Story Type: Views & Reviews

Filtering failure

Despite having enjoyed a successful 40 year career in the private sector – and having raised his children successfully to adulthood – Richard was surprised to discover that his record branded him as a criminal with two previous convictions – one for possessing “dangerous drugs” and the other for “theft from an employer”.

The records surfaced approximately forty years on. Richard’s son wanted to join a choir and as a Dad, Richard needed to pass the new record check.

In the 1960s, aged 16, Richard had been prosecuted for the possession of marijuana and was given a one year conditional discharge. He was never a habitual drug taker; the offence resulted from a one-off mistake when he was approached by a dealer the police wanted to trap. Richard got into trouble again, a few years later, while a student. He was convicted of taking an item of food from a warehouse where he had a job stacking shelves. He believed the item he took was going to waste. Again, he was given a one year conditional discharge and put the mistake behind him.

After graduating, Richard found private sector jobs throughout the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 00s without anyone wanting to know if he had a criminal record. He was given positions of responsibility and had a productive career. Had anyone asked him, he would have said that he had no convictions. He had been discharged by the Courts and understood that his record was still clear. However, approaching sixty, he suddenly discovered that even after forty years of good behaviour, the Police were listing his youthful mistakes as criminal convictions on a non-basic check. Richard now feels he has been retrospectively criminalized and is being punished for events that should have been forgotten decades ago.

Richard says: “When you look at this record, it looks dreadful. But I was never really the drug taking thief that it suggests – I was a young person who made a couple of silly mistakes. But it’s harder than you would ever believe to correct the impression this record creates, even though no-one apart from me knows or should care about what happened over forty years ago.”

Because of this “new” old record, Richard feels unable to apply for third sector work he would like to do. He thinks he is being prevented from contributing in a way the justice system never intended: “I thought that Conditional Discharges were invented to help people get back on track – but since the invention of the CRB/DBS, people like me are shackled with old records they cannot get deleted. This creates a problem that never goes away.”
Richard believes that, realistically, he will never be chosen to do voluntary or third sector work for charities etc. He is inhibited about making applications requiring checks because he knows he will be required to explain away his mistakes to people who would largely prefer not to hear, or be asked to think deeply, about a senior applicant’s juvenile problems.

Richard believes that the Government needs to make decisive changes to the law so that the Check stop listing from youthful mistakes that resulted in conditional discharges decades ago.

Richard concludes, “We have lost faith in the capacity of people to learn from their mistakes and to change for the better. The present system is preventing people like me from participating.”

“Computer says no” to running a business

Like many people who contact Unlock, I have convictions. There’s more than one – fraud, burglary, driving whilst disqualified and I’m not proud of them but I’ve learnt my lesson and now I just want to put the past behind me and move on.

At the moment I have an unspent conviction and I’m on licence until next year. I’ve done everything that my probation officer has asked of me and never missed an appointment.

As we all know, work is hard to come by especially if you’ve got a criminal record. I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs and didn’t even get an interview and so at the beginning of this year, I decided to set up my own cleaning business. It’s taken me a while to get it off the ground but I’ve slowly managed to get myself several contracts in and around the town in which I live. I’m trying really hard to be a good person, run a successful business and prove to the community in which I live that I’ve turned over a new leaf.

Now that I’ve got some contacts, I decided last month to start the process of registering my business with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. I mentioned this to my Probation Officer thinking that she would see it as a really positive step. She told me that due to my “offending history” I couldn’t run my own business in any way, shape or form. I asked if I could run if from behind the scenes but again the response was ‘no’.

I was so disappointed. All I’m trying to do is provide for myself and my family and put my criminal past behind me.

I really didn’t know where to turn and a search of the internet led me to the Unlock Helpline. I spoke to somebody there about my experience, the man I spoke to listened for ages and at the end gave me some really good advice.

It looks like my probation officer could be wrong and that I could run my business after all. There’s nothing legally stopping me from being a director of my company and I have no restrictions on my licence. I’m going to have to try and speak with my probation officer and maybe make some sort of formal appeal.

I really hope that my probation officer has just made a mistake but at the moment it feels really personal. It seems as though she is deliberately putting obstacles in the way.

