Put the Students Behind Bars

An article in yesterday’s paper describes the government's intention to force high-school student that refuse to stay in school to 18 to attend weekend detention.

What will happen to those who do not appear to the detention? Will we employ the police force – too busy to finish their current paperwork – to chase students? And when they catch them? Will we burden the legal system, or shall we simply extend the anti-terrorist law and allow for detention without a trial? Shall we build special jails for them, or shall we just release before time some more dangerous rapist and murderers to free jail space?

There was another interesting fact in yesterday’s paper: on an international scale, in the past five years, British students have plunged down from 4th to 14th place in science, and from 3rd to 19th in Reading Literacy.

So why do we want to force people to go to school? After all, they don’t seem to learn anything there. Aren't they better off getting a job and learn something useful?

Instead of detention centers, the government may want to think of alternative education, make educational TV attractive and exciting. Or perhaps create a free game arcades with exciting educational games.

I’m sure it can’t be that difficult to create some exciting and educational games. For example: a person approaches you in the dark and asks for help (oral comprehension), as soon as you recognize he made a grammatical mistake you can blow his head off, but if you were wrong, he chops you with a machete (grammar education). However, when you are out of bullet you can pick up a bottle of acid (chemistry) and throw at his face and see how his body deforms (biology).

I am sure that the creative minds can come with better games, if not we might want to consider the drop out student as their replacement -- a change that may feel just like the holiday that UK needs.

Legal Matters

The life of a girl of 15 working as a prostitute was exposed when a suspicious teacher, who searched her bag, found condoms and the name card of her agency and alerted police.

Two legal issues are yet to be resolved before any act can take place:

1. Should the crown sue the teacher for abusing her power and conducting an unauthorized search?
2. Can help services ‘rescue’ the girl, as evidence was obtained illegally, and therefore, by law inadmissible.

There is nothing like a good bureaucracy to raise ones confidence in the system.

Lock them behind bars

A mother who let her child continuously play truant was jailed for 56 days. This is a great use of our jail system, considering the number of dangerous criminals released early for lack of jail space.

I just wonder when was the last time anyone thought why we have jails at all, and who should be put there?

 

Drug enlightened UK by ranfuchs @ 18/02/2009 – 07:19:45

A father of three, whose family had been suffering from heroin dealers, has been jailed for two months for grabbing dealer’s heroin stash and flushing it down the toilet.

How enlightened UK has become. We have now entered a new human-right era in which heroin dealers seek police help to protect their possessions. Next, they will sue the police when it fails to protect them.

Coming soon: tax-payer's funds will be used to establish help-line for heroin dealers in financial distress.

Hypocrisy

Today, Musa was found guilty for Speed camera scam and was sentenced to 16 months in prison. He had charged speeding motorists up to £200 for taking the blame.

Today, if the four House of Lords members are found to have accepted £120,000 to help secure amendments to a Government bill on behalf of a business client, they could be required to apologise on the floor of the Lords. They cannot be expelled from Parliament or stripped of their titles, not to mention serving a jail sentence.

Everyone will benefit if we send Musa to the House of Lords and the Lords to prison.

Crime and Robbery

My neighbour’s house got broken into. The thieves took money and jewellery.

The police came. They did a good job: they conducted lots of interviews, filled in many forms, and said that all goes on file. But when asked what the chance of getting the things back is, they admitted that the vast majority of stolen items are never found.

It was not the money that breaks my neighbour’s heart; it’s the sentimental value of some of the jewelleries; some given to her by her mother on her deathbed.

What does it say about us?

Police doesn’t have enough budget for proper investigation (why don’t we throw them a billion or so from the bank bailout?) and a great deal of their taxpayer-paid time is spent on non-productive paperwork.

While non-criminal are often fined for minor ‘offenses’, despite the increased crime (including violent crime) the legal system makes any effort to understand the problem of criminals, rather than the law-abiding victims. So even if my neighbours robbers are caught, they are likely to end up with minimal penalty.

We, those who grew up in a generation where good behaviour was respected and crime was heavily punished, may still believe that crime is bad. But what message does the young generation get? That crime is acceptable and excusable?

We are now blaming the greed culture we created for the latest economic crisis. It’s not long before we will be blaming the crime supporting culture we are now creating for not being able to walk in the streets unarmed.

The crime and gang culture is already here, but we still may have a chance to stop it. Tomorrow may be too late.

Trust the news: crime and savings

"Automated phone system should be brought in to report crimes. This would save money and ease pressure on the police."

