Our hellish prisons are run by crime lords. And here’s why...
THE BBC should, I suppose, be praised for screening its new prison drama Time, in which Sean Bean plays a middleclass wimp, an ageing teacher who gets banged up with hard men. It’s a powerful event which leaves a nasty taste in the brain hours after you’ve watched it, as it should.
But many people simply won’t watch anything so miserable. It’s all too easy to imagine falling into such a pit, in a country where justice is increasingly back-to-front. Just hope the police, the CPS, the judge and the jury in your case don’t all subscribe to the view that ‘victims’ must be ‘believed’. You may be disappointed.
But Bean’s character is not in that position. There are, no doubt, too many unharmful, gentle souls misplaced inside our jails. But a man who sinks four large vodkas before getting behind the wheel of his car, kills a cyclist and then drives off, is not one of them. I view such a crime as premeditated murder, made worse by the fact that the killer does not even care whose life he ends. But the courts don’t. Google the words ‘driver spared jail after killing cyclist’, and see how many references come up.
But there we are. And then we have the upright prison officer Eric McNally, beautifully played by Stephen Graham, fair but firm (as far as I know, this is a pretty true portrayal of many prison officers, to whom we owe a lot).
Yet somehow this wise, brave man and his long-suffering, loyal wife have a son in his 20s who has gone so wrong that he is now in prison, which most people have to try quite hard to get into.
Well, perhaps such things happen, but in real life wouldn’t the authorities spot the problem before it turned bad?
Everything which then follows, which I think is pretty wellresearched, backs up a point I have been derided for making for years, particularly after visiting two jails to see for myself. Our prisons are increasingly run by the inmates. Sean Bean’s character has to learn to be violent to protect himself. Worse, when he is in trouble he goes to a crime lord to get help, not to the officers or the governor.
But this Left-wing drama, while admitting this horrible fact, makes no sense of it. When prisons were for punishment and run by the warders, the inmates and the staff did not live in fear of criminal hardmen. And most people were careful to stay out of jail.
The monstrous failure of our criminal justice system means that almost nobody goes to prison until he is already a hardened criminal. It so totally fails to deter that the prisons are fuller than at any time in history. The jails themselves are sinks of crime and drugs, pointless warehouses we prefer not to think about. But this BBC drama openly sympathises with the soppy ‘restorative justice’ which has done so much to help create the hell it portrays.
Make your mind up, BBC. This is what liberal crime policies have produced. Yet you rightly hate the outcome.