Friday, November 16, 2018
ON. THE. FUCKING. DOT.
99% of published articles on prisons are lethally genocidally wrong. A few are only mortally wrong.
Here's THE ONLY ONE that is PRECISELY EXACTLY TOTALLY CORRECT ABOUT EVERYTHING.
It's written by Ann Widdecombe, who was formerly the British minister for prisons. Even more remarkable. How did such a MIRACULOUSLY SANE person end up as an official?
What does CORRECT ABOUT EVERYTHING mean?
Two samples are enough.
It is a fact of penal life that people coming into prison have already been through the route of probation/community service/supervision orders etc, none of which have deterred the convict from further crime. Alternatively they may not have been through such a course because the crime was either too serious or too often repeated. In other words, prison picks up the people who are either more persistent or more serious offenders, so naturally the recidivism rate is higher. There is nothing surprising in that.and
Obviously 'A Journey of Hope' is not oversupplied with detail, so what we have here is an evidence-free zone in which old arguments are trotted out but which, above all, disappoints in its promise of suggesting a “genuinely rehabilitative environment”. So let me summarise what one of those actually looks like: a daily routine of work and education, being able to move about without fear, to live in a drug-free environment, having prospects on release. That is what I asked for in 1999. Yet in 20 years the state has gone backwards instead of forwards and now the Church throws its hands up in holy horror and proclaims that the answer to getting prisons right is not to use them. No, it is to reform them with a sense of purpose and will. Sadly those characteristics are in short supply.USEFUL WORK. SECURITY for the trainables. DRUG-FREE. PROSPECTS ON RELEASE. SENSE OF PURPOSE AND WILL. That's EVERYTHING, neatly summarized in a few paragraphs. And the other side of EVERYTHING is "backwards instead of forwards" and "the answer is not to use them." The CORRECT RECIPE has ALWAYS BEEN AVAILABLE. It's not new or mysterious. Unfortunately it's never used. Same as every other fucking pile of shit. We have the data from 50000 years of experimentation. We know what works. We do the fucking opposite EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Labels: infinite evil, infinite GOOD
¶ 10:40 AM
