A women can’t even carry a can of pepper spray in this damn country.

Seriously, it is my understanding that the only people that spend any significant time in prison are those who have committed serious crime. If you go by the media reporting on verdicts and custodial sentences – I believe it is very difficult to actually get one.

Finally I don’y think prisons are a bad concept – but if they are undermanned so inmates can have a 24/7 party, or don’t offer whatever is required for rehabilitation – then obviously they are failing in their target – but its not the concept of prison that’s wrong. You can draw a parrelal between that and the “Care in the community” strategy that was created when mental health asylums were closed as they were deemed not politically correct anymore. What happened was mentally ill people were left in isolation in a community which didn’t care at all!

Criminals aren’t afraid of the government. They’re afraid of an armed victim.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1u0Byq5Qis&feature=related

Indeed, luxury items such as TV & video games should be forbidden. Not only are they a bad use of taxpayers’ money, they do the prisoner so good whatsoever. Far better to have them studying, working (my brother’s local prison has its own farm, for example) & generally doing worthwhile stuff & being offered some vague hope of rebuilding their lives when they come out.

Although I generally view Jackart as something of a cunt, I appreciated this:
http://brackenworld.blogspot.com/2009/01/surprisingly-simple-policy-to-make.html

By all means, let’s build more prisons, but make them smaller and with a lower number of inmates per prison guard. If you did that, I reckon you’d see a significant decrease in the smuggling of drugs, a lower incidence of prisoners copping a fix when they should be serving their punishment and maybe, just maybe, greater success in helping those prisoners who don’t want to return to crime when they’re released.

But as I am sure you have gathered the implied question was more to do with risk assessment, an activity that is hardly a science at the best of times?

So an honest question – who gets to make the call (on risk to the public)?
And if it goes wrong what are the consequences for those who make such judgements (assuming more and more criminals would be let out under this new type of system)?

Managing risk, especially in some of our inner city ghettos is not an easy task – ask any front line social worker involved in child protection work.

If you had a chance to look at my earlier post [28] you would see that Mournian typifies the kind of needy, immature, and volatile addict that many are concerned about once at liberty to roam our streets.

The last great project to close down public institutions led to a body of opinion that regarded the care of psychiatric patients (in the community) as something of a lottery – some may have benefit but many others did not.

He killed her five days later. ”
Now what is the significance of this. Would the extra 18 days have properly rehabilitated him so that he wouldnt have come out 18 days later and done exactly the same thing?

While the Guardian even claims that some crims prefer to be IN prison rather than out (due to favourable exchange rates for certain commodities – the market in action so to speak)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/aug/17/prisonsandprobation.drugsandalcohol

God knows how community elders (or similar august body) will adjudicate in such cases.

I’m always sceptical about cross-cultural comparisons of criminality anyway, there are generally too many variables to make the comparisons informative.

“No, most people in those categories don’t breed criminals but the origins of most criminals can’t simply be ignored as if it were somehow irrelevant.”

Agree, but look at the stats the other way round – i.e the majority of people in prison are from single parent families/the care system.

Is this becasue they “invested in communities” in the years before World War I?

Think about it- women who don’t fucking want to have children, if they were forced to have them, many of whom ill-equipped: is it a surprise that so many of their offspring get into trouble? If Baby P’s mother, for example, had decided that she couldn’t cope, how many right-wingers would have said she was obliged to give birth?

You can see the link between single parent families, low intelligence & crime. No, most people in those categories don’t breed criminals but the origins of most criminals can’t simply be ignored as if it were somehow irrelevant.

It isn’t pretty but nor is violent crime or the home environments of children whose parents don’t give a fuck whether they live or die.

Interstingly if you dare to suggest that the most obvious environmental correlate of criminality (being from a single parent family) should be socially or fiscally discourated, Godwins laws tends to be invoked fairly quickly.

None of what’s being suggested here is new – the idea of community based solutions in one guise of other has been doing the rounds since at least the 1960s. The results in the past have been “mixed” (generally effective for about 30% of the throughput to most programmes, about the same as no intervention at all) and it is very, very expensive.

Frank assessment by who, school ? family ? friends ?

Its hardly a mystery why the majority of individuals turn to crime.
One significant group are those who develop one type of addiction or another to cope with overwhelming psychological insecurity. Such individuals may revert to robbing, prostitution, or even acts of violence to fund their habit – decriminalisation would go some way to alleviating this problem, as well as strategically placed state run opium dens to facilitate less antisocial forms of drug use.

