Prisoners to be called 'men' and cells 'rooms' under new guidelines.

Nasher said:
The EU sets strict rules for how prisoners should be treated with "human rights". But gloss over homeless people.
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That's absolutely right and proper for where the EU should focus. I'm not suggesting that homeless people shouldn't have much more support, but people in custody of a state should have strong protections. This is something that we should be pressuring the UK government for, not criticising the EU.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
That's absolutely right and proper for where the EU should focus. I'm not suggesting that homeless people shouldn't have much more support, but people in custody of a state should have strong protections. This is something that we should be pressuring the UK government for, not criticising the EU.
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Why should they have protection when it's often their victims which are much worse off?

If someone goes to prison for a serious crime (murder, throwing acid in someone's face, etc), they shouldn't have any rights until they get released. We shouldn't be spending £10,000s a year housing the scum of society when the money is needed elsewhere.
 
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Nasher said:
Why should they have protection when it's often their victims which are much worse off?

If someone goes to prison for a serious crime (murder, throwing acid in someone's face, etc), they shouldn't have any rights until they get released. We shouldn't be spending £10,000s a year housing the scum of society when the money is needed elsewhere.
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Because their conviction is based on circumstantial evidence (some are obviously more cut-dry than others) and may even be fundamentally innocent, you are being morally repugnant here.

The fact is the more you spend elsewhere will just mean you're actually spending more overall as the criminal damages will have nullified it (society tends to shift along the lines of how we treat the dregs of society, it is a zero-sum game), or you've had to spend well too much on policing as a result.
 
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Nasher said:
Why should they have protection when it's often their victims which are much worse off?

If someone goes to prison for a serious crime (murder, throwing acid in someone's face, etc), they shouldn't have any rights until they get released. We shouldn't be spending £10,000s a year housing the scum of society when the money is needed elsewhere.
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  1. The whole idea of human rights is that they apply to all humans and not just people that can be arbitrarily picked. That especially includes people in state custody to prevent things like torture.
  2. Not everyone in prison has actually committed the crime they have been found guilty of. Miscarriages of justice happen and these people also need protections.
  3. Prison isn't just about punishment. The whole point of why Scandinavian type systems work so effectively is that the focus of the purpose of prison is centred around rehabilitation and not punishment.
  4. To call all prisoner "the scum of society" is incredibly simplistic and naive. What about the women who have been victims of domestic violence for decades, snap and kill their abusive husbands. Are they scum of society or victims in their own way too?
 
Burnsy2023 said:
  1. The whole idea of human rights is that they apply to all humans and not just people that can be arbitrarily picked. That especially includes people in state custody to prevent things like torture.
  2. Not everyone in prison has actually committed the crime they have been found guilty of. Miscarriages of justice happen and these people also need protections.
  3. Prison isn't just about punishment. The whole point of why Scandinavian type systems work so effectively is that the focus of the purpose of prison is centred around rehabilitation and not punishment.
  4. To call all prisoner "the scum of society" is incredibly simplistic and naive. What about the women who have been victims of domestic violence for decades, snap and kill their abusive husbands. Are they scum of society or victims in their own way too?
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Yet crime has been rising since we became a soft touch (especially violent crime), so it's not working. London is worse than it's ever been.
 
Nasher said:
Yet crime has been rising since we became a soft touch (especially violent crime), so it's not working. London is worse than it's ever been.
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Correlation does not equal causation. If indeed they even correlate. Violent has also been rising as we lose Local Policing Teams who are there to engage with potential offenders to prevent crime. I would suggest there is more likely to be a causal link there.
 
Nasher said:
Years ago gun and knife crime was almost unheard of in the UK, even when hand guns were still legal...

Now it's multiple times a day in London.
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As @Burnsy2023 says; attributing a rise in crime rates to ‘becoming soft touch’ is simplistic at best.

It may be a factor, but even if there was evidence to support the hypothesis (I don’t know) it would have to mitigate for a whole host of other factors before ‘soft touch’ could be pinpointed as ‘the cause’.

For instance, crime rates fell ~20 years after the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s. The theory is that there were fewer unwanted children who had abusive childhoods and therefore fewer adults who turned to a life of crime.

