Helping Them to Harm Themselves

Although violence has reached record heights while staffing and budgets have attained an entirely coincidental low, Britain's prison system continues heroically to retain its all-important element of punishment. Ministers have always shied away from rehabilitation, education and suchlike namby-pamby concerns, for fear of being seen as soft on crimes other than the war and financial variety; and the advent of the Bullingdon Club and its little yellow enablers, who dropped all pretence of being concerned with anything other than shrinking the state and kicking the vulnerable, has simply accelerated this eminently British trend. One single prison for young offenders has achieved more than five hundred incidents of self-harm in six months, prompting indignation from the Trotskyite ideologues at the inspectorate of prisons and a gush of pious rhetoric from the chief executive of Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service; and this despite the obvious fact that letting offenders take the initiative and harm themselves is even cheaper and easier than hiring boot-boys of the calibre of those charming G4S people to do the job for them.