To think prisoners should be safe in prison?

[BlueJuniper94]

Is this an unreasonable belief? I know Ian Huntley committed horrific crimes and I really do sympathise with the feelings that he deserves it in light of what his victims have suffered and continue to suffer.

BUT - this shouldn't be allowed to happen in prisons. Aibu?

Absolutely agree they should be kept safe otherwise we may as well have the death penalty if we allow others to take matters into their own hands?

The man who attacked Ian Huntley is a viscous, murderous thug too and it’s turning my stomach seeing people applaud him after the atrocities he committed himself.

I guess the one positive is that neither will probably ever be released.

They were both given whole lives sentences.

Haven't read the full thread but a convicted murderer getting clouted over the head with a metal bar by another inmate? Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Pity the guy who did it didn't do a better job.

I think it should be allowed to happen more often in prisons. As far as I'm concerned, if they're convicted for life for such heinous crimes then bring back hanging. Or let the families of the victims decide their fate with no repercussions. Or drop them in the desert, naked, with no food, water or shelter.

Do you really think prison officers who are attacked cannot make life very very difficult for an inmate one way or another!

I have mentioned this several times.
Feel more sorry for the prison staff who get attacked.

**gets the popcorn out

I don't understand why people are getting upset about this. If there are two scumbags, and one of them kills the other, then there is one fewer scumbag breathing oxygen and consuming resources that could be used by other people.

You’d think that the risk of awful things happening to awful people in prison would deter them from doing the awful crimes to end up there in the first place.

Never seems to though 🤷‍♀️

I hope he dies. One less for us the tax payer to keep, at exorbitant costs. It’s always going to happen. If you put 500 or so violent men together, occasionally this will be the result.

"The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons" is attributed to Dostoevsky,
The idea being that a society should be judged not by how it treats its elite, but by how it treats its marginalised and its criminals.
Morally I totally go along with that.

There are so many other victims of crimes than those most affected, such as appalling injuries and loss of life. Their families have life sentences and have no option but to deal with the consequences of crime. Further, the criminal's family also loses that person, with their actions often a huge shock to them.

I do think, as PP suggests, we need to improve security in prisons for inmates and staff.

Dostoevsky was right.

It's annoying to read that prisoners SHOULD be kept safe in prison.

People NOT in prison SHOULD be kept safe. That is what is right. People should not live in fear and at risk of being abused, raped, murdered.

I am not saying prisoners should be left to attack one another or no effort made to keep prisoners from running amok. There are some prisoners who are in for non-violent crimes (financial etc) and some who are wrongfully imprisoned/convicted.

It is just really annoying that abusers, murderers, rapists who don't even get prison sentences that reflect the enormity of their crime then get protected from harm themselves (wrapped in cottonwool lest a hair on their head is harmed) and have their every need met.
And then after some years are let out to reoffend.

Access to a pencil could mean stabbed in the eye - unless every prisoner sits alone in cell with crayons it will never stop!

First of all, the people who are saying the man who attacked Ian Huntley should be celebrated as a hero are stupid beyond comprehension. In virtually all cases, the attacker is every bit as bad as the person they attacked.

The man who attacked Ian Huntley murdered 3 people. One of the murder victims was a pregnant woman, who he also raped. I'm not sure what other people's opinions are, but I don't think a man who rapes and murders a pregnant woman is any better than a man who murders two 10 year old girls.

As another example, the man who murdered Richard Huckle was also in prison for serious sex offences, and is considered so volatile and dangerous that he cannot be left alone with female prison officers. Again, hardly a decent a noble and decent person.

As for Ian Huntley, I am not sure why people want him to die. I would much rather he survives, as this will mean he will have to live with his injuries. While I would not wish harm on the majority of people, I think it is safe to say that Ian Huntley is one of the exceptions, as he definitely deserves to be in pain for what he did.

They already are ‘safe’ in as much as anyone can be safe. IH is usually under close watch and if it turns out that someone was negligent then they will be held to account for it. We have a system that tries its best to keep very violent men as safe from each other as possible. There is, however, never any guarantee for any of us to be 100% safe from attack unless we’re locked away in a room by ourselves - that would also be considered inhumane. That’s the imperfect world we live in. So, no, I don’t celebrate one murderer killing another murderer, but it is not something that is being ‘allowed’ either.

IMO Dostoevsky was wrong.

I don't know, OP.

On the one hand, he was there against his will, so maybe they have a responsibility to him.

On the other hand, he was there because of his absolutely heinous crimes, and he wouldn't have been safe on the outside either. Do I feel bad that he was attacked? No. Do I think he deserved it? Yes, probably.

Surely a society should be judged by how well it treats it's loyal, law-abiding hard-working citizens, not by how well it treats it's criminals?

By Dostoevsky's argument, we should reward criminals.

It isn’t an either/or situation, though, @OonaStubbs - of course we should be making sure the innocent members of society are safe - but that doesn’t preclude us saying that prisoners should be safe in prison. Preventing prisoners from being assaulted won’t make people outside of prisons less safe.

If prisoners die in prison they can't harm people once they get out of prison or if they escape from prison. Also, the money and resources spent on keeping prisoners safe could be used to help law-abiding people who are not in prison.

The problem is, take it from someone who has been there, prisons are full of prisoners....

Prisons should be safe enough. Punishment is the deprivation of liberty not being attacked.

What I've not seen anyone else talk about is the possibility Huntley has a traumatic brain injury which might mean him needing expensive and complex to deliver care for the rest of his life.

Keeping somebody in prison has a cost. Having prison staff guarding someone in hospital is an extra cost. Isolating him from other patients may well be disrupting the usual way the ward is organised at cost to the NHS. He could be in a coma for weeks and need rehab that can't be done in prison. With a brain injury he recovers from reasonably well he may start behaving in ways they can't manage well in prison and need to be transferred to one of the high security mental health hospitals.

All the extra cost could be avoided if prison was safer.

Also there's a bit of an argument that death is the easy way out compared with serving his full sentence. He might have been injured so severely that further punishment is meaningless.

It isn’t allowed to happen. We aren’t allowed to stab or shoot or run each other over either. The man who attacked Huntley will be punished, and the guards have spent years stopping men like him from doing what he did.

He could have had 30 years left at todays cost around £2 million, death penalty 0

How would you like to administer the death penalty at zero cost?
Have you any idea how much more expensive it is in America to sentence someone to death versus hand out a life sentence? Are you aware that the death penalty does not have a deterrent effect whatsoever? Who would you like to carry out the execution?