Now another significant population are those who have never engaged with the education system, and come from families where parenting skills are conspicuous by their absence – since by definition they are chronically needy and immature they will only ever develop limited insight into the effects of their criminal behaviour on others.
Meaningful rehabilitation of such individuals is nigh on impossible because of the intractable nature of their problems, not to mention the kings ransom that would be required to provide both material support while helping them to recognise the connection between their criminal deeds and effect on the wider community.

Already hampered by a criminal conviction such characters are unlikely to have either the skills, or more importantly the motivation to overcome the kind of adversity that will give them a fighting chance to compete with better equipped job seekers in a shrinking market.

Very occasionally – for example following the horrific death of a three year old by two school boys, attentive psychologists, new identities, state funded housing, etc are all afforded to offenders in the hope of achieving some sort of redemption but the emotional and financial cost of such intervention is prohibitive.

My guess, (and that’s all it is) is that most teachers could tell you which 14, or 15yr old are most risk of offending – while some teachers would have such concerns at an even earlier age?

It seems divided between those who treat crime as something that is purely due to intrinsically ‘bad’ criminal individuals, and those who believe that social ills have solutions that lie in inclusion and creating non-criminal opportunities in disadvantaged communities.

I am by no means an expert, but as a film-maker who has worked on a couple of films about the criminal justice system, it seems to me that almost everyone who has had any contact with the prison system belongs to the latter group, whereas most policy is aimed at re-enforcing the ill-informed prejudices of the former group.

Recently I worked on a film about Prisoners’ Families, and this brought home to me how wrong headed our attitude is to criminal justice,

Most crime is a community problem. The building blocks of communities are individual families. More families in the UK are faced with the trauma, stigma and financial challenges accompanying a close relative’s arrest and sentence than anywhere in Europe. (The UK prison population has risen by 30% in the last 10 years to 92, 000.)

The impact of the arrest and sentencing of a parent on children can be severe.

Children of prisoners are three times more likely to suffer mental health problems and delinquency than their peers. 160,000 children a year have a parent taken into custody, more than experience the divorce of a parent.

Research shows that a prisoner who has a strong family unit to return to is less likely to re-offend. Those prisoners visited by a partner or family member have a 25% lower re-offending rate than those whose families do not support them. Sadly, one in four men and half of all women on remand receive no visits from their family.

Crime happens in the community and needs to be solved there, rather than stigmatising individuals and their families and sending people away, there needs to be a frank assessment of why these individuals are failing, and an attempt to prevent their children suffering the same fate. This is not altruism, this is pragmatism and a social responsibility.

You can find out more about prisoners’ families – and watch some moving films here:

http://www.familiesontrial.org/

So then, Matt, would you like to name which particular commentors here live in Islington, or are you incapable of doing any such thing?

“It’s easy for the middle class islington dwelling contributors to LC to pontificate about how “the community” should support people like that, they don’t, and never will, live in the communities that have to.”

Aye, ’tis true, we really do all live in Islington. In fact, we spend most of our evenings sat cross-legged on plush persian rugs, nibbling goji berries, drinking wine from the Rothschilds and chortling at the barbarisms of the masses, all whilst happily cocooned in the safest gated community in Britain.

But here’s the thing…

In the 12 months to May 09, the Met recorded 29,518 crimes in Islington. That includes 8 homicides, 5,822 acts of violence against a person, 62 rapes, 198 other sexual offences, 1,090 robberies, 3,007 burglaries, 78 gun crimes, 3,359 motor vehicle crimes and 1,572 domestic crimes. (http://bit.ly/7fGgA)

So when the area you live in experiences nearly 30,000 crimes a year, I reckon you’ve earned the right to contribute some thoughts about the criminal justice system, regardless of whether some presumptuous thread spoiler starts to dribble some drab cliches all over his keyboard in a (failed) attempt to claim you ‘just don’t get it’.

Regrettably, & in defiance of all logic, this government is going the other way in its assault on currently legal highs.

Prohibition only causes crime.

But that’s a false correlation – how do you know they wouldn’t “re-offend” (as in they would have carried on offending uninterrupted) if they hadn’t been in prison ????

This is why the “prison doesn’t work” argument is bollocks – it assumes a causal link between recidivism (look it up asquith) and prison, rather than inherent criminality and offending.