Re: It's time for politicians to take a radical approach to criminal justice

On Aug 31, 10:22 am, "amused onlooker" <n...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
<patrick.bar...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:1188483802.957712.132100@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



On Aug 30, 2:35 am, "MCP" <gf010w5...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article2906316.ece

By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Published: 30 August 2007

Britain's prison system is on the verge of collapse. Our crumbling jails
have reached breaking point, prisoners are being released early and now,
for
the first time in their history, the men and women paid to guard the
inmates
have left their posts.

It's a desperate situation made worse by the grim truth that prison has
failed to stop inmates re-offending. And suicide rates remain alarmingly
high, a fact brought home by the death of another inmate yesterday.

How long can politicians continue to tell us that the only way to avert
this
crisis is by building more prisons? Britain already imprisons more people
per capita than any other country in Western Europe and if the trend
continues the number of inmates will pass 100,000 in the next decade.

Labour's response is to pledge 10,000 more prison places by 2012. The
Tories
have committed to using prison ships and disused army camps so that all
inmates see out their sentences.

For many years Britain's penal reformers have been warning of where these
increasingly draconian policies will lead.

Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, says we
are
using a Victorian invention to tackle a 21st-century problem: "Prison
does
nothing to deter offending. Yet our obsession with placing punishment...
over cutting crime has led to gross overcrowding."

Justice, the human rights group, says it is impossible to have a sensible
debate about penal reform because it has been become bogged down in
"electioneering rhetoric and swamped by legislative hyperactivity".

This week an ICM poll showed that only 40 per cent of the public thought
the
government should aim to send more criminals to prison, against 57 per
cent
who want to see other, non-custodial forms of punishment.

Now that politicians can see that radical alternatives to prison may no
longer alienate the electorate they have little excuse for not trying
something different.

I heard about a judge here who has been sentencing people to public
humiliation instead of jail for mino, nonviolent crimes and apparently
the reoffending rate is pretty low amongst the people he has
sentenced. I guess people value their reputation and ego more than
their free time.

The real answer to this problem is not creating so many criminals in the
first place. The book "The Garbage Generation" holds a big piece of the
puzzle in how to achieve that. But you'll never get anyone in either the
government or the mainstream media to touch those ideas with a bargepole.

In fact they seem to be doing everything possible to push our society in the
opposite direction. Wonder why that is?

http://www.fisheaters.com/garbagegeneration.html

I have a reasonable way to "read" now, audiobooks, and will "read"
"Garbage Generation" if they have it in audio.

Thanks MCP for highlighting this important men's issue. Like the Drug
War, the War on Crime began when the feminists took over the Left in
'72 and they happily worked hand in hand with the Right to wage a "War
on Men". This gave the Right the social control they needed for to
their rich clients and the feminists the power they needed to rule
over men.

We needn't concern ourselves with the crime issue, we need to storm
the fucking Bastille!!

Smitty

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