Author: Chris Atkins
ISBN No: 9781838954697
Review date: 09/06/2026
No of pages: 344
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Publisher URL:
https://atlantic-books.co.uk/book/time-after-time/
Year of publication: 01/08/2024
Brief:
price
£10.99
Chris Atkins has given us priceless stories to show (to quote the book’s sub-title) ‘why criminals can’t quit crime’. Such as Ed (they’re anonymous). Because of an original fixed term prison sentence of more than ten years, and has been recalled four times ‘with no proven re-offending’; he goes back to dealing drugs in a shire county, though in small enough amounts and laundering of money through betting shop bets to avoid coming to the notice of the authorities.
As the author comments, such a decision ‘shows that the licence system is doing the exact opposite of its stated purpose. It’s supposed to provide a stable platform for offenders to re-integrate into society, but in many cases it’s putting offenders in an intolerable purgatory that makes prison look like a better alternative’.
Next story is of Josh, who as of 2022 had ‘been stuck inside for nearly three years,’ and ‘is likely to spend more time in jail for not attending a rubbish party than if he’s taken someone’s life’, thanks to him and other prisoners being on licence. Before you get your violin or tissues out, Josh had been released on licence after a term for manslaughter. True, if the had killed someone and been convicted of manslaughter, on a fixed-term sentence of ten years he would be ‘out in five’. Is the problem merely that the justice system is daft, or that good people are in jail when they shouldn’t be?
The author himself was in jail, including in Wandsworth; and became a prison ‘Listener’. When he put an ad in the free prison newspaper Inside Time, ‘offering to be a convicts’ agony aunt’, he was ‘inundated with letters, introducing me to some jaw-dropping tales from some fascinating law-breakers’. In the story of Josh as many others, they were ‘born into the system’; a parent or both were troubled, they were in care, ‘hanging around with the wrong crowd’, smoking cannabis and drinking, suffering physical abuse, coming to the attention of police and courts from an early age. Offending becoming ever more serious, because they lack a safety net and have to deal drugs, and steal and be generally criminal, to live.
If, like me, it occurs to you that the author is exploiting convicted criminals for his work as a writer and film-maker, Atkins has the emotional intelligence to know that, and in the book he endearingly is not taking himself any more seriously than any of the things he comes across – criminals boasting of crimes on Snapchat, private firms like G4S and Serco making money out of electronic tagging of offenders, that don’t deter; how victims clearly are an after-thought in the system; how probation and magistrates and everyone in the system with any experience understand how it doesn’t work.
Atkins confesses to ‘a grubby necessity of journalism, currying favour with unsavoury characters to gain access’. He admits also in an earlier book, A Bit of a Stretch, he gave voice to criminals and not victims. Here he does speak to ‘Ingrid’, victim of a stalker, whose case only came to court ‘several years after the harassment began’, and with her testimony watered down (and a physical side to the harassment not reaching the hearing of court). Atkins through the stalker ‘Harry’ gets a recording device into an RAR (rehabilitation activity requirement) session, as given to those convicted rather than prison, ‘with none of the kids taking the session remotely seriously …. All the people attending these courses have complex and wildly different problems, so a generic ‘one size fits all approach’ seems doomed from the outset’.
Atkins meets some of the young criminals after a session, who use them to swap ideas such as how much to spend on buying drugs for county line dealing (‘everyone swaps numbers and Snapchat accounts’). To round off about RAR days, Atkins notes official inspectors have pointed to the flaws, but everyone plays along – the ‘offenders avoid prisons, while the scheme providers get a healthy cheque from the government’. In fact such schemes ‘can actually be counter-productive, by presenting an excellent opportunity for criminal networking. It’s practically speed-dating for drug dealers’. Who can say, as Atkins wonders, how many of the more easily-led criminals and crimes are a ‘consequence of criminals meeting new associates, while’, absurdly, ‘being punished’ by the state?!
Each reader will have their favourite chapter about a criminal that relates most to them or their work; perhaps the fraudster Alex who pretended to be a duke, for example at Claridge’s (‘everyone thinks you can’t defraud Claridge’s as it’s too secure, and so therefore no one tries’). ‘Alex’ was eventually arrested for the ‘hotels’ (he carried it through at ‘about 30’) scam. The story of Alex makes a change from those who have been dealt a poor hand – Alex was wealthy and highly educated and came out of prison after his first sentence (for years of crime, remember) ‘and had no intention of reforming in any way’. Alex commuted from London to a Midlands room where he did worked the phone on frauds, by helicopter (‘I didn’t want to drive, as that would leave a trail’).
Alex has ‘started a successful business developing rehabilitation courses for white collar criminals to steer them away from a return to crime’. Atkins marvels ‘at how quickly’ the criminal justice system has embraced Alex (the Ministry of Justice has endorsed Alex’s business, Atkins hears him speak, well, at a counter-fraud conference in 2023). Atkins closes the chapter on Alex by wondering ‘how many crimes he has personally spawned’ while at Wandsworth for his first bunch of frauds.
Atkins shows how hard it is to generalise about anything to do with crime and justice; even having ‘a loving and supportive family can actually make the cycle of offending much worse’. Atkins concludes that, sadly, stories of redemption are an exception, to the rule of criminals doing more and more crime. He states that ‘the state bodies, officials and companies that are charged with keeping offenders out of prison are either absent or doing the exact opposite’.
Atkins touches on some ‘potential solutions’; as for probation, thanks to part-privatisation in the 2010s ‘it’s effectively stopped functioning as a means of rehabilitation’. We need more and better places for people when they’re released from jail. Offenders need jobs; the recall system needs ‘a complete overhaul’. Drug addiction should be treated as a medical problem rather than a criminal one. The more or less general automatic release of prisoners halfway through a prison sentence ‘is a millstone around the neck of the criminal justice system’ and sentences need to be honest. The state spends millions on ‘dubious offending behaviour courses that have no hard evidence that they actually work’. Trust in such programmes can kill (Atkins mentions Usman Khan, the Fishmongers’ Hall and London Bridge terrorist of 2019).
Without such ‘radical reform’, Atkins tells us that ‘the UK will continue to be plagued by sky-high levels of re-offending’. Carrot or stick? he asks, and answers his own question. The system ‘traps’ offenders, and society ‘believes that crime can be fixed by brutal punishment alone rather than an evidence-based approach to lift people out of the criminal cycle’. This updated paperback edition (with more about how some of the people we meet are getting on) of Time After Time is that evidence.
