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Cody still moves like he owns the lane, three paws steady, one failing, dignity intact. Animals don’t overthink. I do.
Last week, a government press release proposed stopping offenders detained in psychiatric hospitals from receiving Universal Credit, to “restore fairness” and “common sense” by treating them no different from convicted prisoners.
But “common sense” is often just complexity with the difficult bits edited out. We need to realise that this is not one neat group. It is people living at the junction of criminal justice, mental health, and welfare. We therefore must start with the question of who is being targeted?
Some patients in secure hospitals are there, transferred from prison. Serving prisoners who are transferred to hospital cannot claim Universal Credit. There is no newly discovered loophole here; it is already the rule.
Is this therefore about hospital orders from courts? If so, the headlines don’t quite fit. Some hospital disposals follow conviction, others involve people found not guilty by reason of insanity or unfit to plead. Saying this isn’t about excusing anything. It is simply cautioning against sloppy legislating.
Cody stops to sniff a tree, a pattern of scent and sequence without regard for categories. Humans however love categories; especially moral ones and this one refers to ‘holding violent offenders accountable’.
With mentally disordered offenders, the real question isn’t whether they’re accountable, but how you hold them accountable when their illness and offending are so tangled together.
Secure psychiatric hospitals for treatment are locked places, built around risk where some restricted hospital orders remove liberty for longer than prison would. When policy is sold as correcting “leniency”, it misses this lived reality.
If the goal of treatment in these settings is rehabilitation and recovery, we should be cautious about measures that feel like retribution.
Yet, condemning the whole move as regressive won’t do either. A democratic society does have the right to ask what benefits are for. Universal Credit is meant for living costs. If bed and board in hospital is already covered, it is not entirely irrational to review the level of payment.
Cody wants to move on as the pause has been too long. In public life however, we need an unfliching pause that can validly hold two truths. Victims deserve a system that doesn’t compound their grief. Treatment of the mentally disordered offenders who led to that grief is not softness but a part of public protection.
We need careful deliberation about this to cover clarity of definitions and legal categories, the pathway for those without convictions, and a credible alternative that doesn’t turn “mentally disordered offender” into shorthand for “ the undeserving”.
It should be possible to do all this without outrage or applause.