I vividly recall, as a young cop, being locked in a police cell in Bracknell police station. The prank was orchestrated by a couple of the shift elders and was part and parcel of the rituals of being accepted into the fold. Scaring new recruits shitless was a 1980s tradition that typified the slow transition from a military-style police force to a more progressive police service.
On reflection, and now as a post-graduate criminologist, I’m probably being a little too kind to this phase of my former career, since there were also some right bastards who donned the tall helmet and Dr Marten boots. Whatever the psychology behind this particular event, I was nonetheless traumatized by that handful of minutes spent in horrid, dark isolation, with my ultimate freedom at the behest of my excited colleagues who mocked me through the small cell hatch. Perhaps being claustrophobic didn’t help either. Eventually, I was released and laughed it off on the outside, but on the inside, the loss of my freedom was truly terrifying.
Liberty is, of course, conditional. There is no such thing as unfettered freedom. Laws exist to protect us, yet in doing so they restrict the notion of, in the words of Lynyrd Skynyrd, being as free as a bird. In western democracies these curbs are generally consensual and for the benefit of the majority. My freedom to kill exists, but the penalties make me dismiss this choice and I know that,
