Prison Holiday

When you commit a crime, you deserve to be punished. This could mean a fine or prison. If the punishment is prison, you are being taken out of society to protect the public and this should also mean that you lose access to the best that life has to offer.

So when I read that prisoners recently had a party, I was stunned at how PC and stupidly liberal we have become – we can’t upset anyone, not even a criminal. Treating such people as misunderstood and in need of help misses the point, in my opinion. They need to be educated, to allow them to offer something back to society and also shocked into not breaking the law again.

Prison should simply be an awful place to live, to make sure that people never want to return. “We” are making prison easy and, from what I read on various websites, quite an agreeable place to live! I’m not quite advocating flogging, but let’s get back to basics with a removal of the pleasant things in life like TV, games consoles, ipods, etc. The prisoners should really want to get out – and we should make sure that they have the tools (i.e. education and skills) to get on with life when they have served their sentence. That way, we all win… the criminal doesn’t want to go back to prison and hopefully will avoid crime, and we get skilled people able to work so don’t need to rely on benefits.

And if you want to know how ludicrous it has become – one quote from a year or so ago jumped out at me on my google search: “Violent and disruptive prisoners are being paid by the Prison Service to play Scrabble, look after fish tanks and learn the guitar.”

Sounds more like a holiday to me...