The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Premature Release

The Vicar of Downing Street began the week leading up to the End Time of His Own Choosing with an expression of regret at being forced by circumstances to act in a way that might be construed as forgiving or merciful. About twenty-five thousand people with sentences of between a month and four years will be given an eighteen-day remission in order to ease prison overcrowding.

His reverence was very clear on the reasons why this population problem has arisen. "First, because the number of people in prison has risen dramatically as a result of a 25% increase in sentencing"; and, self-evidently, this is no fault of the Government. It's the result of market forces, or God's will, or the poisonous influence of Magna Carta or sunspots or something. "Secondly, under this government we are now recalling people who breach their licence conditions and there's 5,000 extra in prison as a result of that"; an uncharitable observer might claim that the Government could be considered to have something to do with this, but that's just the sort of hindsight-driven, paradigm-stodgy carping which has prevented Tony drawing a line under Iraq. After all, it could hardly have been predicted that, by filling up the prisons, we eventually would run out of prison space; nobody really knew that prison places were a finite resource until they had all been used.

Thirdly, "we now have almost 3,000 people in prison on indeterminate sentences for violent and sexual offences". Since it is difficult to subtract eighteen days from an indeterminate amount of time, I suppose we may take this as reassurance that the ravening horde of hardened criminals who are about to be ejaculated onto our streets will contain relatively few actual rapists and murderers. This was his reverence's obligatory genuflection before the altar of Murdoch, whose thoughtful style was creditably adopted by his acolyte-in-waiting, the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, who described eighteen days' remission as "opening the prison gates and releasing 25,000 prisoners onto our streets". How nice to see that, under Daveybloke's civilising influence, the Conservatives no longer resort to Daily Mail hysteria at the drop of an opinion poll.

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