#11

Our government will do their best to respond. Oh no wait, they’ll just play to the Telegraph crowd of course

#12

it was a legal high but those were done away with by a stupid piece of legislation. Apparently spice ws really fucking awful. Like it was actually what the propaganda in the 1950s said weed was.

#13

ahh, figures. had mates who liked it and mixed it with their weed.

#14

but prison is like ‘holiday camp’?

#15

was until Cameron sorted it out mate!

1 Like
#16

spice was fucking horrendous, no idea how anyone could enjoy it

#17

Silly concept tbh

#18

prisons or spice?

#19

Both I suppose

#20

spice: horrendous

prison: serves a purpose

you don’t think anyone at all should be locked up? i’m all for treating people well, providing education.

you reckon we should just get rid

#21

Eventually, it’s not like we’d remove prisons first then fix society later, but ultimately they’re putting the cart before the horse. I appreciate there are a tiny amount of very damaged folk that need to be removed from the populace for everybody’s safety too but I don’t think locking them away forever serves any purpose either.

#22

what would you have in place of prisons?

#23

to think there aren’t people that need to be locked up forever is utopian and silly. like in theory if you can rehabilitate them, great, but there are clearly and unfortunately people way beyond that, often due to psychological problems i imagine. extreme example: if someone openly admits they’re going to kill as soon as they leave the prison, you don’t just set them free because, well, they’ve been there long enough.

#24

No, thinking prisons are a necessary evil is the silly utopian project - and demonstrably does not work and has made things like social inequality, structural racism, alienation, poverty, reoffending all the rest of it worse in the long run.
And if you’d actually bothered reading what I said I never denied there weren’t a small amount of people like that, but I don’t think institutionalisation is the answer for that either. It’s a much more complicated problem than that.

#25

Whatever the confinement is framed as, anyone who is clearly a danger to other people can’t be allowed unsupervised interaction with society. Call it prison or Happy Fun Rehabilitation and Love Time but you have to do something about it.

#26

really long community service for all crimes except murder / sex offences.

#27

Sure. So what do you do with the murderers/sex offenders?

#28

LOCK EM UP.

#29

Well no, that’s what we have now. That’s the thing that’s making things worse.
Every case is individual but in a society where we had greater equality and communitarian living, and more importantly a change in social attitudes we’d be able to catch warning signs much earlier since people would be less isolated. This isn’t pie in the sky thinking, it’s the reason North European countries have so many less prisoners and are ending up closing a lot of their prisons.
That’s not to say there wouldn’t be instances of extremely violent crime still happening, but at that point it’d probably be more a job for a hospital - removing the idea of punishment and punitive measures and it’d be much better for the wider society too.

#30

So you still have prisons then.