Reply With QuoteProperly right, but threatening them with getting up at the crack at dawn and have them running up and down a hill all day might help. Who am I kidding.Originally Posted by HaylePie
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For those thinking of National Service - what are you going with the people you conscript? The military is lean these days, very efficient and relies on dedicated professionals. The battlefield is a very technical place with training taking a long time and a lot of money, so what do the NS boys n girls do all day? And what if they won't go or don't play by the rules - Jail them? I think that ship has sailed.
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Properly right, but threatening them with getting up at the crack at dawn and have them running up and down a hill all day might help. Who am I kidding.
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National Service might be evolved into something not just limited to military service perhaps? I'm sure there are many other services to the national interest which could be performed.
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Maybe. And I confess, I did fall into the mindset of old school NS. Actually, the Swedes have a type of NS - I met a young guy who is trained in riot policing (training was 3 months or so and he's liable for call up for civil disobedience stuff), and another with advanced fire-fighting training. But these are bright guys and Sweden has had this system for years, not just for discipline but also because they have a huge country and a small population. I can't see this carrying over here, esp with a stroppy ****age repeat offender with an attitude problem. Maybe I lack vision
Last edited by HaylePie; 18-04-2020 at 05:28 PM.
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Not a bad idea but not asking them really nicely could be a problem.
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Friends n family include plods, social workers, psychologist and a prison officer (governor grade). We've chatted before about this. I have also chatted with prison educators at a Cat B prison (all but terrorists iirc). And I've met a few ex-convicts. If I had to summarise - prison is generally hard, being in lockdown is one thing, being locked down is another. This is someone else turning the key and turning your lights out til they let you out again. TVs and game consoles don't make up for the lack of freedom - take the 'treats' away and the only form of entertainment is taking lumps out of each other or the staff. A governor's worst nightmare is an officer hostage situation.
Training as part of rehab to help adjust to the outside world? Tricky. Its not school, there is no September intake, people come and go continually. Qualifications? Almost impossible for the short-term prisoners. If (say) the aim is a BTEC, C&G or GCSE you need at least 2 years clear, so probably a 5-year sentence and you miss the quick in&outers. Short vocational courses have been trialled and I gather are successful. Get a tradesman in, teach plastering or basic plumbing for a week or so. A formal certificate of what they'd done might be useful. But it costs and short-sighted Joe Public squeals every time at that.
No one else to blame? Social workers and psychologists can run you through the backgrounds of many prisoner types and there is blame elsewhere - parents, school, social work, care system to name a few. Many ppl enter prison with awful backgrounds, they have been prisoners-in-waiting for years, and have no one looking after them. Man is tribal and needs to fit in, who are the vulnerable mixing with in prison? Its been said in earlier posts, more than one sort of prisoner needs more than sort of prison.
Put people to work in society? Why? - being locked up is their punishment, and what do they/who's job are they taking? Time is better spent talking to reformed cons and victims of crime.
So, what to do? Here's an idea - spend more money ..... but outside of prisons and recoup the spending later with a lower prison population and a better society to boot. Spend on education (drop the focus solely on university fgs) & job creation. I'm not all heart btw - there are scumbags who are never gonna change and they aren't my focus, they get to stay banged up - but it would be cost effective to rehab those we can.
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27% of the people locked up in UK prisons are locked up for violent crime. Only 15% are drugs. How do you make violent people non violent? Because I have no idea.
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I'm not necessarily sure that you can, you should try mind.
Keeping the 73% non-violent must be a priority though you would have thought.
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I agree spending outside of prison to prevent creating prisoners has to be part of the solution, NS was talked about as part of this.
But I think you have to consider this entirely as a multifactorial solution. To bin off “learning” just because you think it’s difficult is easy. There are different prisoners and as such there needs to be different solutions. On training there are so many online options today that starts and ends of terms can be irrelevant.
If you take away the treats you only get the bad side if there is nothing else to do. Again it doesn’t suit all, but you need to find useful things that can be done, from cleaning up litter to creating websites or pretty much any job you can be trained to do. If we want people to return to society, they need to have a useful trade if work ethic. You don’t get that by then sitting around playing video games all day.
Pick apart the offered solutions if you want, but there is no magic single solution, you have to resolve the problem in many many ways. And want to do it.
The main problem is that in society we are happy to complain about prisoners and crime, but less interested in actually solving the problems, very likely because it’s hard and costly. That needs to be addressed first.
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Fair call that I do pick things apart, but not to be negative - to find a solution, nibble away at the problems. Otherwise we only get as far as political soundbites with no practical solutions. I don't think it is costly - averaging Google results, I reckon it costs £35000 per prisoner per year. Hell, that's posh school fees or a £100 a night hotel for year (for the pedants, I got discount).
Training in prison - I don't think its hard but it needs radical thought. We have an education/employment system which values paper qualifications. Training which leads to nothing won't help, and big chunks of the prison population aren't natural learners and lack motivation (and incarceration is soporific - how many people in lockdown aren't doing all things they said they would?) - they were foremost in my mind and they need educators/mentors with specific skills. I can throw cash at 'On line' training - and prisons have learning centres - but it needs to work, it has to lead to prospects of a better life or job or what are they training for?
Despite my negative vibe, I'm with you. I am big on education to help those who aren't natural learners so I am generally thinking of a particular element of the prison population for whom the system has never worked.
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