Is Prison Working?

The British prison's are up to their capacity and the justice secretary is forced to whisper to judges to stop sending so many prisoners to prison.
While in America, the Pew report has found that the United States imprisons more people than any country in the world.
The answer to the British problem seems to be being fixed by constructing more prisons but maybe we should be looking into the problem of why we send so many of our citizens to prison.
According to the Home Office British Crime Survey, 65 per cent of prisoners had at least five previous convictions which could point towards the argument that prison doesn't actually stop re-offending, merely stops them doing it while they are inside.
Of course murders, rapists and such should be held in Prison to protect the wider society but a large swathe of the prison population are there for relatively minor offences like not having a TV licence or failure to pay an amenities bill. These people are not a danger to society and need not be locked up but it seems to be the mood of society these days that incarceration is not the final possible option for such trifling crimes.
What does seem to be the major contributor to our problem is drugs.
Whether convicted for dealing or taking to criminal means to fund the habit, drugs accounts for a horrendous amount of prison admissions.
The HM Prison Service website reveals the frightening statistic that
On average 55% of prisoners report a serious drug problem and in prisons where prisoners are screened on reception that figure can be as high as 80%.
That there seems to be the crux of the problem. You need to tackle the problem of drugs in order to tackle the problem of the exploding prison population.
My solution would be to find an alternative punishment for non-threatening crimes and take the time to seriously look again at the legalisation of drugs.

Italian Meat Balls

Mussolini had a habit of touching his own testicles to ward off bad luck. Obviously, as he ended his days hanging upside down from a lamppost after being shot several times, it is fair to conclude that grabbing your own nads is not the best way to ward off the fickle finger of fate.
Regardless of the outcome of Il Duce's plum fondling, when the Italians are not living up to the national stereotype of gesticulating wildly, riding scooters and ending every sentence with 'Mama Mia', they are stroking their swingers for luck.
Or they were until yesterday because Italy's highest court has ruled it is a criminal offence for Italian men to touch their meat and two veg in public.
The judges stressed that the ban did not just apply to scratching, but any gratuitous grabbing of their crackers will be frowned upon and owner of the aforementioned love-spuds handed a fine of 200 euros.
"You should wait till you have returned to the privacy of your own homes before letting their hands stray trouser-wards" warned the judges.
Sound guidance indeed from the spaghetti munching judiciary. How George Michael and Pee Wee Herman can only wish they had been handed such sage advice.

When Were We Funniest?

UKTV is a comedy television channel here which appears to have the budget of 43p and half a hob nob biscuit but it has posed a very interesting question. What decade was the best for comedy?
It is a hard question to answer because there were some classic comedy personalities around in each generation. I would be hard pressed to name many of them before the seventies although i do have a chuckle at the Marx Brothers films who i would pick as the best from that Era, i never really found Charlie Chaplin or much else from that era very funny.
So i would have to pick from the seventies onwards and apart from the clothes and hairstyles of that time, MASH, Monty Python, Mork & Mindy, Fawlty Towers, Blazing saddles and Happy Days are the stand out comedies of the 70s.
The 80s gave us The Young Ones, Cheers, Blackadder, Only Fools & Horses, Chevvy Chase and the Airplane films, Steve Martin, the National Lampoon films, John Candy, The Naked Gun, Police Academy, Bill Murray and Michael J Fox. All very funny and a tough choice between this decade and the next for the high water mark of comedy so far.
Friends, Vicar of Dibly, 3rd Rock from the sun, Frasier, Simpsons, Red Dwarf, Father Ted, Eddie Izzard, Whose Line it is anyway (Colin Mochrie was a genius) were all knocking around in the 90s and so it's a tough choice but Father Ted just gives the 90s the edge for me.

End Of Action Films?

A few of my views put me in a direct line of fire from some of the more outspoken members of society who don't see things through my hippy tinged eyes. The Israel-Palestine thing usually draws the sharpest comments but not far behind it is my notion that people are influenced by what they see in films and on television.
Many people, including this blog, made links between the Virginia tech shooting and the film 'Oldboy' which the shooter watched obsessively and my view seems to have the agreement of the US military who set up recruiting booths in major cinemas where Top Gun was showing and had the highest applications rate for years as a result.
While we are always going to get films that are a throwback to the boy’s films of the 80s, there does seem to have been a shift away from the mindless gun toting action films emerging from Hollywood. Back in their heyday you couldn't swing a M-16 without hitting a buffed up Arnie, Stallone or Van Damme but as this generation of actors aged and either had sense to give up or stuff themselves full of steroids to make ill-advised comebacks, the following bunch of performers didn't seem so keen to play muscle bound gun-toters.
Maybe we are seeing the grinding down of the film makers by people who carp on about Hollywood taking more responsibility for what they present to an audience or maybe it is just the action films of yesterday are just not the money spinners that they once were. Whatever the reason behind it, the revisited Rambo’s and Die Hard's which performed badly at the UK box office are a dying breed.

Theft Is Wrong (Most Of The Time)

It took some goggling but i finally found the Simpson’s quote i was desperately searching for. The scene is Fat Tony and Bart talking about the rights and wrongs of taking things that are not yours and without paying.

Fat Tony: "Bart, um, is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?"
Bart: "No."
Fat Tony: "Well, suppose you got a large starving family. Is it wrong to steal a truckload of bread to feed them?"
Bart: "Uh uh."
Fat Tony: "And, what if your family don't like bread? They like... cigarettes?"
Bart: "I guess that's okay."
Fat Tony: "Now, what if instead of giving them away, you sold them at a price that was practically giving them away.
Would that be a crime, Bart?"
Bart: "Hell, no!"

