Brew to Blog

A blog post like a good shit needs time to ferment in the bowel. Like a tea bag it needs time to brew in the pot. This one has been brewing for the past nine days. I don't know exactly what I am going to opine when I hit the keyboard but I tend to get my breath after a bit. And Breath. What has been pissing me off recently is the news about prisons and the building of new prisons in Wales (Please see title of Blog: Diolch) We always think that battles have been won in Wales and then along comes a one nation Tory and starts stirring the slop bucket up again. The M4 Relief Road in Newport and now a Prison in Port Talbot. The Socialists in the Senedd have kicked those into the long grass but now with Big Ben's Brexit Bong a looming those sinister Victorian Stove Pipe Hatted Tories are chuntering again about bringing these projects alive. You never hear of these people until they say something fucking ridiculous and then along comes Robert Buckland who says that "he would love a second Welsh prison to become part of the programme" and we all know what that programme is don't we? The Elysian Fields of One Nation Conservatism. As you probably know by now "I've done a bit o bird" in a foreign jail and I flinch with a nervous tick every time somebody demands "Longer Jail Sentences" and "Throw away the Key". These very same Union Jack wearing Conservative Loyalists wouldn't last a night let alone a week in a prison so their calls for more prisons are as hollow as the echoes of mentally ill prisoners incarcerated because of their mental health and not because of their criminality. I wonder what percentage of the prison population is mentally ill? Quite a high percentage would be my guess. This especially so in a Women's prison. Call me woke left if you like and I know that those who bang on about equality all the time wont be happy but I don't think that there should be such things as women's prisons. If women are in prison it is likely that they have been victims of some kind of drug abuse, of family history, of sexual abuse, of domestic violence. For every action there is a reaction and these women have reacted in criminal ways as a response to how they themselves have been treated and UK PLC with its Victorian Punitive Prison & Justice system always feel the need to punish these women further. Of course this will not be true in all cases and the same can be said of the male prison population. The prison system needs a massive overhaul in the UK and the United States. One nation conservatives under the leadership of a man suffering from Boarding School Syndrome  want to build more prisons and want longer jail sentences. The problem with longer jail sentences especially for those serving 'terror offences' is that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. We have seen recently that if you treat 'terrorist' prisoners like other prisoners then they will become even more radicalised and turn on the people who have tried to help them or run riot in the prison itself. There are no easy answers but as an old lag with grey hairs I will suggest a few

• You have special prison camps for 'terrorist' prisoners. You do not treat them the same as the rest of the prison population. You do not use prison guards, you utilise army personnel. These are Prisoners of War. They are involved in an ideological war with the West and therefore you must afford them the rights of political prisoners. They can even be kept on prison ships or on islands off the mainland like the Alcatraz model. After all it is ON the British mainland that they have been radicalised or alienated and if their kith and kin wish to come and free them and repatriate them in a dinghy with an outboard motor then it would save a few quid in looking after them. 

• You decommission women's prisons and you turn them into therapeutic centers where the emphasis is on healing and not on punishment. There will be cases where the crimes committed will require punishment but these will not be decided by a male judge in a red outfit and a grey wig with a wooden gavel.

• The emphasis in male prisons of whichever category should be on rehabilitation and not on punishment. Instead of 24 hour lock up and isolation in solitary confinement you reverse the psychology and you allow the prisoners to spend as much time as they can outside of their cell. Many need socialising not isolating further. Prison is compounding the damage caused already to the minds of these men from their earlier and younger lives. There will be a dearth of fruit pickers after Brexit. Prison Gangs could be shipped out to farms to pick fruit all day. They'll certainly sleep better than spending a day in the cell watching television.

There will always be exceptions to the above rules and in the cases of the most serious crimes then I would stop short at the Death Penalty but I would consider offering the prisoner a humane exit from this world as opposed to spending 'life' in a cell. Obviously this is where guilt has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt. Would some prisoners welcome the choice? because that then removes suicide watch and a wasting away in a cell at the expense of the tax paying one nation conservatives.