Pubdate: Sun, 02 Jan 2000
Source: Observer, The (UK)
Copyright: Guardian Media Group plc. 2000
Contact:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Author: Nick Cohen

JAILED FOR DOING HER JOB

The Sentencing To Prison Of Two Charity Workers Has Shocked And Scandalised Cambridge

On 17 December at King's Lynn Crown Court, a representative section of the
Cambridge intelligentsia was pushed as close as its good manners and quiet
temperament permitted to riot. Judge Jonathan Haworth, a new beak who has
been delivering stern sentences from the moment his bottom hit the bench,
put Ruth Wyner and John Brock on the casualty list of the unwinnable war on
drugs.

Their punishment was commonplace, but their offence was distinctive. No one
suggested they were heroin dealers or users. The prosecution didn't allege
that they were money launderers, racketeers taking protection money, or
Channel Island bankers wary of inquiring too closely about the provenance
of the large piles of notes that passed through entrepreneurs' accounts.
The hapless couple didn't look like gangsters; to be frank, no drug baron
would have been seen dead in their mousy clothes.

By the standards of what used to be conventional morality, Wyner and Brock
were admirable people who had followed the instructions of Tony Blair and
Louise Casey, his Homelessness Tsarina, and got beggars off the streets and
in to Wintercomfort, an acclaimed network of refuges in Cambridge that
supplied hot food, tea, washing machines, baths, GPs, advice on finding
homes and jobs and, indeed, rehabilitation from drug addiction.

Haworth was unimpressed. The jury had found them guilty of allowing the
sale of heroin at their day centres and they had to be punished for their
'deliberately obstructive' behaviour. As he wound himself up with ever more
chilling descriptions of their 'perverse' refusal to show remorse and the
'dreadful circumstances' at Wintercomfort, spectators didn't need Mystic
Meg to predict the sequel. One fraught woman interrupted his harangue with
a shout of: 'I was on drugs for 20 years until Wintercomfort helped me.'
She was silenced. The judge gave Ruth Wyner five years and John Brock four
- - harsher punishments than he had imposed on the heroin dealers who had
been netted in their hostels.

They gripped the dock rail. Catcalls and sobs filled the courtroom. Wyner's
21-year-old son, Joel, bellowed at the judge: 'You scum. You ought to be
arrested.' But it was the young man who was arrested and ordered to
apologise or be sent to join his mother in the cells for contempt of court.
The hard-man act over, Haworth made a characteristically modern switch from
brutalism to sentimentality and cooed his best wishes to the charity's
appalled volunteers and patrons. 'Finally, I wish to say a word to those
who so selflessly give of their time and money to aid the work of
Wintercomfort. I hope they will emerge from this unhappy episode
strengthened in the knowledge that their purposes are laudable.'

His Pecksniffery was intolerable. The public in the gallery stood up before
he was half way through his peroration and walked out. Gordon Wyner, Ruth's
husband, tried to lunge at a policeman in the corridor and had to be held
back by his friends. The next night, 100 people protested outside Parkside
police station in Cambridge, where Wyner was being held before being
transported to Holloway, and picked an action committee to organise an
appeal.

Peter Bottomley, a Conservative MP with liberal leanings, has put down
questions in Parliament. The answers should make interesting reading. The
undercover police operation at Wintercomfort has not only brought
misfortune to the Wyner and Brock families but shown that the national fad
for zero tolerance not only encourages the hounding of the destitute but
also the persecution of those who help them.

In The Observer a few weeks ago, Louise Casey instructed us to recognise
that the greedy homeless were spongeing off 'well-meaning people' whose
charity 'perpetuated the problem'. The metropolis, with its anodyne
culture, tacky domes, cigar bars and beguiling cuisines from all over the
globe, doesn't like its business disturbed by ragged bundles in doorways.
The smug orthodoxy of the comfortable is not to blame for poverty but the
Salvation Army and the Big Issue, which pretend to want to clean up the
mess.

In many respects, Cambridge has been a better example of the theme-park
city than the capital. Its medieval architecture blends with businesses in
the vanguard of the new economy. The wealthier students and silicon
fenlanders have produced fantastically high house prices and an atmosphere
of hip propriety. Like London, it has attracted tramps, in part because
there are generous tourists to tap; in part because the poor, like everyone
else, prefer pleasant scenery to a slum.

