New Incentives for Career Criminals in Britain

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, so the old saying goes.
Down here on our little allotment in South Gloucestershire in the good old Dis-United Kingdom the meaning of this is not lost on Nosher and me.
We can see what's going on, and it is not good.
'The Dis-United Kingdom is increasingly becoming like my compost heap!' Nosher announced one afternoon, as we were turning the compost to mix the constituents more thoroughly.
'With one important difference' he continued.
Now, Nosher puts all his allotment waste plus his old Daily Mails (I'm sure most of you have guessed he is a Daily Mail reader - nothing wrong with that...) onto his compost heap. And, a year or so later, with the right kind of care, this heap of rotting matter turns into nice fresh compost, especially good for the ground, even more so if mixed with some well-rotted horse-manure.
'What is happening in Britain today is roughly similar' Nosher went on 'our society puts its rotten members (or as many as can be caught) into prison, and some time later (in theory) nice newly-reformed ex-criminals should emerge into the bright light of day, having turned into good citizen material.'
We leaned on the handles of our forks for a moment, taking in the wonderful smell of rotting compost.
'All it needs is a good dose of horse-manure soon and it will be perfect' I said. Nosher nodded. Then shook his head.
'Gordon the Moron and his Assistants in Idiocy have different plans' he explained. 'Having ignored warnings for years that crime trends indicated the need for a new prison-building programme they instead decided to give more and more serious offenders derisory community sentences, which for these already morally-degraded people amounts to no punishment at all (not for the prisoners either).'
'And then there's the effect of prison overcrowding' I added. 'Instead of renting old ships to incarcerate the overflow of jailbirds in, the idiots who rule over us have decided to let inmates out early. Hardly a disincentive to commit more crime, is it?'
'The result has been more and more crime' declared Nosher, 'and people shouldn't believe the crime statistics, they're fiddled. The sentences actually served are getting shorter and shorter, whatever the Judge may have ordered, and the Judges have been ordered by the Government to give lighter sentences anyway.'
'So what has actually happened' I suggested 'is the creation of a new career incentive scheme for criminals. The more crime you do, the more you get caught, the lighter your sentences will be, until you do only community sentences (hardly a form of punishment at all) during which you can carry on offending at will. And finally, because of the risible target-driven system the Police now have to operate under, cautions are being given out for more and more serious offences. It means such offences don't appear on the crime figures, hence the fiddling..'
Nosher nodded enthusiastically.
'That's exactly what I'm trying to say!' he exclaimed. 'Under this new system of fighting crime, the recidivists will be developing their careers very nicely, whilst they occasionally get a stern talking-to from the Police, which they will take absolutely no notice of, obviously.'
And there we have it.
The Dis-United Kingdom is now one great big career-development incentive scheme for criminals, who view the rest of us as being merely stupid for being law-abiding decent, honest, hard-working members of society.
That's what kind of country we now live in.
More from www.overthegardenfence.blogspot.com soon.
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