New Labour, New Slammer
The Minister of Freedom, Charles Carde, has been talking nonsense, it appears. Well, that makes a change.
Mr Carde has been efficiently taken to task by the director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, a charity which "advocates more work in communities to prevent reoffending and 'restorative justice' schemes to make offenders face their victims". Of Mr Carde's latest eructation on prison reform: "It is nonsense," said the happily-surnamed Frances Crook. "I hope he has a better grip on his brief by the time he addresses our conference in November."
In an effort to ease the infamous overcrowding in our prisons, which adds the virtue of British squalor to the effectiveness of British discipline, Mr Carde's predecessor imposed a cap of eighty thousand on the number of prisoners incarcerated in England and Wales. As the number of prisoners, not counting those detained without trial, has now got within three thousand of the forbidden number, Mr Carde has decided to take decisive action to remedy the situation. Mr Carde has decided to abolish the cap. Mr Carde is "not convinced a cap [is] the right policy". Mr Carde is not convinced that limiting the numbers of prisoners will keep the numbers of prisoners down.
Instead, Mr Carde wishes to build swathes of "community prisons" to enable prisoners to maintain contact with their relatives and friends. While this is not in itself a bad idea, if prison populations are to be allowed to continue rising it seems doubtful that even Mr Carde will be able to implement the programme as effectively as might be wished. The "community prisons" will provide more spaces, but the Government's continuing moist ménage á trois with the tabloids and custodial sentencing will mean that there are more people to fill the spaces up. Prisoners will simply be shunted to whatever prisons are able to hold them, as now, and there will be no movement on the issue except possibly a small upward surge in the bank balances of any private companies the Government employs to aid the redemption of Britain's wandering sheep.
Mr Carde is, of course, a prominent member of a government whose idea of legal accountability is to blame the law for being too stuffy and inflexible to encompass the vision filling Blair's moral bomb-sights. In the interests of ethical purity and fiscal prudence, it is surely time to ask whether such creatures are redeemable; and if not, to find some way of rendering them harmless. To apply Mr Carde's own harsh but doubtless well-meaning version of British justice, as presently applicable to Muslims and other luckless duskies: if left to walk around free, who knows what they might do next?
Mr Carde has been efficiently taken to task by the director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, a charity which "advocates more work in communities to prevent reoffending and 'restorative justice' schemes to make offenders face their victims". Of Mr Carde's latest eructation on prison reform: "It is nonsense," said the happily-surnamed Frances Crook. "I hope he has a better grip on his brief by the time he addresses our conference in November."
In an effort to ease the infamous overcrowding in our prisons, which adds the virtue of British squalor to the effectiveness of British discipline, Mr Carde's predecessor imposed a cap of eighty thousand on the number of prisoners incarcerated in England and Wales. As the number of prisoners, not counting those detained without trial, has now got within three thousand of the forbidden number, Mr Carde has decided to take decisive action to remedy the situation. Mr Carde has decided to abolish the cap. Mr Carde is "not convinced a cap [is] the right policy". Mr Carde is not convinced that limiting the numbers of prisoners will keep the numbers of prisoners down.
Instead, Mr Carde wishes to build swathes of "community prisons" to enable prisoners to maintain contact with their relatives and friends. While this is not in itself a bad idea, if prison populations are to be allowed to continue rising it seems doubtful that even Mr Carde will be able to implement the programme as effectively as might be wished. The "community prisons" will provide more spaces, but the Government's continuing moist ménage á trois with the tabloids and custodial sentencing will mean that there are more people to fill the spaces up. Prisoners will simply be shunted to whatever prisons are able to hold them, as now, and there will be no movement on the issue except possibly a small upward surge in the bank balances of any private companies the Government employs to aid the redemption of Britain's wandering sheep.
Mr Carde is, of course, a prominent member of a government whose idea of legal accountability is to blame the law for being too stuffy and inflexible to encompass the vision filling Blair's moral bomb-sights. In the interests of ethical purity and fiscal prudence, it is surely time to ask whether such creatures are redeemable; and if not, to find some way of rendering them harmless. To apply Mr Carde's own harsh but doubtless well-meaning version of British justice, as presently applicable to Muslims and other luckless duskies: if left to walk around free, who knows what they might do next?
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