PRISON. DOES IT WORK? IS IT TOO HARD? OR TOO SOFT?
As I understand it more people are locked up in prison, per head in the UK than anywhere else in Europe and many other places around the world. Some say this is too much! and I agree wholeheartedly, we really need to lock up a lot less people!! we really do, and it’s costing us a fortune to keep them.
I was watching one of those topical chat TV programmes this morning I think it was called ‘The Big Questions’, there were a number of people in the studio from both sides, ex prisoners and other experts including one of my favorites David Fraser the author of ‘A Land Fit For Criminals’.
There were a number of long haired middle aged liberals who wanted to hug criminals instead of lock them up, they were more concerned about the criminal than the victims of crime and to be quite frank made me want to lock them up with them.
The argument was mainly between those who think like me and that while a criminal is locked up he or she wont be able to commit further offences against me or you.
And there were those that think locking criminals up for anything less serious than murder or rape is wrong and that we just need to give them help. Be it help with their drug problem or other behavioural problem.
I say that part of the reason for having more crims locked up is that prison is too nice a place to be!! I was chatting with an old jail bird only last week and he was telling me how he was locked up many years ago in various prisons around the country and how he would have to slop out daily and that there was nothing in his cell to keep him entertained. He said that he had a long gap between stretches and that on a more recent stretch he was shown to his cell with a television, sink and toilet. Kettle and supplies of tea and coffee. He was saying how he could not believe how cushy things had got in his absence. If prisoners had someone on the outside who were willing they could have playstations sent in for their amusement.
I think this is why prisons are full!! people want to go there!!
Another bleeding heart liberal was banging on about how people are committing suicide in prison due to overcrowding and poor facilities! well ain’t that a shame now.
We the public have the right to be protected from criminals and we ain’t being protected at the moment are we! the same people are committing the majority of the crime. Probation is a waste of time because nothing happens to criminals when they breach their probation anyway.
Prison needs to be a bad place to be!! if they feel they want to kill themselves rather than remain there, then there ain’t much we can do about it really. I mean it’s their fault that they are there in the first place.
November 18, 2007 at 8:30 pm
“As I understand it more people are locked up in prison, per head in the UK than anywhere else in Europe and many other places around the world.”
As David Fraser points out in his book, this is because we have much higher crime rates than other countries.
He also points out that the liberal criiminal justice policies currently in force in Britain were tried in America in the 60’s and 70’s. The result was that cities like New York and LA degenerated into war zones with some of the highest murder rates in the world,
The backlash during the 80’s resulted in shoplifters receiving whole life sentences and production line executions in places like Texas.
November 18, 2007 at 10:16 pm
You are right, they must be too soft these days, people are no longer afraid of doing time in prison. And it is the same faces who appear in court each week/month etc ….its pathetic, no wonder they carry on with their lives of crime, nothing bad happens to them when they do.
November 18, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Prison might work a lot better if prisoners weren’t able to get drugs while they were inside and weren’t let out until they were clean.
Also if they weren’t as nice. What purpose does a TV serve for a prisoner? Give them books instead, they might learn something useful.
As I see it, the prison should serve three purposes. Firstly they must deter some people from committing crime. Secondly they must be places we can put people who aren’t safe to be among ordinary nice people. Thirdly they must be places where people who are, for want of a better word, screwed up, can be put in order that they can be fixed.
Ultimately though we’ll be wanting to stop people wanting to be such scumbags in the first place, and I really don’t have a clue how to do that.
November 19, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Prison needs to be a place that persistent criminals do not want to go back to.
I get fed up of the liberal views of people who say we should provide them with some form of training or rehabilitation because prison does not work.
They fail to understand that prison is not the first choice of sentence, it follows from various orders, probation community service and other failing measures. Prison stands at the 4th, 5th or even more conviction level and there are an endless stream of reasons why people should not go to prison.
The real reason is because the costs involved of buiilding, equipping and staffing such places make it easier not to build them and add an ever increasing burden on the current system. This is short sighted and driven by people who are not interested in the way crime inflicts suffering on the majority of law abiding and decent people.
It will not change. It will only get worse and the politicians will try to convince the population that they have answers, will make a change for the better and will spend umpteem millions of pounds on rubbish. at the same time they will continue to ‘invest’ a staggering sum on foreign investments and financial support yet disregard the welfare and protection of their own country-people.
This is part of the reason as to why so many people choose to leave the country.
Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime ? Again, I think not.
November 19, 2007 at 2:12 pm
I think it was the late great Lord Denning who said “Prison is voluntary, persons who commit crime volunteer to go to jail if convicted” No Crime, No Prison. or the old saw ” If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime”
November 19, 2007 at 5:01 pm
I haven’t actually met many criminals who found the prospect of jail a deterent. Most I have spoke to, say that jail is very easy. Roof over your head, fed 3 meals a day.