I’m not asking for special treatment and I know that I’ve done wrong in the past. I’ve been told that probation officer’s use some sort of computer programme to assess how risky an offender is. I’ve met my probation officer regularly over the last year and I thought that she had gotten to know me well. Surely she should make a decision based on the face to face contacts she has had with me rather than looking to a computer for an answer.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I can continue with my business. If I can’t, I really don’t know what I’m going to do. As the business grows, I want to give other ex-offenders a chance of employment so please probation it’s not just my future that’s going to be affected but the future of others as well.

Problems with employment for serving inmates

I am an inmate at an open prison. I have been at the establishment for around 6 months now, already having served a sizable amount of time, and I am in the process of rebuilding my life. I am fortunate enough to have good family support and a stable background with which to go back to upon my eventual release – a lot of my peers are not so fortunate. I am already going home to visit my family at weekends, and I also have a very worthwhile voluntary part time job. In the very near future I will be able to go home for ‘overnight resettlement leaves’.

And that leaves me only one final hurdle; finding paid employment whilst still serving my sentence…

Part of the work I do within the jail (when I’m not out) is helping my peers to find paid employment themselves; I work as a mentor. We have various means by which potential opportunities can be generated, indeed many inmates source their own leads for work, or at least they try. I am lucky enough to work with some very professional people from outside organisations. Serco, SOVA, the National Careers Service, and the staff within the jail. A large percentage of the inmates in the jail are long term or ‘life’ (indeterminate) sentence prisoners, with some very serious offences and – in some cases – criminal histories. There has been a lot of focus from both media and government recently on the open jail estate following several high profile absconds and incidents.

But the problems we are experiencing are not necessarily what you would expect (i.e issues to do with disclosure, criminal record checks, unspent convictions). Neither are the problems often other obvious issues such as an inmate’s poor work history, and/or lack of qualifications and references.

On the contrary, we have several local companies extremely keen to take inmates on. After all, they would be getting (in theory at least) staff who are keen to get on with lives in the real world, desperate not to screw anything up, physically fit, willing and able. Grateful for what they can get, probably more reliable than the average applicant for a similar job, due to the potentially disastrous consequences of being anything other than a reliable and trustworthy worker. People who have been through a lot to get to where they now are. People who may have had extremely recently all relevant training taken care of as part of their sentence plan. People who will often be employable at minimum wage for starters, who won’t have demands for annual leave. In many ways, inmates can be highly employable people.

Getting interviews and job offers has not been the problem. The stumbling blocks we are increasingly encountering are with company insurance, and problems getting clearance from the Police Liaison Officer (P.L.O).

On the subject of insurance, I have very little knowledge aside from observations made: Insurers are wanting more and more disclosure information, and subsequent big delays are sometimes scaring employers off.

But the biggest problems are coming more and more often from the Police Liaison Officer. The P.L.O’s job is to clear any prospective companies as suitable and safe for a serving inmate to work for, although it should be pointed out that the Prison Governor has the final say and can in theory overturn a negative decision made by the P.L.O. A Governor will rarely overturn a P.L.O decision, which is understandable given that if something went wrong it would be down to one person making a decision against other ‘intelligence’, and therefore becoming a focal point for any blame.

Recently we have had several opportunities for voluntary work, paid work, and training placements turned down by the P.L.O. It seems to me that there have been more rejections than we previously had, and it does make you wonder if some sort of ‘shift in climate’ or pressure from above, such as at government level, have been the motivating factor. Within the last few weeks we have had a handful of P.L.O refusals on the grounds that the prospective companies had not been trading for long enough… upon closer inspection, one of these companies had been trading for over 4 years, plenty of time you would think – especially given how many businesses and companies have gone to the wall during the last 6-7 years. Subsequently you will obviously have many new start-up businesses. Not that 4 years is even within this remit; it’s clearly an established entity already.

If there have indeed been any unknown changes as a result of new government directives or criteria’s, one thing that you can be certain of is that the shift – if there has been one – will have been implemented extremely poorly. Half-baked directives given with no clear statement of intention, no back up training or clear instruction, no structure in place. Every single recent change to regime in open estate jails – and there have been several, I can assure you – have been exactly that.

A colleague of mine who suffered an inexplicable refusal by the P.L.O (and saw all his hard work and diligence come to nothing on little more than a whim) requested an appointment with the P.L.O, which, surprisingly he got.

