Labour's much-vaunted ``prison without bars'' system of electronic tags for sex offenders has suffered severe technical problems, it emerged yesterday.
Ministers were also privately advised to cover up the fact that trees, clouds and buildings all blocked the tagging systems for paedophiles and other sex offenders, a leaked document revealed.
(More entertainingly headlined in the Mirror as £3 MILLION PAEDO SPY FARCE, but I'm not sure how long that link will last.)
The Police will keep tabs on offenders (especially sex offenders) using `satellite tracking', by which they mean some kind of GPS thingy which transmits its position back to Mission Control periodically.
How well will this tracking idea work, then?
(The answer to the question, by the way, is, ``pretty well, so long as you're not worried about offenders travelling around on the Underground, inside cars or trains, in very built up areas, or anywhere else that a GPS receiver may not be able to see enough of the sky to get a decent fix.'' So that's alright then.)
Actually, I have this great idea for how we can protect society from criminals at the same time as punishing them and giving them an opportunity for rehabilitation.
What we should do is build a great big building and then build a high wall around it. Inside the building we build lots of rooms with locks on the doors, one for each criminal, and facilities like canteens, classrooms etc.
Then hire lots of staff to keep an eye on the criminals to make sure that they don't escape, or do anything criminal, and also to serve them food and teach them how to not be criminals (or whatever the current fashion in rehabilitation is). Hey presto!
Another great thing about this scheme is that we don't have to rely on tagging the criminals to make sure that we know where they are, because they'd always be inside the big building! (Unless they escaped, but in that case we'd be no worse off than under this tagging scheme.)
Even better, while they're inside this big building, their opportunities for committing crime would be much reduced, and anyway the only victims would be other criminals. Oh, and the staff of the facility, but we could pay them extra to compensate for the risk. And probably it'd be pretty easy to catch the offenders when crimes did occur.
Now, the only problems I can see with this policy are:
- it might cost quite a bit, what with rising house prices and everything; and
- since it doesn't rely on any flakey high technology, it's not going to look very sexy to the Home Office unless it has a really cool name, and I can't think of one.
I'm sure I could solve the latter problem at least, if only somebody would give me £3 million to work on the problem for a few months.
Comments
Posted by Pete Stevens, Friday, 12 August 2005 11:30 (link):
You should engage your evil side and add some proper punishment too.
In addition to all that you should serve only the nastiest and plastic of food. You could employ bizarre frenchmen wearing giant romper suits and get them to fondle the criminals at every opportunity. Every time they wanted to use a facility - like a chair - you could put them through a three hour twisting queue.
As for snappy names - Disneyland Paris - springs to mind....
Posted by Colin Teubner, Tuesday, 23 August 2005 04:02 (link):
Hmm, emails when you write something, eh? If only there were some technology where, instead of visiting news websites and blogs periodically, or getting extra mail clogging my inbox, I could just subscribe to the sites directly and my computer would let me know when there was a new article. It could use XML-based feeds of content. I'm sure it would take off if only someone could come up with a really cool name for it. ;-)
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Tuesday, 23 August 2005 10:13 (link):
I do have an RSS feed, you know....
Posted by Francis Irving, Tuesday, 23 August 2005 11:38 (link):
Yes, but it is fashionable these days to add it to some kind of meta link tag, so that it appears as a little orange button in the corner of Firefox.
Posted by Colin Teubner, Monday, 29 August 2005 17:33 (link):
I know, it's how I discovered you'd posted once again, and what earned you such sarcasm. If I thought you were unfamiliar with RSS you might rather have received a friendly suggestion to add a feed.
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