Uproar over prisoners’ reading habits & their right to have sex: Prison stories always bring out the right wing dingbats and bleeding heart brigade

Right, two prison stories for you today, for the price of one, sort of. The first one is a bit of a nonsense, care of the tabloid press - sorry: care of the British Tory opposition:

“The Conservative party has attacked prisons for allowing inmates access to books which glorify crime and detail escapes from jail. A list put together by the Tories of “inappropriate” books available includes memoirs by the notoriously violent jailbird Charles Bronson, the Krays, and former drug smuggler David McMillan’s Escape, which tells how he broke out of Thailand’s Klong Prem prison.”

Now, I’m not an expert on true crime or great escape books but, somehow, I doubt that English criminals who learn the details of a prison break in Thailand will benefit much from this knowledge when they are planning their escape from one of her Majesty’s prisons.

It would seem to me that our world’s politicians have bigger things to worry about than the reading habits of prisoners, what with the world’s economy bleeding from its ears but that’s politicians for you: Reacting to tabloid type headlines like a Pavlovian crack hound is what they do best.

Still, it’s the other prison story that is even more ludicrous.

(True love knows no bars…)

Yes, just when you thought Western ‘civilisation’ could not get any more pathetic, we are told that we must allow murderers, armed robbers and - who knows? - rapists, who are serving long prison sentences, to have “sexual relations with partners on the outside…”

How wonderfully humane - or how utterly insane. Depending whether you have mush for brains or not:

“The rights and wrongs of enabling men serving long sentences to father children, to whose upbringing they can only ever make a limited contribution, could be debated in perpetuity. But however outraged some may feel about it, it has long been established that people who are sent to prison do not forfeit their rights under the European convention on human rights. So if the Strasbourg court agrees that prisoners are entitled to a family and private life, how can it not rule, when the appropriate case is brought before it, that people in prison are entitled to sexual relations with partners on the outside?”

Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that, on the whole, our prisons are too soft on criminals. In fact, in most Western countries, prisons are ill-equipped to deal with the ever-growing numbers of inmates and perpetually underfunded to boot. It is easy to fill the tabloids with stories of prisons being more like holiday camps but almost all of that is bullshit, of course. Just look at the rising numbers of inmates committing suicide, for instance. Anyone who thinks that prison is a barrel of laughs should simply try it for a few years.

Having said that, prisons are places where we lock up those who have forfeited the right to walk among the rest of us for a certain amount of time - and sometimes, this is, unfortunately, the only way society can deal with those who choose to behave in a criminal and anti-social manner.

Apart from the occasional miscarriages of justice, our prisons hold people who decided that they are above certain laws - and society should not feel all that moved to bend over backwards to accomodate those who have committed serious crimes, when they feel somewhat discomfited by the fact that they can’t move about freely anymore.

So, apart from the fact that it is truly a ludicrous idea that society would end up paying child support for kids whose fathers sired them while they were doing life sentences, there is this simple truth, expressed by the old saying, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”

In other words: Entitling long term prisoners to have sexual relations with partners on the outside? No fucking way.

(Jail breaks and sex in one clip: Damn, I’m good…!)