They get more than pensioners do. Pensioners worry about what they can buy to eat, how long to put the heating/electric on etc.
Prisoners don’t. They can sit and watch telly, play their playstations.
Most of them hate being locked up for a weekend in Police cells. Stuck in a cell, all alone, no drugs, no booze, no telly, no playstation – just 4 walls to stare at.
We need to get tough on those who commit crime. We should start looking at how the yanks are now doing it. Jail over there is very unpleasant.
Or, alternatively, as one of my prisoners said last week, he wasn’t deterred by the ‘threat’ of a £100 or £200 fine. He thought that we should bring back birching/stocks etc.
Imagine being in the stocks all weekend in the town centre for all to see, with a big placard around your neck telling all what you had done wrong.
Medieval ? Yes, but so are some of the crimes these folk commit.
Match the penalty to the crime.
November 19, 2007 at 5:14 pm
I was in San Francisco recently and visited Alcatraz. What a bloody awful place it must have been for the cons. Tiny cells, lock downs, no TV or radio and when the wind was in the right direction they could hear the music and merryment from the Yacht Club on the shore at New Years Eve just to really rub it in.
The Library was a very large room and well stocked as I understand it.
They even tried to escape from this prison.
November 19, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Murderers, Rapists and paedophiles should be shot that would free up some space the rest we should just chuck on an island – drop in enough food to feed half of them every week and let them fight to the death.
Sorry too militant I like the thought of hugging each one – thatll solve the problem.
November 20, 2007 at 3:33 pm
There has been a series on TV (Virgin1 I think) called Brits Behind Bars.
A group of scroats who had never been to prison were sent to Arizona’s Tent City jail run by Jo Arpaio.
Why can’t our proisone be run in the same way?
Only educational TV allowed, no wieght rooms, no computer games, chain gangs to do community clean up work, and very, very strict.
The bit I liked was when Sheriff Jo was saing how the inmates wanted exercise facilities. He gave each tent an exercise bike. He said, “If they want electric light, someone has to get some exercise. Why should the State have to pay for their light”.
Why can’t we have that attitude over here?
November 21, 2007 at 6:39 pm
The lack of a weight room would be a start to begin with. How many young scrawny lads finally go to prisoner after robbing their 20th old lady just to go inside, hit the weights and get three square meals? When they come out they’re the same old criminal with the same intent to rob old ladies but this time they’re muscled up so they can really hurt people as well as robbing them.
The system works!
November 21, 2007 at 8:13 pm
It is too soft and clearly does not work judging by my regular clientelle. There are so many other options though by the time prison is considered that have already become immune to the system
November 22, 2007 at 9:53 pm
I saw something on the paper the other day about how people came out of prison having put a lot of weight whilst in there. They must be having a good life, no wonder people want to go in…
November 24, 2007 at 2:42 am
I heard that some prison officers had to wear softer sounding shoes as their normal shoes made noise as they walked keeping the crims awake…………
November 25, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Big Fella, I would make them wear hobnail boots and whistle while they work. I heard this story too!!
December 17, 2007 at 5:06 am
Bread. Water.
Wait.
Just Water.
No.
Actually.
Would criminals make a nutrient dense compost?
December 23, 2007 at 1:30 am
Back in the seventies I used to have the occasional and pleasant converstion with one of the better known train robbers who had plenty of form prior to the big one. and he always said to me that the do gooders held too much sway and that prisons were too soft. TV’s Hi Fi and all that. They were not the deterent they ought to be.
Some years later in my businees career I used the prison service for its availability of labour and the work that it could handle and during my occasional visits over coffee with the warders it was openly acknowledged that drugs were commonly in use – it keeps them quiet they said – and that cells were raided in rotation with a loss of 45 days remission.
A howitzer would have been difficult, but I could have taken anything reasonably small, guns,drugs etc, into the prison without detection.
November 23, 2009 at 7:36 pm
The jails are definately too soft, they want more programs to “rehabilitate”. The criminals complain that the system is too rough on them, they are constant management problems because the human rights are pushed to the absolute max. They come in bulk up and then are major issues for the staff. Why not have skinny or fat inmates? That way they are less of a management problem. The less thinigs that they are given means less things that they can make, and the less stuff that guards have to search through. It would be great to tear through a cell, just dumping everything out, without hearing, “Hey that’s my stuff.” Then being told by the management that you need to respect the inmates better. Look at the edmonton military detention barracks, now that is how prison should be run.