A curse?

[chickenfeet]

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make Home Secretary. Is it the job that sends people mad or is it that only raving loonies get made Home Secretary? The last sane one I can remember was Roy Jenkins (for some value of sane).

Comments

[knirirr.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. I posted a few weeks ago about how an RP sergeant of the Coldstream Guards had mentioned that many of their recruits were recruited from prison, or that the army was their last chance before going to prison.
However, I'll bet that the majority of those in prison would not benefit from this offer at all, and that the effectivness of the armed forces would suffer.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I didn't get the idea that Reid was proposing the army as an alternative to prison. Rather, that the army should run some daft young offenders scheme for the Home Office. I would imagine the army would be very unchuffed to be tasked with that job and it would almost certainly be very counter productive.

[ceruleanblue3.livejournal.com]

I love the way they lump domestic violence in with graffiti there.

Definitely off his head, whichever way round it happened. How did this idiot get elected in the first place?

[frankie-ecap.livejournal.com]

If you were home secretary, what would you do?

[itchyfidget.livejournal.com]

Use Eric to weed out young offenders.

[frankie-ecap.livejournal.com]

And then what?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I don't think I have the quick and easy action plan for fixing the various FUBAR's satrapies of the Home Office but as far as prisons and penal policy go I'd start with something like:

1. Get the mentally ill and the driug addicted out of the general prison population and into treatment programmes

2. Get young offenders out of the general prison population. There has to be some hope of rehabilitating them. HMPs are one of the most effective vocational training systems in the country and I don't want them getting a brilliant education in how to be a hardened criminal.

3. Recognise that determining sentencing policy according to the latest Daily Mail editorial is wrong and stupid. Keep sentences short (at least for non-violent offenders) unless and until there is data to prove that something else works.

4. Give some thought to how to stop cross contamination between "prisons for locking up people society can't cope with and v.v" and "prisons for likely one-time rehabilitable offenders".

Beyong the prison service and penal policy, I think I'd take Immigration and Nationality and, perhaps, policing away from the Home Office. It says something very wrong about the country's attitude to immigration that it's lumped in with a bunch of other stuff that's mostly about criminals.