Brain Cells

Among the jolly legislative treats lined up for the Head Boy's home stretch is the biggest overhaul of prisons since the nineteenth century; although it remains an open question whether the system is to be dragged into the twenty-first century or allowed to slide back to the eighteenth. The bill is the work of Michael Gove, the jabbering homunculus who thought that the best way to reform the education system was to antagonise everyone in it except Michael Gove and to put out a special edition of the Bible signed by himself. Among Gove's proposals for prison reform is a programme whereby our massively overcrowded prisons will stand more or less empty for most of the week and then become massively overcrowded at the weekends, to the ineffable moral improvement of the inmates. Presumably Gove (who, as we know, has trouble with figures), thinks that this is the way to ensure that the average number of inmates becomes better than average.

Meanwhile Gove's predecessor, the well-known public intellectual Chris Graybeing, has denied that overcrowding is at record levels, and blames everything on "legal highs", a category which in the Graybeing pharmacopoeia includes such moral hazards as books, telephone calls and exercise. Graybeing expressed his hearty approval of the bill, which seems a reasonable indication of just how far the Gove approach will go in ameliorating the problems Graybeing himself exacerbated with such hobnail-brained enthusiasm. Fortunately, Gove also intends to give "greater autonomy" to governors, so that they can take more of the blame when things go wrong.