The outcome of that meeting is almost too embarrassing to write about. The officer gave completely irrelevant comment about individual cases he had dealt with where an offender had been caught in unlawful circumstances, and even started talking about individual inmates still within our jail that he had dealt with – by name! He regaled an instance where he had reconsidered a decision, given the green light, and there had subsequently been a ‘mishap’. As a result he would “never change his mind again”. All this falls under ‘blanket punishment’ – one person’s misdemeanour being used against everyone else. The government have clear directives about such treatment not taking place. Talking about individual cases by name is downright incompetent, reckless and irresponsible, and the man had clearly no real guidelines or notion of what he was doing, let alone any concern about even taking it seriously.

Even when the clearance is eventually given, the fact remains that companies tend to advertise for jobs when they need staff. They cannot afford to wait for 2 months with no idea as to whether or not they will even ever get to employ someone they have offered a job. Why would they have advertised in the first place?

The current government have the party line that they are very pro offender resettlement. They have over the last 12 months nominated several closed conditions jails as becoming resettlement focused establishments. But it’s only a throwaway comment.

Many long term or ‘lifer’ inmates have virtual certainty that they will not gain parole without having found paid work. They will remain in open conditions costing the tax payer around £45k a year, clogging up a system already on its knees with population rise, and we are supposed to find paid work in this climate of seemingly increasing limitation.

And then they wonder why so many lifers are suddenly running away when they are out on temporary release…

I think there could be a link.

by Anonymous

Convictions on your DBS isn’t the end of your employment chances

Some refreshing news for those of us who have convictions that will apparently forever overshadow our possible career ambitions.

The Unlock helpline recently received a call from a person with a very serious conviction (causing death by dangerous driving). The caller had been offered a place at University to study Psychology, and was understandably worried about the DBS check which would be needed as the degree included some work experience placements involving working with vulnerable adult patients.

However, during the course of the conversation the caller revealed that they were already working within the NHS… Upon questioning we learned that their role had indeed required an enhanced DBS check, and that they had got the position anyway, albeit after a stressful and thorough interview process. Basically they had won through by persistence and being both confident and committed enough to give a good, honest and heartfelt account of themselves, and doing everything they could to demonstrate their fundamental decency, integrity, and ultimately – employability.

This is obviously a fantastic and inspirational story. Whilst it may seem to be unusual, perhaps the lesson here is that it is only so unusual because so many people in comparable situations believe that they have literally no remaining chance of their target career, and therefore understandably lack the willpower and sheer audacity to give it a go regardless of their records.

Always remember – the worst that can happen is that you don’t get the job, and you are no worse off than you were before trying. In fact, you could argue that even an unsuccessful outcome can be used as a positive; a learning experience, and a boost of self-esteem and confidence for the fact that you felt able to apply in the first place.

Therefore the message from me is – Go for it, and hold your head up… You have nothing to lose, and plenty to gain.

by Stuart

Caution with cautions

by Katie

In 2008 the police called my phone and asked me to come into the station and explain something I’d done. I explained what happened, and I was told that they would issue me with a caution, which would stay on file for 3 years.

I currently work in the health care industry, I always have, and for over 10 years now. Recently I applied I for some extra work, notifying the employer that a caution may possibly be still on record, but added that I had been told it would be cleared after 3 years.

This was not the case.

I received my enhanced DBS check with the caution on the certificate. I then contacted the customer line where they informed me it will be on there for six years, not three, and then told to contact the Unlock helpline for further advice. Even though I had voluntarily declared possible caution, it now appears I’m being judged automatically, as still remains on certificate because of the offence type.

We live and learn from acts of impulsiveness and, in my case, I was sent something and then sent it back and explained briefly to employer, and yet it’s unfortunate when you try and move forward and explain your past, that it’s judged upon – even when successful at interview.

Police officers should give correct information. If they had told me at the time that the caution would be on my record much longer, I would have accepted this. But when you find its still on your record it just deflates your hopes, as employers do judge. As much as they talk about equal opportunities, this doesn’t always apply to people with cautions.

Disclosing to employers, dealing with rejection and being persistent

I’m currently on my way to London to give a training session on ‘disclosing criminal convictions to employers’. “Been there, done that” I think. It’s been almost three years to the day since I walked out of those prison gates – no job, middle-aged and back to living with my parents.

