filled up with many of the people who in the past, before ‘care in the community’, might have been residents in mental hospitals. Whatever the known deficiencies of the old sprawling mental hospitals they may well have been better for these people than prison and may even have prevented these individuals from committing the crimes that led to gaol in the first place.
Britain’s prison service is clearly in a mess and is becoming a bit of a metaphor for the nation itself. The prison service is crumbling, poorly managed, allegedly corrupt, with insufficient staff and resources or even the will to make possible any reasonable attempt at the reformation of those prisoners who can be reformed. The prison health service is from what I can gather a bit like the woeful National Health Service but worse and if you know how bad the NHS can be on the outside it should give some idea of how bad it can be on the inside.
We’ve got to have root and branch reform of prisons. We’ve got to make more spaces for prisoners in more prisons and have better management and resources, human and otherwise, for such institutions. The murder of Ian Huntley, whilst it will be seen by many as a form of justice, opens up a window into a chaotic, badly run, dangerous and failing prison service that is always on the verge of collapse.
I want the bad people locked up and locked up for a long time but I want them confined in such a way that they cannot do harm again to anyone no matter who they are staff or prisoner and that’s not what’s happened in this case.
Background links
Corruption in UK prisons
https://spectator.com/article/how-corrupt-are-britains-prisons/
Mistaken prisoner releases
https://www.reuters.com/world/several-prisoners-mistakenly-released-uk-prisons-each-week-minister-says-2025-11-06/
One of London’s major prisons deemed ‘inhumane and unfit for purpose’
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/wandsworth-prison-inspection-conditions-b1253510.html