Britain has a history of excellence in penal innovation stretching back several centuries. During this period, we have successfully resisted the sort of fashionable but foolish fads that are the hallmark of woolly liberal and European thinking.
There have been several milestones along the way of which the nation is rightfully proud. Perhaps the most outstanding is our visionary and enlightened attitudes to prisoners. Who knew that when we pioneered the concentration camp during the Boer War that it would be taken up so enthusiastically and refined by such leading specialists in confinement as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin?
We should also be proud of our record during the Industrial Revolution of debtors’ jails and workhouses, memorably and sympathetically portrayed by Charles Dickens in novels such as Little Dorrit and Oliver Twist. Mr Dickens knew that our Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have been half as successful if we were allowing people to run around the country willy and nilly without paying back what they owed at a reasonable rate of interest.
I like to think that in his novels he got the balance just right between applying unstinting discipline and rigour in our treatment of miscreants and the need for a degree of compassion. I’ve always modelled myself on the complex and deeply misunderstood character of Mr Bumble myself.
Hopefully, once we’ve left the EU, we can begin to apply some traditionally British rectitude and moral backbone to the prisons system. Britain locks up more of its citizens than just about any other western European country. Even the bloody Jocks lock up more women, including expectant mothers, than almost any other nation in northern Europe. These are records of which we should be justly proud: we shouldn’t give them up without a fight.
What better way of showing our little ones that crime doesn’t pay than by having them born into captivity? Rather than reduce the number of women in our prisons, we need to increase it. Exponentially, that would mean more babies being born in prison, especially if we were to encourage much more intimacy during conjugal visits. Thus, many more children would be born who had learned tough but necessary lessons about the nature of crime and punishment.
Britain has an unblemished record away from home in military conflict, apart from an early reversal against the Americans and a score draw with the Irish Republican Army. We wouldn’t have achieved such excellence in the field of human conflict if we’d treated our prisoners with a light touch. After all, we’ve always required them to be ship-shape and Bristol fashion to feed our relentless war machine. And once we start sending in the gunboats to reinforce our interests with the more truculent of the World Trade Organisation states, we’ll need our sovereign ruffians even more, gawd bless ’em all.
Many people seemed to be troubled last week by reports that several of our jails are operating like speakeasies run by Al Capone during the prohibition era. I think they all need to see the bigger picture. G4S security was chosen specifically to ensure a smooth handover in power from the prison officers to the prisoners. Everyone knows that G4S couldn’t be trusted to walk your granny across the road without losing her somewhere along the way.
Deployment of G4S followed a study of the methods of the US penal reform society from its award-winning promotional video, entitled Escape From New York. This seemed to offer a progressive and enlightened solution to prison overcrowding and sensitive issues around electrocuting innocent people that had led to some boisterousness in wider society. It all seemed to be rooted in the visionary, controversial but deeply misunderstood concept of locking ’em up and throwing away the key.
Handing over the prison contract fully to G4S would ensure that the prisoners would be running the jails before you could say: “Would you like a £10 wrap with your porridge today, sir.” Soon after, we would simply withdraw all staff and let the inmates get on with it.
Of course, we would keep an eye on them with CCTV to ensure that those displaying a special aptitude for organisation and leadership in such demanding circumstances would be earmarked for high office with our security services or for deployment in our Moscow embassy. Chaps and ladies displaying unusually high levels of psychopathic tendencies have always thrived in these environments.
Those exhibiting rare prowess in chib-to-head combat would be fast-tracked for action in some of the dirty little wars in which we always seem to be engaged here and there. If anyone is getting squeamish about this, I’d remind them that we used just such an approach in various Irish wars against the rebel scum when we sent in the Black and Tans early last century. I need hardly remind you that these were the torch bearers for our policy in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the 70s.
Eventually, with the help of our flexible friends at G4S, we would create walled penitentiaries around cities that have always resisted our forced civilisation initiatives, such as Manchester and Glasgow. All of our most violent criminals (and possible SAS recruits) would be thrown in there and the rules of the free market would apply to ensure the survival of the fittest. What’s not to like?