Peter Stanford: For the love of Myra

Lord Longford wanted the child-killer's accomplice Hindley to be forgiven and was mocked as a 'loony'. But with jails at bursting point, the non-religious arguments for forgiveness are stronger than ever

Lord Longford is on his knees next to the bed, in pyjamas and dressing gown, about to start his nighttime prayers. His wife, Elizabeth, in neck-to-ankle nightie, is angry he is planning a prison visit to the Moors murderess Myra Hindley, a woman she regards as a "monster". She pleads with him not to go. "No human is beyond forgiveness," he rebukes her angrily. "Condemn people from our armchairs and what have we become?" And with that he clasps his hands together and starts addressing his God.

The scene, between Jim Broadbent as the Labour Cabinet minister and penal reformer, and Lindsay Duncan as his biographer wife, comes early in Channel 4's forthcoming and already controversial film Longford, an account of the peer's long friendship with Hindley (played by Samantha Morton). It charts his unsuccessful attempt from the late 1960s until his death in 2001 to persuade the British public and politicians to forgive her and grant her parole.

Longford's own capacity to forgive Hindley is portrayed in the script by Peter Morgan as springing from his Catholic faith. Longford tested his own religious belief in forgiveness by picking on the woman the public (and his wife) regarded as the most unforgivable creature in the country. The experience - a kind of crucifixion complex, as one of his godsons, Auberon Waugh, once described it - has, the Longford character reflects at the end of the film, deepened his faith and brought him closer to God.

It's a portrait I can vouch for as Longford's friend, biographer and consultant on the film. He loved the sinner and hated the sin - a phrase he used often to describe his attitude to offenders during 60 years as a prison visitor. For those who reject the language of sin, though, must it also mean rejecting any idea of forgiveness?

During a question-and-answer session with Morgan and the cast after a press screening of the film last week, journalists asked the same question over and over again. Was Longford, as one reporter put it, "a naive, old fool" who could preach forgiveness for Hindley only because his religious faith desensitised him to the appalling nature of what she had done to children? Forgiveness, it seems, has become the exclusive preserve of the piously religious. Implicit is the assumption that you are denying what would otherwise be your natural reaction to wrongdoers - to seek retribution, revenge and compensation via the courts.

That easy association of religion and forgiveness is all around us. It was there in coverage last week of the Amish community in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, when relatives said they were trying to forgive Charles Carl Roberts after he murdered five of their daughters in a school. And when Gee Walker, a Liverpool mother, spoke in July 2005 of her efforts to forgive the racist thugs who killed her son Anthony just because he was black, she was carefully and prominently labelled a Christian fundamentalist.Much more in tune with our secular and sceptical society was Anglican vicar the Rev Julie Nicholson. She stood down from the altar because she couldn't achieve the ideal of forgiveness that her faith preached after the 7/7 bombers blew up her daughter.

One of the problems with examples of faith-based forgiveness is that it can appear to spring too quickly to the lips of those who have been offended against. They make it look easy, when we all need little imagination to know how hard it must be. And therefore we doubt their sincerity - or in the case of Longford, dubbed a "loony lord" by the press because of his Hindley campaign - their sanity.

"Forgiveness has become associated in the public mind with a kind of spiritual superiority," says Marina Cantacuzino, who runs the charity The Forgiveness Project, which has been inspired by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission."And because of that link made between forgiveness and religion, forgiveness has somehow become seen as sentimental, glib and the territory of the weak and the deluded."

Which is a loss to us all, religious or not. At a time when our prisons are full to bursting and sentences have never been so long, yet reoffending rates are greater than ever and our fears of being victims of crime are at an all-time high, forgiveness might just offer a viable alternative to politicians' increasingly frantic and apparently ineffective efforts to rack up the range and severity of punishment for offenders.

Forgiveness can be successfully decoupled from religion. For the majority who have no faith, a distinctive secular template for forgiveness does exist. One of the Government's achievements in criminal justice has been the establishment of the Youth Justice Board. Its Referral Order Panels offer first-time offenders under 18 who have pleaded guilty the chance to sit down with the victim of their crime as part of determining an appropriate sentence. Mutual understanding that moves towards forgiveness is an explicit part of the process. The Referral Order Panels embrace a concept known as restorative justice.

A pioneer of that concept in Britain is Barbara Tudor, a Victim/Offender Development Officer with West Midlands Probation Service. Part of her work is bringing together offenders and those who have suffered from their crimes. "I am not religious in any way," Ms Tudor says, "and in some senses therefore I resist the use of the word forgiveness to describe what such meetings seek to achieve. But forgiveness is undoubtedly part of what happens. And it can be amazingly powerful."

In a recent case, she brought together a joyrider and the daughter of the woman he had killed when he lost control of the car. "He had been in prison for six years... It took a lot of hard work to get them together... She told him: 'I hate you for what you have done. You've stolen my mother from me and you've wrecked my life.' She showed him photographs of the grandchildren her mother would never see... They slowly began to talk. He saw the real damage he'd done and he began to show remorse... Right at the end of the meeting, she said to him: 'Nothing makes sense of this unless you now make something of your life.'" The young man is now released, and has not offended again. Yet work like Ms Tudor's is treated by many as a "soft option". Forgiveness is seen as the prerogative of the weak.

Which is the opposite of the truth, according to Camilla Carr. In 1997, she and her partner were kidnapped in Chechnya and held hostage for 14 months. She was repeatedly raped. "Afterwards I felt fear and anger, and the desire for revenge," she says, "but I also knew that I had to try and understand the man who raped me and why he had acted as he had... Working through it is very hard and takes a long time, but... I have finally come to a place of forgiveness... Forgiving has brought me well-being." Ms Carr now works with The Forgiveness Project in schools and prisons. She says her work shows her daily that the capacity to forgive is as much a part of the human psyche as the desire for revenge.

Denying that forgiveness is part of our make-up risks rejecting our own humanity. Part of our obsession with prison is wanting to separate prisoners from the rest of society, to treat them as not fully human. The prison walls are a symbol of that. And many released prisoners find in our unforgiving society that the walls continue to exist - in their minds and those of the public. Their remorse appears to count for nothing. Yet, surely, this is part of what prison is meant to be about? To prompt reflection and remorse.

In Hindley's case, for instance, one excuse proffered for the refusal to follow Longford's lead in forgiveness was that she hadn't demonstrated any remorse. This was untrue. Through him, I visited her on several occasions and each time she showed it in abundance. She even wrote to the families of her victims to say it. But we preferred to overlook it. For once you start to give weight to remorse, it becomes harder not to respond with some degree of forgiveness.

One day every prisoner's sentence will come to an end and they will have to reintegrate into society. We can continue to demonise them and drive them to do precisely what we don't want them to do - reoffend. Or we can try to show them a measure of forgiveness. It's not about rolling out a red carpet, but something much more instinctive and, ultimately, selfish.

The benefits are so obvious that it can only be collective madness that we are prepared to dismiss forgiveness as the resort of oddball God-botherers. And we called Lord Longford "loony"?

'Longford' is on Channel 4 at 9pm on 26 October. The Forgiveness Project is at www.theforgivenessproject.com