The death sentence will never be a deterrent to a disturbed or desperate mind. If a person is pathologically dangerous-as I suspect Jeremy is-then the life sentence should mean life and nothing less.
Now that may offend some of my new friends in prisons, but a sentence has to be what it says it is, otherwise it has no meaning. What might have greater meaning, however-and thereby give meaning and purpose to the whole experience of long-term incarceration-is to begin training inmates in the same skills I have acquired, so that they can begin to help each other in a positive and purposeful way. They are the people who are best equipped to help others coming into the system-not social workers and psychologists(although they do serve a vital purpose) but other "cons".
As a final thought about Jeremy, I suspect his pain is far more complex, more convoluted than anything I experienced at Saughton. He didn't snap suddenly, nor was he driven by an uncontrollable compulsion, like many of the sex offenders. But instead, without any compunction, affect or emotion, any real sense of guilt or remorse, he planned and schemed and waited for the right moment-when he could kill everybody! In that sense, I can see now, he really is "evil beyond belief" and there we depart from any common ground. I am nothing like him, and never will be. Jeremy simply served as a conduit through which I could access and begin to understand my own negative or destructive impulses.
In his book Inside Time, author Ken Smith described Jeremy as "a resident monster of the public imagination, dragged out into the tabloids to rattle at the public from time to time," and as such, "occupies a strange corner in the human psyche".
Yes, Jeremy Bamber touches the imagination-and it's a role he carries very well for us-but let's not forget that he is also very real and very dangerous. Can we ever really risk letting him out of that role, out of prison? I very much doubt it.
