Neighbours from hell? Give them Scroat Camp
INSTEAD of blindly building more prisons to lock up more criminals, I’d like to see our Prime Minister take a creative approach to combating crime, by assembling a few great minds to come up with punishments tailored to offenders.
Boris, I stand ready to serve. Indeed, I have a project in mind – one that would quickly curb a plague upon thousands of people who are denied a peaceful existence in the place they call home.
It’s something akin to the pig-sty for the so-called neighbour from hell.
There can be few things worse than living next to someone bent on making your life a misery and I witnessed some prime examples on a “caught on camera” series on TV.
Toerags, scumbags… the labels ran dry as I snarled at CCTV and mobile phone footage of people brawling in the street, smashing up cars, throwing bricks through windows and emptying dustbins
into gardens. What shocked me most, though, was the case of two old biddies we’ll call Nice Granny and Nasty Granny.
All Nice Granny wanted to do was go quietly about her business. But Nasty Granny was bent on terrorising her. Hemming her car in by parking either end of it, bumper to bumper, was bad enough but when she followed Nice Granny down the street, getting in her face and taunting her, then pouring a cup of tea down her back and feigning remorse (“Oh, I’m so sorry, I seem to have spilt my tea down your back!” she gurned) I wanted to neck the old witch.
Doing all this in the knowledge that she was being filmed, she should have been prosecuted for stupidity. Instead, she was charged with assault – and given a “community order”.
Enough of this namby-pamby so-called justice!
A short, sharp shock is needed: immediate incarceration in a specially designed prison I’d call Scroat Camp.
My blueprint envisages a plot of industrial wasteland, ringed by electric fencing and occupied by rows of garden sheds, each just large enough for a hard bed and a chair, with one light, no running water and a door that won’t shut properly, so that even nastier neighbours can intrude as they please.
And no TVs or mobile phones. Toilets would be outside and illflushing. Baths would be communal. Loud bursts of rap music and car engines revving up would punctuate the night air. Menial tasks would be rewarded with bland meals served by warders exempt from disciplinary action for such lapses as spilling food into a prisoner’s lap and laughing: “Oh, I’m so sorry!”
One week in Scroat Camp should be enough to change the behaviour of most “neighbours from hell”.
Now, how to deal with rapists and child murderers.