Monthly Archives: November 2008

Tweets on 2008-11-05

  • Accidentally telling LDV chatroom that @willhowells is pooping champagne corks #
  • Setting alarm for three hours, five minutes. Why did I agree to training sesh at 9am?! #
  • @qwghlm barely 3hrs sleep and feeling dreadful! #
  • listening to @iaindale chat to Eddie Mair #
  • Waiting for the firework display on the Forest. A bit foggy. #

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Tweets on 2008-11-04

  • BBC using West Wing theme tune for US election coverage. Fiction and reality blur. #
  • @iaindale whatcha talkin ’bout on Woman’s Hour? Who with? And Manchester or London? #
  • Cardinal rule of campaign photos – no dark backgrounds. Have spent 20 mins doctoring a piccy to make it work on a riso 😦 #
  • Man, today is completely derailed by mammoth oversleep. #
  • @thermalsatsuma ours too 😦 turning it off and on again often works #
  • @doctorvee You can’t remember when Blair came in, surely? #
  • @doctorvee ah, I remember it more as EVERYONE: Blair’s PM, isn’t that great?! ME: no. #
  • listening to Martha Kearney interviewing Tina C #
  • Hehehe – Tina C thinks that despite the sand and danger, it’s time to invade Al Quaeda itself. #

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Won’t somebody think of the children?

I wrote a day or two ago about the “needs of the offenders” vs the needs of the victims.

Today, I’m pointed at an excellent piece in the Graundian about dads in prison recording bed-time stories for their kids at home – a project that has since been extended for serving servicemen and women.

No doubt some on the right will see this as disgraceful. More evidence that those on the inside are gifted hi-tech equipment that the innocent unconvicted on the outside can ill-afford. And no doubt those mouth-frothing swiveleyes are only a hop-skip and a jump from those bemoaning single families.

It’s an excellent initiative, keeping fathers close to their children and keeping offenders grounded in family life. Strong support mechanisms, and a reason not to re-offend are all helped by this project. Inmates are also learning useful skills they can put to work when they complete their sentences.

Tweets on 2008-11-03

  • Reading up on the Aleutian Islands. Coming round to thinking prob worth visiting more British islands before schlepping out to Kanaga #
  • Eek, massive Google Chrome crash after writing hundreds of words on a blog post about CA’s Prop 8 #
  • Downloading a sample San Francisco ballot paper. There are 8 different elections and a massive 34 referendums all on one voting paper! #
  • Definitely shouldn’t have stayed up all night writing US election blogs for LDV – they don’t look all that good in cold light of day. #
  • Need to get body clock to accomodate staying up all night Tues, getting up at 9am Weds and staying up for Bonfire Night on. #
  • Bah. You’d have thought two cats, two catbeds would have worked just fine, but in fact they both prefer the same one, and fight over it. #
  • To the Printcave, Risoman! #
  • @jamesgraham stay well clear if it starts talking about radishes #
  • Checking the EDM database using the browser on my phone. #

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Tweets on 2008-11-01

  • Looking into fridge for midnight snack and seeing celery, apples, grapes, walnuts… Manuelgate has got to me more than I thought! #
  • Loving Will Howell’s video round up of the US elections: http://tinyurl.com/5c78tw #
  • Joining a ginormous queue for Bond at 2250, since 2130 and 2215 were both sold out. #
  • Looks like most of the people in the queue are 15 years younger than me. #
  • Feeling really old. Has anyone else in here ever actually seen a Bond movie before? #

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The needs of the offenders

Jonathan Calder’s House Points this week reminds me of something that angered me earlier in the week.

[Jack Straw] invented something called the ‘criminal justice lobby’ and announced that it has been running Britain’s prisons for the past decade. This of nonsense, of course, and not just because it is ministers who runs our prisons. Anyone who works with public sector professionals will know how quickly they come to endorse every new twist of government thinking. They know which side their bread is buttered.

But try telling that to Straw. According to him, the members of this lobby are obsessed with the needs of offenders when they should be worrying about the victims of crime – though he was notably short of practical proposals for helping those victims.

That particular sound bite was irksome because the needs of offenders ARE the needs of victims.

Assume there will always be criminals, and that the vast majority of them will commit crimes that mean their stay in prison will only be short-lived. It is in EVERYONE’S interest to make sure that time behind bars equips them to live a legal life on their release. Shoving them in the worst possible unpleasant stinkhole for a government-specified period then unleashing them unprepared on an unready public is not in anyone’s interest.