The bereaved families of the victims of the 2024 Southport murders have reacted with shock to the news that the perpetrator, Axel Rudakubana, is to be moved out of prison and onto a secure psychiatric ward. This is apparently in response to a “deterioration in his mental health” which means that he can no longer be managed by prison officers and requires specialist psychiatric care.

A spokesman for the families expressed concern that Rudakubana was “manipulating” the prison service, and that he was exhibiting erratic behavior to secure more comfortable conditions in a hospital setting. While this hypothesis seems plausible, it probably overestimates the sophistication of both Rudakubana and HM Prison Service. Indeed, this case is another example of how unprepared the carceral system is to deal with violent inmates.

The prison service is hopelessly overstretched, managing far too many offenders in far too small a prison estate, and is crippled with poor morale and a high turnover of staff. As a high-profile and volatile inmate, Rudakubana requires a disproportionate amount of management and attention and in the current system that is clearly not possible. Last year, he attacked a prison officer by throwing boiling water over him. He is the sort of criminal who would have been hanged until the Sixties, and neither the courts nor the prison service ever seriously updated their operating model when that option was taken off the table, and other options were ruled out.

But it’s not just the criminal justice system itself that is the problem here, even if that is where the failing is most obvious. The greater issue is that British society as a whole has lost its collective ability to recognize evil and think objectively about how to deal with it, excepting those families whose lives have been touched personally by it. If somebody does something incomprehensibly awful and presents as incorrigibly dangerous, or sinister or malign, we struggle to think of them as anything other than insane.

The point of a sentence like the minimum of 52 years Rudakubana received is that it rules out the objective of rehabilitation. Yet the UK’s entire approach to prisons is so geared towards that end that it has lost touch with the other purposes of incarceration — not that the system is much good at rehabilitation either. With the lack of any clearer idea about what it is supposed to do with Rudakubana for the rest of his life, the best HMPS can aim for is not ending up with one or more of its staff hurt or killed.

With prison resources as they are, and other options ruled out by the Murder Act 1965 and the Human Rights Act 1998, it may be that keeping the Southport killer in a medicated stupor is the best thing to be done with him. It is impossible not to sympathize with the victims’ families yet again as their grief is compounded, but contemporary Britain just has no answer to that degree of evil; we can’t even look at it or call it by its name.

In earlier times, and even today in much of the world, somebody like Rudakubana would have been torn to pieces before the police arrived at the scene of the crime. That doesn’t happen in Britain because of a residual faith people carry that justice will be done by the system and according to the law. But with every case like this, Britain is becoming a little more like the rest of the world.

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Chris Bayliss is an independent consultant who works on energy infrastructure in the Middle East.

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