In a time when violent crime sores, the question should be how to prevent and fight crime effectively, not how to cut cost. After all, if cutting cost was our objective, we could get the police off our streets and let citizens defend themselves. Then to justify the money that goes to the legal system, we can arrest those citizens who harm criminals while trying to protect themselves. Alternatively, we can get rid of the legal system too. After all, if we can’t put in jails those sent there by the legal system, why bother at all?

Another option may be to privatise the police force. This seems to work very well in many third world countries. Pay your own policemen policy will clearly improve our GDP and create new business opportunities, especially if we make it tax deductible. If we save the government a great deal of money, don't we deserve some back?

On the other hand, why don’t we get rid of the government and use the money wasted on politician to pay the police. At least I know what the role of the police should be, something I can’t confidently say about the government.

The best prostitute award

What do we -- as society -- have against prostitution?

1. We all sell parts of ourselves -- body, mind, or spirit -- for money.
2. Unlike many other business (say my car mechanic) with prostitution you get what you pay for.
3. In other businesses you often feel that you got f**d (last night’s restaurant, for instance). With prostitution, this is what you pay for.

So let’s recognize prostitution for what it is -- an honest trade where you get what you pay for, and focus on that which is important: forced prostitution, and human trafficking should clearly top this list.

School Bullying

Today’s paper reported on another school girl who committed suicide, allegedly as a result of school bullying.

I don’t know if the claim is true, nor do I know the statistics. But from my personal experience, school bullying is much more tolerated in the UK, than in any other country I’ve been.

I have three kids going to three different schools, and this is the fourth country we’ve lived in. We’ve always lived in similar type of suburbs, and sent our kids to similar types of schools. By all means, my three kids have encountered (fortunately, not first hand) more bullying here than in any of their previous schools.

The scarier thing is not the bullying itself, but the total inability of the schools stuff to discipline the bullies. Despite the fact that a single bully can make life hell for an entire class, school stuff is not given any means whatsoever to discipline them.

As one of the teachers said: “I don’t know why we need to sacrifice entire classes of good student for some hypothetical ideal of giving everyone equal opportunity. It doesn’t work.”

If at school you realize that bullying is not punishable, can we really complain about the level of violence in our streets?

Human Trafficking

Last week, the justice minister and deputy leader, Harriet Harman, announced she’d be focusing on fighting human trafficking.

For anyone who is familiar with human trafficking this initiative is most welcome, as it is truly one of the most horrendous modern crimes.

The opening of Russia and Eastern Europe and the removing of the European borders have brought slavery back to the developed world, for the first time since the American Civil War (1865). It’s not merely sweat shops we are talking about, but true slavery.

Thousands of young women, often in their late teens, from poor countries are brought to their dream land (UK and other European countries) under the promise of good work that will help them support their families. They are lent the money for the trip and told that it will be easy to pay it off once they have started working.

When they arrive without their passports (held by their ‘travel agents’) they are sold to local pimps and made to work in prostitution ‘to pay back their debt.’ From stories of some of the girls who got rescued, we learn that they are held in cage conditions, which they are not allowed to leave. They have to service dozens of men each day, and although they are given no money whatsoever, they never manage to pay off their debt. Some have been living under such conditions for years.

Any effort to fight this crime should be applaud. But from a pragmatic point of view, it’s unlikely that Ms. Harriet’s suggestion to make paying for sex illegal will solve the problem, for the following reasons:

1. In England, due to insufficient police forces, inefficient justice system, and overcrowded jails many dangerous criminals, murderers and rapist walk free in our streets. Are we planning to bog down these resources further to handle the thousand of men frequenting prostitutes?
2. Prostitution is often considered a safety value for those who may otherwise commit sex crimes. So as long as prostitution is voluntary (in the sense that any work we do is voluntary) do we really want to remove this safety mechanism?
3. Prostitution, whatever your personal opinion may be, is a natural part of society. No culture or country, not even the strictest ones where prostitution means death, has managed to stop it. Would England be the first one? Besides, if we knew where to arrest the men frequenting the prostitutes, couldn’t we simply rescue the girls?

Human trafficking must be fought smart. We may want to consider regulating prostitution by restricting it to certain locations, and require prostitutes to have a license. If license also included health checks, it would be in the client’s best interest to ask for it.
We may also want to start a big awareness campaign, and provide free, anonymous telephone numbers to report of such cases. Although not all clients will care, I am sure that many would not agree with involuntary exploitation of women, and would use these lines to report.

Undoubtedly, there are other better solutions, which we must seek. But if we are to fight this crime, a knee jerk reaction that satisfies self-appraising political system is unlikely to be the solution we need.