Withhold Not Correction from the Child

Encouraging news for discipline fans: Tony's Family Paradise is jailing more children than ever before, some of them more than fifty miles from any opportunity to disrupt the home environment. Many of them have slept rough, have drug or drink problems, or are premature parents, in which case, of course, it serves them right and helps keep the homelessness figures conveniently low. In many cases, they have been in care or in children's homes, sponging off the state; while in prison they will, of course, have many opportunities to learn how to support themselves by relieving others of their property by stealth and/or violence, like responsible members of the international community. Perhaps thirty per cent of the girls and women claim to have been sexually abused, many have been subjected to governmentally non-approved forms of discipline, and many young offenders of both sexes have suffered loss, bereavement, and failed to pull themselves together. The chief inspector of prisons has expressed particular concern about "the number of young people with mental illness who end up in our prisons because of the lack of adequate provision outside", which shows a deplorable tendency to lend credence to the old "insanity plea" which these surplus-to-requirements human resources may easily have picked up by seeing evil criminals waltz out of court on probation with orders to live in a bail hostel but otherwise free to kill again. The Department of Unfitness for Purpose said that imprisoning children is, like everything else, "a last resort", and added that "of the 190,000 young people dealt with by police every year, only 4% were given custodial sentences". Four per cent of 190,000 is seven thousand, six hundred children per year; and it's working so well that the numbers are still going up.