Wow – so much has changed. I’ve got a job I love, working with people with convictions, giving them advice on what and how to disclose their convictions. I’m renting my own house now and going on a holiday abroad next month for the first time in 8 years.

Sounds like I’ve had it easy. But I’ve been through the same as many of you reading this.

I left prison full of hope for the future. My personal officer told me that I’d been punished for my crime, and that I could now leave all that behind me and concentrate on the future. “You’ve still got the same skills you came into prison with and lot’s more besides” she said. She’s right. I’ve almost got a degree, courtesy of the Open University, and I’ve learnt 101 ways to use tinfoil courtesy of my cell mates (not sure that’s going to come in quite as handy!)

I had my first job interview 2 weeks after coming home. It went well. Small company, new offices and I immediately built up a good rapport with the interviewer. This job’s mine I thought. “Any other questions” the interviewer asked. I disclosed my conviction. He looked stunned and said “Why did you have to tell me that? You were without doubt the best person for the job but now I know about your conviction, you are too much of a risk”. I tried to explain that I didn’t see myself as a risk – “I see my probation officer every week, I don’t want to re-offend, I can’t afford to do anything wrong. I’ve learnt my lesson, paid the price ……..blah, blah, blah”. He was very kind but no job. He should be proud – it was the best rejection ever.

I lost count of the number of jobs I applied for – hundreds. Most didn’t answer at all, some told me I didn’t have enough experience and a few invited me for interviews. After that 1^st experience I didn’t disclose my criminal conviction at interview anymore, I and managed to secure 3 jobs. As soon as I got a job offer, I told them that I had a conviction – it was a specific condition of my licence that I had to disclose to employers. Of course, at that stage, the offer would be revoked.

I truly believed I was a positive person but boy, those rejections started to really knock my confidence. It was hard living back at home again but with no job I couldn’t afford to move out. As my self-confidence hit an all-time low, I applied to do some voluntary work with ex-offenders. After a great interview, great news – they wanted me. They thought I had lots to offer, I could be a real asset. They even said they may be able to offer me paid work at some time in the future.

I volunteered just one day a week but in that time, I began to get my self-belief back. I felt valued, I had a purpose in life again and it gave me the confidence to I throw myself once again in applying for paid work. Several months after release, I got a part-time paid job – working in retail. Never done it before but I was upbeat and decided that this would now be my future. I’d work hard, get promoted and that’s exactly what happened. I started to be offered more hours until part time became full time, I was then asked to go for promotion and got offered a supervisors role with the promise of a managers assessment after 6 months. I gained more knowledge, got more confident and then saw an advert for my current job.

I’ve never wanted to be defined by my time in prison but, it has had a massive impact on the person I am today. I always wanted to use this experience in a positive way and when I saw my current job being advertised I felt that potentially it could be my ‘dream job’.

Disclosing convictions is never easy, however many times you do it but the interviewers tried to put me at ease and I was as honest and upfront as I could be. After a long 2 week wait, the news I had been waiting for – success.

I’ve had good days and bad days in my search for employment. There is a lot of negativity about getting a job with a conviction but at the end of the day it only takes one person to give you a second chance and those people are out there. You certainly have to work harder to sell yourself and you will definitely hit some brick walls along the way. You might not be able to work in the field you did prior to conviction – look “outside the box”. This might be just the time to go into a new career, train in something new, set up your own business – the possibilities are endless.

The Right to Forget

Editorial

There’s an interesting debate in the air regarding the EU ruling on ‘the right to forget’. The EU has just passed legislation that allows individuals to block access to outdated information and stories.

On one side, individuals who want hide information on the internet about the way they have behaved in the past can write to search engine providers, such as Google, to stop them listing pages containing personal information which is more than 30yrs old.

Some journalists and media academics are claiming this is a dangerous form of censorship, undermines free speech and hobbles journalism. They claim it should only be publishers who have the right to decide if information should or should not be made public. This means that the judgement call on what it is legitimate to publish rests with journalists like Piers Morgan and Rebekah Brookes.

On the other side, people with convictions, and others who wish to bury embarrassing stories about their pasts, are asking for the right for them to be forgotten, as criminal records are under French law.

