11/08/2005
Ill-informed opinions + BBC Scotland = idiocy all round
entry posted by Inquisitor at 3:10
(permalink).
categories: Idiots
, Politics
There's been a peculiarly Scottish political controversy running for a very long time about slopping-out in prisons - it's still happening up here, despite the fact that the prison system in England and Wales stopped it in 1994 as part of the Strangeways fallout. The Scottish prison service, on the other hand, couldn't be arsed to fix the problem, despite being warned that the European Convention on Human Rights was coming into law - it actually became part of Scots law before the Human Rights Act appeared in England - and so have been on the receiving end, quite rightly, of various legal judgements against them.
What's sadly not peculiarly Scottish about the situation is the general
reaction: "how dare those prisoners complain about having their
rights violated and actually being paid for it? Shouldn't they
just shut up and shit in a bucket like they're told to?" The issue has
recently come back to haunt us because the Scottish Prison Service,
instead of actually fixing the problem by, you know, installing flushing
toilets, is just setting aside more and more money to pay off the legal
judgements against them - currently £40m, and since you consider that
the judgements are only about £2000 each that's a lot of them. The Daily
Mail is going off, although the people it should be going off on
are the Scottish Executive for diverting the £13m it would have taken to
fix the problem completely to the Parliament building
yet another "Just Say No" drugs scheme.
Enter BBC Scotland. BBC Scotland now have a facility where any person can send in a "My View" article, and have it published on the most respected news site in Britain, and naturally since very few people know about this and because BBC Scotland have a liking for sensationalism (see their Luke Mitchell coverage) the most ill-informed, stupid articles will almost certainly turn up on the site. A good example is, indeed, an article on the slopping out issue: "Prisoners with more rights than victims", by an 'information assistant' from Aberdeen.
Going into what's wrong with this article would start with the title, go straight through all the clichés and end up at the just plain wrong - currently, slopping out affects three jails in Scotland, one of which is the Polmont Young Offender's Institution and thus not exactly "those in jail for the most heinous crimes" (see Dominik Savage's Out of Control (2002) and these Guardian articles for what else is wrong with YOIs) - but what's much more shocking is the comments section. Now, I do give BBC Scotland credit for adding a "Have Your Say" system to an article which basically a conversation starter (on USENET, we'd call it a 'troll') in the first place, but what I was totally unprepared for was the way in which everyone seems to... agree with her.
No kidding, either. They almost all agree with her completely and judge those that might like to disagree with them as "Liberal Hippies" - which is the kind of thing I'd expect to see on FreeRepublic, not on the BBC's system. This gets to such the point that that someone says they're playing "devils advocate" - and then puts the view that we have inalienable human rights! There's the usual "this is politically correct" bollocks, "bring back flogging!", various "liberal do-gooder" references and such jaw dropping comments as this:
Hear hear Karen. I saw a news clip the other night showing prison conditions in Manila, with filthy conditions, serious overcrowding and mixing ALL prisoners together in the same cells, whether they were petty thieves or paedophiles. The first thing I thought was 'that is how prison should be in this country'. [JL, Wishaw]
I'm actually ashamed to be in the same country as this guy.
What these people aren't realising are a few basic facts. Peterhead prison has slopping out on the remand wing, i.e. for people who haven't yet been convicted of any crime; "innocent until proven guilty" isn't exactly in these people's vocabulary, but it's still legally (and rightly) there. At the time the £2500 prisoner was suffering slopping-out, he was on remand. They also don't realise what slopping out is: it's shitting in a bucket. Not only is this completely unhygienic and thus dangerous for both prisoner and anyone else who has to handle it - eczema was the least of this guy's problems, since they don't actually have sinks in there either - but it's humiliating, unnecessary and does absolutely nothing to aid the rehabilitation of the prisoner. A modern prison should focus not on punishment but on rehabilitation, since just punishing them generally won't solve the problems that caused them to commit the crimes in the first place (whether psychological, societal, educational, financial or just plain greed); however, any attempt to change the emphasis from one way gets a huge media outcry, fired by the Sun and the Mail and the media transmitters on how it would all be better if we went back to the Victorian prison system. This is amusing in a way, since they also like to go on about how we're a "nanny state" - which is, of course, mutually contradictory to their own "family values" positions - but since when did the rightwing media make any sense?
In fact, this is all part of the attack on the Human Rights Act currently coming from all corners: from those parts of Blair's government who'd like to see "terrorists" (i.e. people who've looked at the wrong website; as well as actual terrorists, although they probably won't get too many of them) disappear permanently without any need for a trial, to these right-wing media attacks on what they like to call "liberal namby-pambyism", to the far-right-wing attacks on anything that isn't white (and especially nothing that has any shade of Islam) having any rights whatsoever. Even the Telegraph, which has well-written news articles and a commendable libertarian bent that makes its opinion columns at least occasionally agreeable to those of a leftier persuasion, called for the removal of the HRA recently; the Scum did it much more loudly, and the Express is getting so loud it's even making the Mail uneasy. And if we're not careful, and make sure our opinion is heard just as loudly as theirs, we could lose the only thing Blair's government should actually be proud of doing; ensuring our rights to free speech, expression and thought.
Sadly, however, in this case the comments are already closed.