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Roger Rabbits with |
Their problem is our problem. Or ours, theirs.
British jails are chocka full of villains, scumbags, miscreants and sleazeballs, scoundrels, jerks, riff-raff and low-life’s. They don’t know what to do with them all.
Why don’t they still ship ‘em out to the penal settlement of Australia – and raise the social stratum of both countries? Because Australia is shipping out its rubbish, its 501s, to New Zealand. Merry-go-round crims.
Britain’s prison population is the size of New Plymouth – about 86,000. That’s a lot of bread and water. The jails are bursting.
Like ours. We even have a waiting list for warm, comfortable serviced cells with a TV, regular hot nutritional meals and long languid days. Because there aren’t enough courts and judges to process all the candidates.
What to do? Short of Cruel and Unusual Punishment? In short, CUP. Painful, tortuous, degrading or humiliating punishment like flayed alive, disemboweling, keel hauling or death by a thousand cuts. Or being sat on by an elephant. That would constitute cruel and unusual, I suspect. Being thrown off a cliff is still a form of punishment in one country. You would have no more than about 10 seconds at terminal velocity to reflect on your misdeeds and seek urgent forgiveness.
They certainly used to be quite imaginative in the ways they dealt with naughtiness.
However, the Poms might have an answer – taking CUP to devilishly dark new places – like banning convicted criminals from attending football matches, and the pub. Can you believe it? Hit the undesirables where it hurts. No footie, no froth, no fights! Savage!
It’s punishing without imprisoning, using the only meaningful things in their miserable lives – beer and football – to get them back on the straight and narrow.
“So why go to England?” pondered one returned OE’er. “No beer, no football, what’s left to do?” Not sure. Take in some culture – a darts match at the ‘Ally Pally’, a couple of frames at the Crucible or check out the housing estates in Slough or Luton. Admittedly, not quite the same tribal, beer-sodden, gamble your life experience that football offers.
Let’s not get smug though, because in NZ we have about 11,000 bad arses living at His Majesty’s pleasure in jail – and, at your and my expense.
So we kicked around some ideas, came up with some fanciful cruel and unusual punishments our judges could hand down to save a few dollars.
A ‘1-Star’ sentence
You can get hotel rooms much cheaper than the $400 a night that it costs to keep someone banged up in NZ. Put offenders in a 1-star hotel room – strip out the mini-fridge and Sky remote, cancel room service – and it would become a ‘1-star’ cell – offering the bare essentials of a bed, reasonably clean sheets, somewhere to pee and cockroaches, bed bugs and fleas thrown in. An average $57 to $64 a night – it’s a bomb.
Sentenced to Mum
CUP for one contributor would be to be sentenced to live with her mother again. Even for a weekend. “It would end badly. I would end up strangling her or pushing her down the stairs.” Just colourful language I suspect Mum, do not fear.
Sentenced to Gore
How about being incarcerated in a cold, damp town which has no real reason to be there? Or anywhere? All those twanging country guitars, rolled ‘R’s’ as in Gor-r-r-re, a diet of ghastly, viscid cheese rolls, and enduring endless one-that-got-away stories from fly fishermen. Riveting!
‘Crap’ music’
Sentence the miscreants to listen to a prolonged 85-decibel loop of ‘noise’ by The Village People, Leonard Cohen, The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, Adele, Mariah Carey, Liberace, Neil Diamond, Justin Bieber, Drake, Bruno Mars, Lou Reed, Nickelback and Tiny Tim – did I miss anyone? Throw in Neil Young’s ‘My My, Hey Hey…’ and ‘Drop Kick Me Jesus Though The Goalposts of Life’.
Home detention
This would be CUP to some, but a blessing for Jane. “Confined to home is fine with me.” Because it offers her the unalienable right to decline. “When someone invites me to a huge dinner party with ‘fascinatingly interesting’ tedious people I could honestly say: ‘Sorry, the ankle bracelet says no!’ Perfect!”
Sentenced to pay back
Some humbling tasks like clearing rubbish and litter, painting out graffiti, mowing a little old man’s lawns – useful productive stuff, and all in the gaze of the very people they offended against. Or is that dehumanising and belittling and cruel and unusual?
To the can
I don’t mean being sentenced to the prison ‘can’ but the karzi ‘can.’ The toilet. The germaphobe says: “I have seriously bad dreams about cleaning public dunnies. No HAZMAT suit, just a brush and a pair of latex gloves”. The germaphobe needs therapy.
Fear
As a kid, I was told I had been seen fighting ‘Snot’ McAusland. ‘Snot’ because his nose ran faster than he could. And I was now in the community copper’s ‘black book’. I didn’t know what that was but I was scared for weeks. Fear’s a powerful tool.