http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/a ... ge_id=1770





I liked this comment though, it was much more balanced than the article:

I'm far from an expert on anything like this, but I do think that part of the problem is that prison can be too easy some people. Far from the same way that the Mail will be implying, but if you've been in and out of prison for all your life, I suspect there's a very real possibility that prison life will be at least a far more stable life than freedom for some people.

In no way am I suggesting that prisons should be made in any way "harsher", but that there should be more emphasis on rehabilitation, both in prison and when people are free. I don't have answers for how this could be done (if I did then I'd be heading for a career in politics rather than writing on forums as a reason to avoid doing revision!). I think that article has some valid points hidden beneath the reporting, but also some complete crap. I don't know if that's from being taken out of context by the Mail, but I suspect it is.

I agree, for some people I would think its better on the inside than the out so the speak. What made me angry about this DM post was the portryal of prisons as some sort of holiday camp, when its far from it and the lumping together of different categories of prisons and prisoner (common sense would say to me a cat. D prison, for example, would be more like normal life than a cat. A one). Reading the prison guy's comments I agreed with him for the first half of the article then it seemed to go of track with the 'lock more up' approach.

As a side note someone with more experience of prisons once told me prisoners have to pay for luxeries such as TVs rather than just being 'handed' to them, does anyone know if this is true?

Also this bit annoyed me:



Why the obsession with those two (or their partners)??



You don't need answers, just smoke and mirrors

I believe they usually do, with the money earned from their day work. It varies, though. Many prisons have communal TVs, and the low-risk ones allow prisoners to bring quite a lot of things in.



I did a short course on criminology [NB: all these figures are from Scottish prisons, but England and Wales are not enormously different], and this is one of the major issues of sentencing. The majority of prison sentences are very short (average prison sentence, excluding life: 10 months) but 49% of released prisoners are back inside within 2 years. Longer sentences could allow prisoners to be rehabilitated more effectively, giving treatments for mental disorders and drug problems (which 70% of prisoners have) more time to take effect in a safe environment. With attempts to cut prison costs, more of these people are being removed earlier from prison into community programs. Frequently, however, these people are imprisoned because they'd be unable to address their problems on the outside - unemployed and in poor health, without supportive friends or family.

I get so irritated every time I read an article about how prisons are hotels which waste tax money to pamper one-dimensional criminal stereotypes. The average prisoner (who's in for minor thefts, petty assaults, drug offences and, overwhelmingly, nonpayment of fines) is disproportionately likely to be unemployed, to have been in care as a child, to have been expelled from school, to be HIV-positive and to have attempted suicide. The majority (and almost all female prisoners) are mentally disturbed and addicted to drugs and only barely literate. And guess who's paying? They are. Again. Leaving prison with no money, no job and no training, to be recycled back into the system.

Prison can be a safe and relatively comfortable environment, certainly compared to living on the street, etc. So of course if your environment is really shit you'll be committing crime to get into jail. I don't see how this reflects badly on prisons (in terms of the general quality of life the environment provides, not rehabilitation, etc.) - to be honest, you'd hope that in a civilised society we wouldn't incarcerate people in dangerous hellholes. Even Peter Hitchens thinks this. Snowden's right about short sentencing buggering up rehabilitation and all that, I've been doing a criminology module this year and we've been learning the same kind of stuff.

I was talking to a magistrate recently, and he reckons that if you have to send someone to prison for a minor offence, four to eight weeks is the best sentence to give out. Because for those four or eight weeks it's fucking terrifying, you won't trust anyone, your head will be swimming with scare stories and stuff and, most crucially, you won't have any time to make any real friends. Once you've been there a couple of months you'll make contacts, if you're really lucky you'll meet someone who'll teach you how to be a better criminal etc etc. Leave after a year, they won't be that bothered about the prospect of coming back, they'll know how to work the system. Leave after two months, they'll never want to see the inside of a prison again.

At least that was his take on it.

To the article:



Or maybe that's because they realise escaping from prison is a really stupid thing to do, that only makes your punishment worse in the long run?

For an expert on prisons he doesn't half speak a load of bollocks.

I think that's a very interesting point. A lot of people (not isolated to mail or sun readers) think that people should go to jail for ever for stealing bread, and tut and sigh at short sentences. But they don't really think it through. In fact I would hazard a guess that if given a million years they wouldn't think of what your magistrate said.

Aye, like my brother, jesus wept. People seem to equate harsher sentencing with the removal of any kind of problem that prison breeds. Because it's 'harsher', and therefore more likely to yield a result. Apparently.

This is website front page news, is it also front page on the print one today?





bloody liberal academics

Rarely do I get really, really, really pissed of but some of these comments are helping me:















What a bunch of total pricks

I trust that those waxing lyrical for the return of the bucket and blanket (hello Weems) for law breakers will be happy to see those poor "otherwise law abiding" dangerous drivers and council tax defaulters subjected to the same regime.

The prison bloke was on the radio this morning.

His argument was a lack of trained prison staff to supervise proper rehabilitation programmes.

Some how it has all been misquoted and "reported" as this to suit someone elses agenda.

Even by the quotes of his the DM used in their article I could see he wasen't a 'lock 'em all up' type.

Further reading into the 'dealer breaks into prison' side of this story on the bbc site (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7366258.stm) shows that the prison in question was-



So maybe prisoners there thought that trying to escape (if this was possible) would be a worse deal as they would no doubt be caught and then have their sentence increased and/or sent to a higher category prison, and since I would think most cat. C prisoners wouldn't be in for a long time this was to much of a risk to take. This is only speculation though.

Because, as we all know, there was NO CRIME at all in the 19th Century when prison regimes where considerably harsher: often no talking, no tobacco, hard labour etc., not to mention the threat of captial punishmen.

Although to be fair you could probably write what J Weems et al know about criminal justice in the 19th century on the back of a matchbox...

What a load of buffoons!

America has the death penalty and much tougher sentences than us, and yet the murder rate is 3x that of the uk and 3.5x that of England.
I would look up general crime stats too, but I can't be arsed. I'd guess if they have problems killing each other than they'd have no problems mugging each other either.

Crime is a very complicated thing and it pisses me off that a lot of people, aided by the papers, think that longer jail sentences and capital punishment will just stop all crime overnight.