~20 years ago, the UK had one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in Europe. Now we’re seeing a rise in crime, especially knife crime involving ‘youths’. This could be just as much of a coincidence as the ‘soft touch’ approach, but it could equally be significant.

Then there’s the correlation between the decline in violent crime and the phasing out of leaded petrol. Obviously leaded petrol can’t be the cause of the spike in crime today, but the point is that there may be environmental factors outside of direct ‘crime and punishment’ policy that could have an effect.
 
We also massively increased reports of crime after the after the 90s, so it's no wonder there's more crime... because it's amazingly reported correctly rather than ignored.

The effect the supposedly Tory oriented policy line they've had for decades with respect to the police (that you know, they'd actually care about it's functional ability to police), while they've done literally the opposite. All the while their voters berate the police for doing their job as declared by the Tories in the first place, and it's almost as if the voters are dumb as bricks.

I'd bet a lot of money that the reduced Police numbers are to blame for any supposed increase in crime recently. Less officers means there's little lee-way for the officers that have to somehow function correctly, people get away with so much more because they literally can't stand there handing out a fine to someone while another more pressing matter requires them.

It's a cascade failure we're witnessing here and the Tories are at the heart of it, there's nothing more they'd love than to have a private police force at their beck & call, it's much too liberal to allow the plebs protection for "free".
 
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StriderX said:
We also massively increased reports of crime after the after the 90s, so it's no wonder there's more crime... because it's amazingly reported correctly rather than ignored.

The effect the supposedly Tory oriented policy line they've had for decades with respect to the police (that you know, they'd actually care about it's functional ability to police), while they've done literally the opposite. All the while their voters berate the police for doing their job as declared by the Tories in the first place, and it's almost as if the voters are dumb as bricks.

I'd bet a lot of money that the reduced Police numbers are to blame for any supposed increase in crime recently. Less officers means there's little lee-way for the officers that have to somehow function correctly, people get away with so much more because they literally can't stand there handing out a fine to someone while another more pressing matter requires them.

It's a cascade failure we're witnessing here and the Tories are at the heart of it, there's nothing more they'd love than to have a private police force at their beck & call, it's much too liberal to allow the plebs protection for "free".
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It's even wider than that, the reduction in police funding is just the tip of the iceberg that you can see. You have a reduced number of police with a higher level of responsibility, dealing with much more complex case loads. That's the law and order aspect of it. The alongside that you've got a reduction in youth and family services funding which means that kids and families who are at risk of either lapsing into crime or escalating now don't have the support from social services that in a lot of cases would cut out the problem before it became an issue for the police, which leads to more criminal activity that could have been avoided by appropriate support. Then you've got the reduction in funding for mental health services. This is a biggy and is two fold, firstly you have, much like the previous example, people lapsing into crisis when they wouldn't have previously and becoming a police issue, secondly you have the fact that people with mental illnesses are much more complex to deal with, because they are potentially more volatile and difficult to contain, and because they are also a vulnerable individual in need of protection, which means massive, and I do mean massive, amounts of police hours are taken up trying to deal with people who would be better supported by mental health professionals.

But no the previous poster is right, it's probably more likely to be ********** and all that.
 
Dis86 said:
Certainly a contributor

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/jul/07/longer-prison-sentences-cut-crime
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Depends what you're trying to achieve with custodial sentences. That article seems to imply that the main reason why longer sentences reduce crime is because habitual criminals are behind bars and therefore unable to offend. Surely a better approach would be to look at ways to reduce re-offending? Either by deterrence which will have an impact when people are released, or by rehabilitation and support.

I've only skimmed but the article doesn't even try to suggest that longer sentences are a greater deterrent, just that longer sentences lead to prisoners being in prison longer, which is pretty obvious.

It also states that the detection rate has a significant impact in crime reduction, which is directly related to policing budgets, hence the success of the previous Labour governments approach which increased police numbers and focused on repeat and serious offenders.
 
Dis86 said:
@FortuitousFluke I'd like to prevent innocent people from being subject to crime. Seems to me it would do just that.
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Well if you want to do that through harsher sentencing the best approach would be to lock all criminals away for life, as there's little evidence that increased sentences will stop people committing crime when they're released.

Failing that you could put the money into prevention and targeted detection and get the same results.
 
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