Chocolate kettle.

Say you'd been doing a little decorating at home and instead of drying on the walls all the paint had slid down them and on to the carpet, or perhaps the varnish on your window frames was still tacky after a fortnight. Imagine how you'd react if, having gone down to the DIY store to complain, you were told that you should really just accept it because sometimes paint does that and actually doing exactly what it says on the tin is just an option. Anybody would be forgiven for feeling a bit pissed off, but as bad as that would be it'd pale into nothingness if someone you love was killed by some mongrel who'd been let out of prison because you couldn't really expect the criminal justice system to spend money keeping them locked up.



You'd be mad as hell, wouldn't you?

Murders and other serious crimes committed by prisoners released early from jail may have to be “accepted” by the public as part of attempts to keep down the cost of the criminal justice system, the probation watchdog suggested.
Andrew Bridges questioned whether it was worth keeping thousands of violent and dangerous offenders locked up for longer than the minimum jail term set by a court just to stop a few of them committing new crimes.
Some reoffending — even if it involved “serious” new crimes — could be the price that society had to pay for trying to cut down on the huge cost of the country’s rising prison population, said Mr Bridges, the chief inspector of probation.

So let me get this straight. Instead of looking at reducing the prison population by not locking up people for bullshit victimless crimes (e.g. council tax defaulters and publicans who've let customers light up a cigarette) and decriminalising a lot of stuff that would be largely victimless if it hadn't been fucking made illegal in the first place (e.g. many drugs offences) and basically just keeping prison for the real cunts, the idea now is to carry on as before but let everybody out at the earliest opportunity regardless of offence and future risk. Have I got that about right, you complete fucknuts?

While acknowledging that prison reduced crime, he described it as a “rather drastic form of crime prevention” and said it was time to consider dealing with more offenders in the community.

No, you bell-end, for some criminals it's the only fucking form of crime prevention. While they're locked up they don't commit crimes, and when you let them out they start again. Yes, there are some who don't reoffend, but that suggests they probably didn't need locking up in the fucking first place.

There are basically three things you can do with a prison. It can be a punishment, which is as much about making the rest of society feel better as anything else, or it can be a place to rehabilitate criminals in the hope that they reoffend. Finally, and most obviously, it can be a way in which law abiding citizens get a break from whatever criminals are locked up in there. Since this last function is probably the only one at which imprisonment is completely effective it seems a little odd to stop fucking doing it by letting criminals out. By all means let out the non-violent and those locked up more for their disobedience to the bloody state than anything else, but the only thing prison is really good at is keeping walls between those who are disarmed by law and helpless to protect themselves and those who just don't give a tinker's fuck.