Lock him up

Have to say, I’m getting a little weary of watching Ken Clarke smirking at various bunches of skaghead offenders and telling them he wants them out of prison, pronto, so that they can stab your wife and crap on your living room carpet. The latest of Ken’s media events inside a nick involved him hearing from prisoners about how prison wasn’t really the right place for them. He beamed back at them and agreed before politely requesting a drug dealer to “please stop selling lots of drugs to people”. I’m sure that did the trick, you deluded old buffer.

Ken’s been peddling a bunch of misleading stats about how prison doesn’t “work”. The rightish think-tank Civitas has countered this preposterous allegation with stats drawn from the EU, which seems to suggest that it does work, or works better than anything else we’ve tried. Here’s an article from the Civitas director from a couple of years back which gives the relevant stats for England.

It’s one thing to argue that we haven’t got enough money to lock people up – although the corollary might be that we haven’t got enough money NOT to lock people up, given the social and economic cost – but another entirely to claim, conveniently, that we shouldn’t lock them up even if we had the money to do so.