16 Months For Charlie Gilmour (Student Fees Demo)

[LemonDifficult]

I wasn't very sympathetic to the rioters but 16 months seems a long time to put someone this young away for. Ridiculous. He'll get the fright of his life in the first few weeks and then what? What's the point of all those extra months - at tax payers expense.

I guess he won't do the full term, but still. It seems crazy.

I do however apologise for the overuse of 'I imagine'

yep sadly he will be out soon, hopefully having learnt a lesson, but sadly I doubt it. he doesn't seem very clever.

Thb I think he must have had previous convictions to have got such a lengthy sentence. The ultimate in thick twattery, not the sort of person i'd want to associate with, nor am I ever likely to thank gawd.

If he had they'd have been mentioned in the news reports, surely?

I dunno

I think it's a total waste of money to have sent him to prison...

Community service would have been more productive..

And if he had jumped on my car i wonder if he would have got 16 months...

Or any months at all.

exactly, reeling

I would like to see people who smash things up, from protestors to drunks, have to do community service in the form of cleaning up. Graffiti, litterr, rivers filled with rubbish and shopping trolleys.
Hard physical and useful work.
Least something is being given back rather than languishing in prjson on taxpayers money.

Yep..Rivenside..

I agree.

A friend got done for Drink driving....ban of two years and 200 hours community service (he was well over the limit).

It took him ages to do but the ban was more painful....for DP too as he ended up driving said friend to work and carrying all his tools etc in his van.

He worked with the council litter picking etc.

perhaps the fact that he was on drugs at the time was part of it.

India Knight has also written sympathetically about CG in the Sunday Times, pointing out that he hurt no-one.

Physical hurt no, but what about emotional distress to war veterans and the families of those killed in action? Did he think about them when he swung from the flags on the Cenotaph?

And how were the police to know he wasn't a threat to someone when rampaging about London? He tried to throw something at a car containing members of the royal family. If it had been the Prime Minister or a foreign head of state he'd probably have found himself face down in the tarmac with a knee (or worse) in the back of his head.

Bastard paywall

He joined an important valid protest while stoned on LSD, valium and alcohol. He acted like a self indulgent little thug. His actions drew attention away from a valid protest and caused it to lose public sympathy. I don't have any sympathy to be honest. I can't believe that a history student did not know what the Cenotaph was.

Cavemum it is not and should not be an offence to cause emotional distress to war veterans, sorry that is British law. Agreed that he is a young twunt, taxpayers money could be far better spent making him do a few months decent hard graft community service. God knows there's enough to do in austerity Britain.

Btw I am not talking about extremes like directly abusing war veterans to their faces etc as that might well come under 'public order', but no doubt war memorials probably including the Cenotaph (unless it's always under guard?) are regularly swung off by drunks every Friday night and the country clearly does not have the money to criminalise every drunk idiot who does this sort of thing.

Of course he was a complete idiot! Nobody here is denying that, or saying that he should not be punished, but what many of us are saying is that 16 months imprisonment is not appropriate, or useful, or cost-effective, or relevant.

Community service, ideally involving clearing up messes made by other idiots like him, would be so much more practical & sensible.

That really is exactly it, Ponders. There's no one saying Charlie Gilmour's behaviour was very nice - but surely not worth the cost of 16 months at the Taxpayers expense. No benefit to anyone.

I'd say it benefits most of us because it will act as a deterrent to the next bunch of muppets who think the best way to protest is to have a riot.

You could argue that imprisonment isn't useful or cost effective for murderer's but we do it! The idea is to punish the person and act as a deterrent to everyone else.

The fact it's 16 months means his case was serious enough to warrant being dealt with at crown court rather than at a magistrates who can only jail for 6 months.

There's just simply no place for violent protests in this country.

the death penalty never deterred people from killing people

That kind of behaviour is never thought through - hence it will never ever be a deterrent.

Nobody said deterrence is 100% effective. But what's the alternative? Let's not bother?

it is of course v hard to assess how well deterrence is working, because we do not know how many people would commit crimes if they were no t too afraid of punishment to do so. However evidence from e.g. the US ('three strikes' drug policy etc) suggests that increasing sentencing and 'getting tough' have very little effect on actual offending.

The question is then why do such policies appeal so much to the public? The answer is clearly anger and symbolic retribution rather than rehabilitation, as prison has been shown over and over again to do the exact opposite and in fact to embed offenders in patterns of repeated crime and imprisonment. So we need to be thinking about what might work better.

I can't think of much better treatment for this young oik than to have to take care of his environment without pay for 6 months or so. 16 months of accommodation at HM's pleasure for Hilton prices strikes me as pointless and a waste of taxpayer's money.

and fair enough violent protest has no place in this country but I think that increasingly due to less than 'transparent' police behaviour (partly, imho, encouraged by media-induced hysteria about violent protest, which began in the 80s) we just cannot be sure who the real villains are any more and I find it rather odd when MN posters start fulminating about student yobs when increasingly both sides are behaving less than sensibly. www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/18/fortnum-mason-uk-uncut-charges-dropped#start-of-comments
In the F&M case it seems a bunch of completely peaceful protesters were basically used as tabloid fodder: ooh look we got some yobs for you (the ones who were wellbehaved and easy to trick into arrest).

But 21 is old enough to know better! I have colleagues that age, some married + some have children. They would never behave like that - even if they wanted to any conviction would lose them their jobs + homes.
Apparently he was one of those who broke into topshop & intimidated the (mostly young) assistants.
He deserved his sentence, shame other sentences aren't higher (& include hard work).