I don't believe it! Options

[TallDarkAndHands...]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11076674

WTF - So hang on. You have a convicted person who is a known MENTALLY ILL VIOLENT CRIMINAL. I know what we'll do - Let them out to mix with all and sundry but hey at least we will know where they are when they strangle / murder / rape some innocenet member of society. This may have been 'successful' to start with but its only a matter of time....

[Iommi]

My view is: doing nothing but making prison a worse place to be, will in all likelihood make little difference to how safe people feel.

[On the edge]

My view is: doing nothing but making prison a worse place to be, will in all likelihood make little difference to how safe people feel.

That's an opinion granted - but evidence and many others differ.

[Iommi]

That's an opinion granted - but evidence and many others differ.

I'm not sure what justifies the roll-of-the-eyes. A short search and read of various websites seem to support my theory. You have said yourself: why people are criminals is a complex thing. It stands to reason that it would take more than one thing to change for there to be a wholesale change. In other-words, there's not a catch all cure. Moreover; there is little likelihood of some of the suggestions being implemented for the foreseeable future.

To me it seems logical that the chances of going to gaol would serve as a greater deterrent than the conditions in gaol if caught.

[Simon Kirby]

The OP was about violent psychiatric patients being released and that does truely seem to be an appalling idea.

But the discussion has moved on to the correlation of mainstream crime and punishment, and while the thought of scrotes suffering in victorian dungeons satisfies the need for vegence, I think you have to balance the discussion with some thought about why people offend.

There was a recent thread that gave smack heads little sympathy, but if drug dependency gets people into trouble then it really does make sense to invest money in treating their dependence, and that almost certainly means providing them with free diamorphine.

And you've also got to think about the whole social exclusion and disenfranchisement thing to get to the bottom of why people offend, particularly the grubby little scrotes who affect us most directly. I'm not claiming to know anything about the subject because I don't, it's just my hunch that the answer isn't with prison and how crappy or otherwise it is, but it's about how crappy society is. And sorry to bang on about it, but that is central to the Big Society.