Picking up a few points from the previous post.
1. Here’s a few ideas to reduce unnecessary costs.
a) HR and bean-counters within HMPs and the DOJ to be culled with extreme prejudice.
b) Prisoners are expected to work. And earn. (*i) Full-time. Real, physical jobs. Part of this thinking is to prevent the work the devil finds for idle hands. Another reason is to, (when possible, i.e. when common sense rules are re-instated, when the EHCR is culled and certain legal chambers are having to re-use their teabags) separate the cons who want to improve themselves from the in-the-life professionals and the damaged beyond repair ASPDs, by making available the kind of jobs that working class men value and enjoy and can use after prison. Trades, motor mechanics, you get the idea.
c) After the second offence (i.e. conviction and sentencing) cons are downgraded to second class citizens with fewer rights and have to earn (or fail/refuse to) regain first class citizen status. I’ll expand on this idea in due course. Remember Appleton was already a con, not a first-time offender. I don’t see a need for changes to the law, it’s serviceable as it is. What Britain is lacking is the political will to do and resource it.
d) Legal aid is denied to second class citizens. They either pay or don’t get. Some solicitors may have to stack shelves and clean toilets.
e) Any windfall from a legal e.g. ECHR challenge is immediately sequestered and paid to the victim.
f) When psychopaths and ASPDs (and the other PD varietals) commit crimes they must go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass Go and do not get a mental-health-get-out-of jail free-card. (*ii) I pointed out earlier ASPDs are unable to learn from experience. Same goes for psychopaths. (*iii)
g) Force, incentives and coercion. Making people do things they don’t want to do (similar to stopping them do things they want to do) is not, as the Guardian columnists would wet themselves over, a one-size-fits-all method. Remember, there are two separate classes of con in this brave new world. Group A class are monsters, predators, the worst kind of psychopaths and sadistic PDs. The others are, if not fixable, at least improvable. Heaps of evidence supporting this. Diagnostically they might be more lightly afflicted ASPDs (perhaps with traits, which means they are below the threshold for the full blown disorder). These people want – or a part of them, the part that wrestles with the worse part of them, the better angel of their nature – wants to make something of their life, to not be a useless addicted, violent, thieving waster forever in and out of prison until they top themselves or are topped by a worse ASPD.
Let’s look at these improvable people first. They will have to be presented with a choice. Which group do you want to be in? Not choosing B = a default choice of A. Locked up forever with the other subhumans? Or you can take advantage of this intensive, demanding and tough programme we’re offering you and change. Not try to change, young Skywalker, ‘do or do not do, there is no try.’ Results matter. ‘Trying’ doesn’t count, only getting there counts. You can either become a man who can live among other humans peacefully and cooperatively or you fail to do that and return to group A.
Caveat, these people aren’t like the movies, where a character has a consistent object of desire he pursues doggedly all through the film. Everyone’s good and bad motives wax and wane. People fall off the wagon repeatedly. We would have to take human nature into account. We’d have to give people credit for the positive steps they manage, not just condemn the bad ones. (*iii) These cons are usually fathers and want to step up to be better fathers. Jordan Peterson says even the worst people, when wanting to show they are not all bad, will point to acts where they helped another person.
*iii) Good Lives model. https://www.goodlivesmodel.com/ Has been used successfully with sex offenders and other offences. Treats people as all-round humans with capacity to choose.
h) Death penalty. High secure mental hospital patients are the most expensive patients in the country. Probably. Over their lifetimes they definitely are. (Maybe I’ll evidence this one day). The level of security required to stop them escaping, the numbers of staff needed, the training and expertise needed and the duration of their detention (often decades) are all factors in the cost. (NB Schizophrenia is very expensive too, I’ll write on that in due course, but you don’t choose to be schizophrenic. A civilised country’s approach to severe mental illnesses should not be the same as it is for psychopaths.)
Now this is a complex ethical conundrum. For ethical people like us, that is. How to separate those deserving of the death penalty from those who aren’t. That is a three pipe problem, not to be rushed. On the other hand, No Idea Kier, during the period he was ruining our CPS, took a jolly to the West Indies with some high powered lawyers and bullied the small countries into ripping up the death penalty. Since I and this blog are fully engaged in the spiritual battle between good and evil, I’ll state this clearly. Two Tier Kier is serving the adversary, he’s deliberately acting to turn Britain into a country Satan wants to see. Satan has achieved this all over the world (often in countries that were never countries in the first place, only open latrines of tribal, animist violence and mere subsistence economies) but turning a formerly Christian jewel into a civil war-torn, Islamist hell-hole would have him leaping with delight.
Back to high-security. I nursed plenty of patients in high-security and they aren’t all the same, not by a long chalk. Plenty recovered, accepted their illness, took their tablets, addressed their risk and got out, never to come back. Plenty had backgrounds that would traumatise Polly just having to listen to. It amazed me how some were still alive, and plenty of them said it was being arrested and eventually sectioned and admitted was the reason why they weren’t dead. Others were evil and will go to their graves evil. And some, in fact every single patient I ever met in the DSPD, (one possible exception), should have received, a stretched neck or a fatal flurry of lead injections. And if they lived in a country that wanted justice for their victims and to guarantee there would never be any further victims, they would.
*i) As I said in the previous post. Cons score poorly on the delayed gratification test. It’s unrealistic and unfair to make them work and not earn. Although we can see work is rehabilitative, you can’t expect them to feel anything but cheated and resentful if they are worked without reward.
The exception would be the punitive and pointless hard work we would put the unrepentant and determinedly violent, exploitative (Group A) cons through (See Sidney Lumet’s ‘The Hill’) as punishment and for wearing them out so much that they find anti-social behaviour like fighting, sexually abusing the weak and scheming is much harder for them when they’re knackered.
*ii) with the caveat that, for good reasons, like clinical judgement, a research study, individual circumstances, a PD would go to mental hospital instead when it would be of some demonstrable benefit to them.
*iii) Oh how horrid someone like Polly (*iv) would say. Punishing and forcing change on people who simply can’t help themselves. A few points on that. 1. While it is impossible – there I said it – for them to learn from their mistakes, they can be made to stop doing things, by external force, threat and punishment. 2. Ask your granddaughter, Polly, when an ASPD rapist or paedo simply cannot stop himself, perhaps we ought to lighten up on him?
*iv) other symbols of progressive/liberal royalty are available.
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