Prison Still Works

Unelected bureaucrats and trendy do-gooders at the Prison Inspectorate continue to criticise and carp at the offender warehousing industry, despite ever more profound levels of managerial buccaneering. Having published a report last year warning of worsening conditions at HMP Pentonville, the inspectorate has now, with typically tedious lack of imaginative innovativity, made further complaints along the same lines. Inmates are shut away for most of the time with nothing to do, without lighting or hot water; few environments could be a better preparation for the rigours of homelessness, the gig economy and Universal Credit, yet the inspectorate implies that the offender warehousing industry should somehow concern itself with maintaining human dignity. Violence and drug use are on the rise, and self-harm is a daily occurrence; yet when the problem self-resolves as suicide the inspectorate complains that the management's response is inadequate and lacklustre. It says much for the decline in moral standards that nothing will satisfy the unnatural lusts of the Prison Inspectorate short of abolishing the all-important punishment component and giving ordinary inmates the same soft option as large-scale fraudsters, tax dodgers, corporate mass murderers and other wealth creators.