Curious Snippets

We have definitely and officially entered the silly season today. Mark Oaten (remember him? how could you forget?) is taking advantage of his very public sacking last year to put himself through another astonishing round of public humiliation (as if he hadn't had enough already!). It seems he wants to get rid of prisons. Good huh?!

The Winchester MP desperately wanted to say that all prisons should be demolished - and replaced with education and training centres, mental health facilities and drug rehabilitation units.

David Rose, a journalist who has taken a special interest in criminal justice issues, believes Mr Oaten's plans would result in a highly authoritarian system.

If, as the research seems to indicate, the success rates of psychological treatments is poor, the end result could be large numbers of offenders being detained indefinitely with little chance of release, even if their crimes are relatively minor.

What Mark Oaten is arguing for is a massive increase in state power with all kinds of new powers for bureaucracies to decide whether people should be released depending on whether they've completed some kind of cognitive behavioural programme

So Mark is definitely not libertarian, but he is most definitely liberal and authoritarian. Nice to know our masters are busy thinking of ways to suppress help us. Never has the word gimp applied so aptly to a politician.

Tags: Mark Oaten - Prisons - Silly Season - Authoritarian - Gimp