But Was It Tough Enough?

Deterring crime with ever longer sentences in ever harsher conditions is, of course, a particular decency of our great Nation, whose return to the populist glories of public hanging and flogging is prevented largely by its basic and fundamental lack of democracy. Nevertheless, an enemy of the people has taken it upon himself to imply that a prison in which a teenager can give birth alone and untended, and lose the child, is in some way none too soft. The coroner rebuked the prison and the local NHS privatisation trust for having no plan to deal with the labour and for providing no professional standard of midwifery, while making no allowance for the needless expense that such luxuries would have entailed. He also noted a "national absence of policies and pathways for pregnant women in custody," while the usual extremists were quick to proclaim that some people should hardly be locked up at all. Such libels are all the more unpatriotic in that, besides being so deficient in family values as to be a care-leaver, the miscreant had confessed to robbery and is of the Windrush race, which for the purposes of British justice makes her practically an asylum seeker.