AIBU to have little sympathy for prisoners during the heatwave?

[PenelopeJoanSterling]

Metro article about prisoners and the heatwave, but if they behaved they would not be in prison ?

Im all for caring for humanity as a whole, but in terms of prisoners they did commit crimes and get locked up.

This is a depressing thread. Being in prison is a real punishment in itself, it shouldn’t mean that prisoners are fair game for any inhumane treatment.

It would be much more cost effective to invest in services that help sort people’s lives out before they end up in prison. Over half of women in prison were abused as children. But if the prison service is overcrowded and underfunded all you do is create a cycle where people will end up straight back in there.

If anyone wants an insight into life in prison and how the system is broken, I recommend A Bit of a Stretch by Chris Atkins. It’s funny and grim.

Actually, this thread has inspired me to finally make a donation to the Shannon Trust, whose ads have been popping up on my Facebook feed. They do literacy programs in prisons for the 2/3 of prisoners who can’t read or struggle to read.

Nice luxury life you have, lucky you.

Not a clue about what other people have to put up with.

It’s not to do with protecting pedophiles.

It’s making sure prisons are safe. Take a look at the recidivism rates in the scandi countries, who have much better prisons than we do.

And God forbid that anyone in prison should actually get food. 🙄

Why are you so determined to have an argument with someone?

Why do some people care so much about prisoners and so little about their victims?

How does making prisoners suffer in inhumane conditions make things better for their victims? Does it undo the crime? Does it take away their feelings after? No.

Go research the scandi and Nordic prison models. All our prison system does is feed into re-offending rates.

but with some people they can be given the whole sliver spoon and still go bad,

Yes, you can’t mitigate for every single eventuality, that is true.

But you absolutely can look at our prisons and realise why we have such high crime rates.

• they’re overpopulated, so the staff have more to manage. They don’t have control of the situation, so drugs etc run rampant.
• because of the drugs issue, when prisoners are released they can be in the throes of addiction which can lead to re-offending.
• because our prison estate is so spread out, and the overwhelming lack of spaces, prisoners are sent all over the country. They’re then released with a measly £76 to get them home. Let’s say they’re released from HMP Channing’s Wood, but they’re from Manchester. They have to purchase a last minute ticket, which is £150. What do they do? They can’t get home, they can’t get a place to stay. They re-offend because it gets them back into prison.
• we have such a poor attitude towards ex convicts in this country. It’s almost impossible for them to get back on their feet and work, even if they want to. So they go back into the same life that they had before.

Our prison system is broken.

but on the flip side how many chances should they get before we design and build closed cities to keep them in to give them a fresh start away from society?

That’s a very poor idea.

I have a first class honours degree in criminology. There’s a reason places like Norway and Sweden have such low crime rates.

But we don't live in a Nordic or Scandinavian country. Their prisons wouldn't work here. Prisoners would laugh and think all their Christmases had come at once.

They would if we had introduced them 20 years ago. We’ve made a rod for our own back. Prison reform is needed, but it now needs to be staged across multiple years. We don’t have the time or money for that, so instead we have this. A system that doesn’t work.

excatly unless each factor is the same then you cannot just say because of x and x it means it does x etc every country every population etc are different even the people, the mentality the drives ambitions etc it all makes a difference

I have a first class degree in this field.

Our problems in the UK are very much societal, but the fundamental failings of the prison system come down to overcrowding, underfunding and societal attitudes towards crime.

Because of people like you, who think that any form of well, anything, in prison is “going soft on crime”, we have prisons that don’t educate prisoners or enrich them. So they sit in their cells bored all day, and then when they leave with no money we’re surprised that they can’t just integrate back into society.

and what about the ones who get support and chance after chance and still go back to being eg drug dealers etc due to easy £ and so on, some times with all the will some people choose the bad apples path

Who?

Who gets support and “chance after chance”? Do you know how woefully underfunded probation services are in this country?

why are you on a public forum if you can't bare to read different opinions? You seem strangely angry about a fairly reasonable and quiet discussion, which is rare on MN.

my studies have been partly from the book by Philip Zimbardo called The Lucifer Effect

No, I’m asking for examples. Not a book from a guy who carried out an incredibly controversial and questionable study in the 1970s. I’m asking for examples in our country where people get chance after chance and go back to being a drug dealer because of “easy money”.

Jesus, that's seriously nasty. Have some humanity.

that book is not just about that study its a more updated project that he wrote 2007 era, and its thanks to his study we have a better understanding of human behaviours

His study is extremely ethically and methodically flawed and cannot be seriously relied upon to make any sort of assertion.

Yet another post wanting jail birds to be boiled in oil. If we dont treat people with the minimum of decency we are not ourselves human and might as well give up pretending to be civilised.

Ironically, @PenelopeJoanSterlingwhen the SPE was replicated by the BBC in their BBC Prison Study [2006], with the correct ethical and methodology controls, the findings were opposite.