Thugs get a taste of real discipline, but will schools learn the lesson?

Laziness is the root of all evil. That belief, that the devil finds work for idle hands, under‑pinned the penal system for teenage criminals 80 years ago.

Young delinquents in the Thirties were thrust into a punitive regime of dawn runs, cold showers, physical labour and schoolroom discipline. if a lad was lazy, the idleness was thrashed out of him.

That agenda is not so much old‑fashioned as archaic. in modern Benefits Britain, young men who thieve, fight or swindle are given repeated let‑offs — there are verbal warnings, written cautions, conditional discharges, suspended sentences and community service to be applied before eventually, reluctantly, the juvenile crook is sent to a young offenders’ institute.

a custodial sentence in 2015 means enforced idleness: 22 hours a day in a cell with a TV and a Playstation. Criminologist Dr David Wilson calls this ‘warehousing’ — these young men are being stored, not reformed.

Wilson, who was a prison governor at 23, believes passionately that the justice system could do much better, and on Bring Back Borstal (iTV) he pointed to the failure rate of young offender institutes. eight out of ten junior criminals will reoffend after they are released, but in the Thirties that figure was just three out of ten.

The programme was hardly a parade of stodgy statistics, though. This was reality TV with an educational edge, as 13 troublemakers with dozens of convictions for violence, theft and drug crime signed up for four weeks of old‑fashioned correction.

They were greeted at the stone portals of a northumberland castle by Chief Officer Ducann, a leather‑lunged sergeant‑major with a peaked cap and jutting jaw. after a medical with matron, they donned the borstal uniform of blazer, shorts and long woollen socks, and were marched in front of Dr Wilson.

anyone old enough to have worn short trousers during their own schooldays will have guessed what these lads had coming, but they were oblivious to it. Proper discipline was literally inconceivable, until it hit them like a bucket of cold water.

To see these insolent louts dumped out of their beds at 6am and forced through a five‑mile run was satisfying. some of them were staggered to be shouted at: they had been cosseted by a timid society all their lives.

They responded with bluster and bullying: ‘no one speaks to me like that!’ bellowed one young thug at the matron. she didn’t flinch.

another picked up a metal chair and hurled it across a lecture room because someone had dared to question his merits as a father.

The sheer violence of their reactions highlighted one problem with this inno‑vative project. it isn’t just the modern penal system that fails to stand up to youngsters; they’ve been getting away with murder all their lives, especially in schools, where discipline is a forbidden word and laziness and foul language are the norm.

Bringing back Borstal is all very well. But this experiment can’t work until respect, decency and solid learning are reintroduced to schools.

no amount of prison sentences could cure the epidemic of murders on the island of saint Marie in the Caribbean, where they have more psychopaths than palm trees. Luckily, every killing on Death In

Paradise (BBC1) is archly well‑mannered and inoffensive. The new series began with a knife in the back at a voodoo seance in a locked room, and, naturally, everyone at the table had a motive for doing away with the victim. accident‑prone inspector Humphrey Goodman might save himself some trouble by arresting the island’s entire population. Obviously they’re all murderous madmen who hide their psychotic tendencies behind wide smiles and a haze of rum.

With the inhabitants locked up, Humphrey could devote all his time to romancing his detective sergeant, Camille — and one day he might even find the courage to tell her how much he fancies her.

if you don’t enjoy daft nonsense, you’ll never like Death in Paradise. But if your brain needs a holiday, pull up a sunbed . . . and check underneath it for corpses.

Oh, and by the way, the sublimely funny Don Warrington as the police commissioner deserves a show of his own. Just brilliant.