TURN THE CRIME TIDE BY BUILDING ISLAND PRISONS
Alcatraz in San Francisco
By Frederick Forsyth
EVERY DAY there is another report of a prisoner who merited a long detention but was released far too early and went straight back to crime.
And always the reason is the same: we have no more room in our jails.
Judges are told flatly: do not give custodial sentences. Our prisons are full. But there is a solution: custodial colonies on offshore islands.
Now I know that at the word “island” people will think of Alcatraz (pictured), a brutal, bleak cruel institution in San Francisco Bay, now a tourist attraction. That is not what I mean.
Stand back and think. If you had to be detained to protect society from yet more hundreds of burglaries you would commit if free, which would you prefer? To walk the beach with the sun on your face and the wind in your hair or be penned like an animal in concrete cells behind steel bars?
The point of an island exile is that the sea is the concrete wall, the waves the iron bars, the rip tides the razor wire. So long as there is no boat or raft, you are not going to escape.
|
The sea is the concrete wall, the waves the iron bars, the rip tides the razor wire.
|
|
|
Our country has about 1,000 offshore islands, from the big ones such as Wight, Man and Scillies down to rocks not much bigger than a football pitch. Several hundred are perfectly habitable but uninhabited, yet large enough to sustain a colony of 1,000 bungalows containing four convicts each.
Yes, there would have to be mess halls and all the facilities of a land-based prison. And yes, there would have to be a wired-off secure zone for the admin fuel stores, workshops, staff quarters, generators, desalination plant and helipad. But modern “systems building” and flat-pack assembly are a thousand miles away from the great brooding Victorian hulks that we think of when the word “prison” is used.
Offshore custodial colonies would cost a fraction of what developers would pay for those prime city sites where the Victorians built. In those days prisons were in the country; now they are at priceless locations.
The police aver that up to 70 per cent of crime is fuelled by drug dependency but in onshore prisons drugs are rife and detoxification impossible. An island could be made immune to smuggling and produce inmates finally clean of narcotics.
And modern technology provides rapid transit from mainland to island, video conference suites to replace family visits and sonar sensors in the surrounding sea to warn of illegal craft approaching. Inmates could learn a skill, acquire the education they never had and enter a form of gainful employment on the island.
Too radical for our bird-nerved politicians and civil servants? Probably. But a simple cost/benefit analysis would, I think, prove my argument.
Video 
THE STUTTERUNG FINGER.
28.05.08, 5:03pm
Honest, "shell22", I must have sneezed or something. The only thing I dominate is my dog, or he'll rebel.
• Posted by: bluenote • Report Comment
BLUENOTE.....!
28.05.08, 5:48am
I feel like I have deja vu!!! Presumably due to the problems yesterday?
• Posted by: Shell22 • Report Comment
TURN THE CRIME TIDE BY BUILDING ISLAND PRISONS
25.05.08, 9:00am
What's wrong with Gough and Nightingale?
• Posted by: JohnnyB • Report Comment
ISLAND PRISONS.
24.05.08, 11:03am
Freddie's idea may not be origonal - Devil's island, Alcatraz and other islands off South America, but at least his basic analysis of it's merits are sound and pretty good, in my estimation, particularly concerning the drugs aspect of prisons in this stupidly run country. It's so easy to ctiticise and take the mick - it's not so easy to make a radical idea take off and work. And we sorely need new ideas to rectify our problems. We are in a right old state in almost every way, so ideas like this are needed urgently. "If it don't work - FIX IT !!!!!!.
• Posted by: bluenote • Report Comment
ISLAND PRISONS.
24.05.08, 11:03am
Freddie's idea may not be origonal - Devil's island, Alcatraz and other islands off South America, but at least his basic analysis of it's merits are sound and pretty good, in my estimation, particularly concerning the drugs aspect of prisons in this stupidly run country. It's so easy to ctiticise and take the mick - it's not so easy to make a radical idea take off and work. And we sorely need new ideas to rectify our problems. We are in a right old state in almost every way, so ideas like this are needed urgently. "If it don't work - FIX IT !!!!!!.
• Posted by: bluenote • Report Comment
ISLAND PRISONS.
24.05.08, 11:03am
Freddie's idea may not be origonal - Devil's island, Alcatraz and other islands off South America, but at least his basic analysis of it's merits are sound and pretty good, in my estimation, particularly concerning the drugs aspect of prisons in this stupidly run country. It's so easy to ctiticise and take the mick - it's not so easy to make a radical idea take off and work. And we sorely need new ideas to rectify our problems. We are in a right old state in almost every way, so ideas like this are needed urgently. "If it don't work - FIX IT !!!!!!.
• Posted by: bluenote • Report Comment
To view all 'Have Your Say' comments, click this button...