As James Bell writes in the guardian: “There might be a case for saying some stories should vanish from the archives: what about, say, someone who committed a petty crime at 18, who long since reformed and cleaned up their act? If at the age of 30 they’re finding that their search history is still preventing them getting a job, couldn’t they make the case that it’s time for their record to be forgotten?”

But he also makes the point that “The Guardian, like the rest of the media, regularly writes about things people have done which might not be illegal but raise serious political, moral or ethical questions – tax avoidance, for example. These should not be allowed to disappear: to do so is a huge, if indirect, challenge to press freedom. The ruling has created a stopwatch on free expression – our journalism can be found only until someone asks for it to be hidden.”

You can see more of the debate here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/02/eu-right-to-be-forgotten-guardian-google

If a person is convicted in the UK, then their conviction is a matter of public record, and anyone can research press articles and court records and bring them back to everyone’s attention. But should there not be a time-limit on this, just like the idea of a spent conviction?

We’re very interested to hear what you have to say about this. Please let us know your views – either comment on this article, or send us your thoughts.

Applying with conviction

by Richard, editor, unlock.devchd.com/community

I’m writing in response to Nicola Inge’s article Beyond conviction (DDN, June, page 8). The ‘Ban the Box’ campaign is an excellent idea and fully supported by online magazine theRecord and our partners at Unlock. The principle behind the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act was to break the cycle of offending and re-offending by enabling people with convictions to gain employment, and led to the concept of a spent conviction.

Sadly, with the inception of the CRB, now DBS, this principle suffered a massive setback, and asking about previous convictions at the application stage became commonplace, particularly in health, social care and education – the very services that espouse a progressive approach to rehabilitation. This, in turn, led to people with convictions not even applying for jobs that require a disclosure at the application stage.

The US approach based on the equal opps agenda and its accompanying legislation is well worth emulating in the UK, for all the reasons set out in the article. And, following Gandhi’s famous dictum, it would serve people with convictions, the recovery industry and the wider society well if drug and alcohol treatment services were to ‘be the change they want to see in the world.’
If recovery services were truly committed to equal opps, they would never expect candidates to discuss their offences at interview because this never gives people with convictions the opportunity to present themselves as equal to those without convictions. This differentially discriminates against those from minorities, as mentioned above, and male applicants – often under-represented among the recovery workforce – because they are seven times more likely to have a conviction than females.

There are only three reasons employers ask about convictions on application forms: because they think they ought to, because they intend to use that information to discriminate or because they are just plain nosy. The simple fact is that an employer only needs to know about the criminal record of people they will employ, i.e. the person who emerges as the leading candidate, after the interview stage is complete. There is no need for any employer to elicit or, more seriously, retain information about a person’s criminal record if they are not going to employ them. It is only the successful candidate who ever needs to be asked. The other candidates should be able to exit the recruitment process with their privacy intact. Sadly, this is not the case with any of the treatment service recruitment processes that theRecord is aware of.

Often, employers are also labouring under the illusion that screening for convictions at the application stage is a form of risk assessment. It is not. The absence of a conviction tells you nothing about a person’s honesty or safe conduct, it only tells you that they have never been caught and convicted.

A person with a history of, say, violence or fraud, but who was never caught, can sail through the process untested, while the poor sod convicted of possessing a few grams of weed or stealing a car 20 years ago gets grilled by complete strangers in a powerful position in a non-therapeutic setting. Any therapist will tell you that this can be devastating, even relapse-inducing. Both Unlock and theRecord regularly receive mail and calls from people who’ve been treated in this way only to be told that a stronger candidate got the job, so there was never any need to put them through that part of the interview because their record was never actually relevant to the employer. And even when they are successful, they are often then faced with working alongside people to whom they have disclosed their convictions – the people who interviewed them. It might be better if such disclosures are only ever made to HR and passed to senior management, not colleagues, because you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

So, if recovery employers want to offer an equal opportunity and run a safe and legal service, there are just three things they need to do. Firstly, ask only the prime candidate about previous convictions. Secondly, follow that up with the appropriate level of DBS check and, thirdly, risk assess that candidate regardless of whether they have a conviction or not. There are several psychometric tests that can be used for this in consultation with a suitably qualified psychologist. If their favourite candidate proves risky, then move on to the next. It would also be very helpful if employers would state at the application stage which level of DBS check is required for that specific post. This would give the candidate an informed choice whether to proceed with an application or not.