Sooner or later, they heard about Ruth Wyner and Wintercomfort. By most
accounts, she is an inspirational woman. Alexander Masters, an author who
helps out at the charity, spoke for many when he said: 'I'm absolutely
devoted to her, she's marvellous.' Wyner began work with the homeless when
her brother had a breakdown, took to the streets and ended up diving to his
death from the top floor of a hostel. Under her leadership, it won pounds
400,000 of lottery money for a new shelter. Cambridge academics - the vice
chancellor of the University, theologians and dons - gave their support.
She became a celebrity who was often in the local press.

On one occasion, she warned about the spread of drugs after a man had died
of a heroin overdose in a Wintercomfort bathroom. For all that, she had her
enemies. 'Some saw her as a modern saint,' said a Cambridge lawyer. 'To
others, she was a middle-class do-gooder -- a pointy head and ageing hippy
who had probably tried drugs herself at some point and was certainly
bringing addicts into the city.' The neighbours of the new day centre she
wanted to open protested noisily and a faction within Cambridgeshire
police's criminal investigation department decided to go for her.

At first sight, they appeared to have an impossible task. Homelessness and
drug taking go together (if you need to ask why they search for oblivion,
you should try to get out more). The simple division between drug users and
dealers breaks down on the briefest of examinations. Many desperate people
buy drugs, sell half at a small profit and take the rest themselves.
They're scarcely Napoleons of crime. A confusingly named Inspector
Constable sat on the charity's advisory board but never warned Wyner she
faced prosecution. When the police told her that drugs were on sale, she
banned anyone dealing in or suspected of dealing in drugs from the centres.
Constable agreed her policy was sensible and all appeared well. But
Cambridgeshire CID wanted her to take zero tolerance a step further by
giving them the names of the alleged dope peddlers.

At this point, Wyner drew the line. She had to defend confidentiality. If
everyone who took drugs thought that they would be shopped, trust would
evaporate and her lectures on the virtues of detoxification would play to
an empty auditorium. Faced with such an unpromising inquiry, the
authorities' determination to destroy her necessitated weird and expensive
tactics. Two officers, codenamed Ed and Swampy, posed as derelicts and hung
around Wintercomfort as agents provocateurs. They asked to buy heroin and
recorded the transactions on hidden cameras. In all, 300 hours of
surveillance tape were collected.

Buried in the footage were shots of pounds 10 packages of heroin being
exchanged in handshakes. None of the cameras caught Wyner or any other
member of the small staff nodding approvingly in the background. The case
seemed weak and the internal politics of the Cambridgeshire force
muddle-headed. Wyner and Brock's lawyers expected it to be thrown out by
the judge as an abuse of the judicial process. But Judge Haworth and the
prosecutors said dealers were coming from miles to deliver the global smack
market to its customers (one crook, who turned queen's evidence, claimed to
be making pounds 1,000 a week) and concluded that Wyner must, somehow, have
known what was going on.

The judge was so keen to issue draconian punishments that he allegedly
boasted at a soiree about the sentences he was preparing to hand down. In
an affidavit which will be presented to the Court of Appeal, Karim Khalil,
Wyner's barrister, said he was putting his wig on in the court robing room
on the day his client was due to be sentenced when he was told Haworth,
while tucking into his food at a dinner party, had told fellow diners that
he was going to send the charity workers down.

You might say - it is already being said - that Wyner and Brock have well
placed and articulate defenders and the Court of Appeal will surely let
them out of jail. I wouldn't necessarily be confident that the senior
judiciary will slap down Haworth, a judge whose empathy with the prejudices
of these hard times foretells rapid promotion. Even if they are released,
much damage will have been done.

Wyner, as you would expect, is holding up well in Holloway. In a prison
letter to her friends, she says she is 'feeling a lot more cheerful'. After
a 'hellish journey' and a 'difficult couple of days', she overcame her
problems with 'one of the screws' and had 'quickly developed my prison
defences'. John Brock is another matter. He was a signwriter who gave up
his reasonably steady job to work for the charity. He collapsed after his
arrest. When the chaplain at Bedford jail phoned his wife before Christmas,
her first thought was that he had killed himself.

Sceptical journalists - your correspondent included - tend to mock the
tough love of the Prime Minister and his tsars and tsarinas as mere
posturing. It's a little too easy to forget that the wretched and the few
who want to do something about their condition suffer for their babble.
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