Reintroduction of ‘boot camps’ could help fight against knives

THE solution to knife crime is very simple: three years’ imprisonment for carrying a weapon – always applied without exception (not five years, however, because prison overcrowding would soon result in courts being pressurised to avoid handing out jail sentences... as now).

I would also advocate the reintroduction of ‘boot camps’ practising military-style discipline and punishment for those who have used a weapon.

Boot camps were abandoned in 1998 after a short experimental period on the basis that they were too expensive and the time spent in them was too short.

Therefore – obviously – a greater proportion of a sentence should be spent in them. One has to ask what the cost is (socially and economically) of the present epidemic of knife crime.

The last part of the sentence should be given over to well thought out and genuine rehabilitation activities to prepare offenders for return to society (unless they have killed someone).

The problem with the justice system – which fails all of us by failing to discourage knife crime among certain groups of young people – is that it is based on an overweening neurosis around ‘human rights’ and the belief that physical punishment is an affront to ‘civilised values.’ The result is a system that lacks any deterrent value, and thereby now leads to the maiming and deaths of alarming numbers of innocent people.

Some years back I had a friend who had been very violent in his youth, most of which he had spent in and out of ‘Borstals.’

He had become adept at fighting and beating more than one adversary by using weapons such as knives and broken bottles etc.

Nothing in the punishment system deterred him until he went to boot camp – which put an immediate end to his violent behaviour because he never, ever, wanted to return to it.

John Stansfield Greenway Park