This article was originally published in the July 2014 edition of Drink and Drug News.

Former MP and former prisoner Denis MacShane writes about the role of financial services in helping people released from prison

Denis MacShane, former MP and former prisoner, argues in a feature for this months’ Financial World magazine, that the financial services industry needs to do more to help discharged prisoners reintegrate into society.

Thanks to Financial World, you can download the specific article here.

The two main issues that Denis raises are that of bank accounts and insurance. We were pleased to be able to speak to Denis when he was writing this article, and we’re glad that he’s raised some of the core issues that remain on these fronts.

‘I’m going to move on now’

I last wrote here about 9 months months ago. Since then there has been a change. New amendments to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act are coming into force this month. Since March 10^th, I no longer need to tell many potential employers, insurance companies or other interested parties that I have a record.

This is a huge relief. For me, it’s a massive change. It means I’ll be able to apply for job like stacking shelves in the Co-op or work in an airport. Seventy percent of all jobs now require a disclosure. Now I can apply for far more of them. And get insurance to be a plumber: what’s possible now in the world of self-employment is far greater too.

In many ways, 36 years after my conviction, I now have the right to be treated much like any other citizen. That’s very important to me because that’s just how I want to feel, just like any other citizen. Now the challenge will be to adapt my ingrained ways of thinking about myself, and take opportunities that were previously barred to me.

But let’s not forget that these changes don’t effect everybody. People who’ve been sentenced to more than 4 yrs. are still caught in the same old net. As a society, we are still obsessed with the long past, and with our belief that it is the best predictor of future behaviour. The Government are changing the legal limit on digging into the past lives of others, for such things as insurance and employment purposes. But the changes haven’t gone far enough. There is still a great deal of disproportion in the system. Why should someone sentenced to four years be treated as a whole different category of human to someone who’s served three? What we have is an arbitrary cut-off point; what we need is a system that takes age and maturity much more into account.

As a society, we have a right to expect people to behave better as they mature and grow older. But, again, what we have now is an arbitrary cut-off point at 18, when we get the right to vote. Everyone knows people mature at different rates, and that, often, the pinpoint accuracy of sentencing to reflect exactly the nature and seriousness of the crime is subject to all kinds of vagaries, from the politics of judiciary to the colour of the convicted’s skin.

As we move ever closer to towards a pan-European criminal record system, and the interconnected and international nature of policing and surveillance methods, there is an opportunity to revise these weaknesses and build a system that still protects the public and the employers, but give better opportunities to those who sort themselves out and go on to live more decent lives. It requires three ingredients:

1) The time during which a conviction is unspent and before which full rehabilitation can begin should be linked to both the sentence handed down and the convicted person’s age at the time of the offence. Simply adding their age to the sentence in years gives a much fairer system. E.g. An 18 yrs old sentenced to 3 yrs gets a rehab period of 21yrs, after which time the record is expunged completely, the offences become spent in half that time, 10.5 yrs. Whereas a 40 yrs old getting three years would have a rehab period of 43 yrs and a spent period of 21.5yrs. A 28 yr old getting 14 yrs would have spent conviction after 28yrs and everything expunged after 42 yrs, by which time they’ll be 70. Doesn’t that seem fair enough? The police and courts would retain records for life, and pervious conviction would still be factored into any future sentencing, but those who don’t offend again get to die with a clean record.

2) That employers do not ask about a job applicant’s criminal record until after all the interviews have been completed and they have decided on their favourite candidate. They should never need to ask applicants they were never going to employ about their record. If the chosen candidate has a record that makes them unsuitable, then they are not offered the job and it goes down the line to the second best candidate. I completely accept that an employer has right to know about convictions – but only of their employees. Until you become an employee you are just a member of the general public, and you should have a right to keep your record private. The box on job application forms which asks about criminal records should be banned.

3) Compassion. As a society we often define ourselves by what we hate and won’t tolerate, and that all seems natural and unavoidable. We also define ourselves by our compassion, or lack of it. If you refuse to forgive, you make a prisoner of both yourself and the other, because both become stuck and neither can move on. Everyone has had their struggles, and if they acting out badly during that time, can we not let rest in peace after thirty years? The French call it ‘the right to forget’. Let’s move closer to that.

I’m going to move on now.