Now then, i have to state from the off that stealing is never right and anyone caught stealing should be severely slapped around the soles of their feet with a rubber hosepipe or something but sometimes you occasionally think, 'hmm, wonder if any of that will come my way."
One case in point is the story that Police in Israel are hunting a gang of thieves who raided a warehouse and made off with almost 100 tons of chocolate.
The company's owners said that it would require five large trucks to transport such a large amount of the product.
Five large trucks full of chocolate should not be hard to find, unless of course someone clears a large space behind their block in a quiet area of the city in return for the keys to the trucks back door. I promise to leave you at least a few tons.

Advice For Hillary

Poor old Hillary. She probably expected to breeze in as the Democrat candidate but she didn't reckon on Obama coming along and directing his stream onto her camp fire. Now it seems that it’s Texas or bust for the former first lady who seems to be quickly disappearing under the wheels of the fast moving Obama juggernaut.
Whether she was responsible for releasing the picture of Obama dressed in the traditional Somali dress which resembles something the well dressed Taliban fighter is wearing this year or not, she does seem to be casting the image of someone who is fast losing their grip on the prize but she has forgotten her biggest asset. She has two X chromosomes while Obama is struggling along with just the one.
She has long projected an image of being tough and hard and more than a match for a man in a man's world but my advice to her is use what nature gave you to your advantage and i predict your rival will be floundering and damning his testicles to Hades.
Listen Hillary, this is what you have to do. Remember New Hampshire when you allowed the voters to see that soft underbelly? That is your secret weapon.
The two biggest drag factors you face is your vote for the Iraq War (What was you thinking woman) and your image. Both problems can be solved with one stone and i think it is probably your last throw of the presidential dice.
Get to a lectern the night before voting, anyone will do but just make sure the Worlds media have you in focus and in your best soft voice apologise.
Don't be soppy or over the top because if you make it look fake you have blown it, just say sorry for that vote and mean it.
A small tremor in the voice, maybe a few stops to clear your throat and sip at some handily placed water and just say you messed up, you are sorry but you have learnt from your mistake and are wiser for it and you hope that you will be given the chance to make amends but if not, you understand and thank everyone for their support.
If you can pull off the peek inside the softer and more human Hillary instead of the tough exterior you usually show, Texas and Ohio voters will see you in a different light.
Alternatively, you can try and brass it out. You have won every state that has a high Latino population so far and Texas especially has a decent enough percentage so you may yet live to fight another day, but my advice would be to find that lectern and munch on that humble pie.

DNA Database

Two murderers were jailed this weekend using DNA evidence collected from the few million people who have been charged with an offence and straight away there were calls to make it a nationwide DNA database with everybody’s details held therefore making it easier and quicker to solve crimes.
My first instinct was that it was an idea worth considering then i remembered that our Government is hopeless at holding information on us.
It somehow lost the tax records of 25m people recently as well as the details of 6500 pensioners and a laptop crammed with top secret documents left at Paddington station.
How can we possibly trust this lot with keeping our genetic codes safe when they have a reputation of being so useless with what they already have?
I don't know what mischief a criminal could get up to if he had the genetic material that goes into making me, me, but it probably isn't good.
So while it may sound a good idea in theory, in practise it would be the equivalent of getting Homer Simpson to protect the crown jewels so until they stop being so hopeless, my DNA stays with me or wherever i decide to leave it and the Police will just have to carry on dusting for fingerprints and harassing black men and Muslims as usual.

Avoiding British Faux Pas

The Which Holiday? website has published a list of potential faux pas that travellers should make note of as not to cause offence when holidaying abroad. Just to be a bit different, Fitz (who is due to take over on Falling on A Bruise in the near future but more on that later) and I put our heads together and came up with some potential faux pas that faces anyone who lands at our green and pleasant land.

You should avoid:
Using a mobile phone in a cinema or theatre.
Shaking hands while wearing gloves.
Opening an umbrella indoors.
Putting new shoes on a table
Offering somebody a light for a cigarette after two others
Pointing at people with the index finger
The V sign with the palm towards yourself is the equivalent of giving the finger.
Touching someone to get their attention.
Trying to gain attention of waiter, barperson etc by snapping your fingers
Calling Britain, England as it annoys the hell out of the Scots, Welsh & Irish
Hugging or kissing anybody unless you are a blood relative or married to them.

You should:
Surrender your seat to the elderly, handicapped or pregnant.
Hold a door open rather than let it close in the face of someone following you.
When out with a group, to take turns buying rounds of drinks.
Que quietly and orderly and not moan about how long you have been queing.
When in a pub, not accept service from a barperson before someone who has been waiting longer.
End every request for anything with the word 'Please'.
Write inside cards in black ink
Ask before you smoke in somebodies house and never while someone is eating

Death Knell For Capitalism?

And the dream of those anti-capitalist types moved a little closer today with news that the company that hiked up our fuel bills by a record busting 17%, made a 500% profit last year.
Centrica, who owns British Gas, made a profit of £1.39bn which is not so much a slap in the face but more of a size 8 up the nether regions to its 13 million customers having to dig deeper to stay powered.
Company bosses may bleat about rising costs and their overheads and whatever else they may say to try and justify their money grasping ways, but what are we expected to think when we see our soaring gas and electric bills and then hear about the company responsible announcing record profits. Excuse me if i don't join in the hip hip hoorays to celebrate with them.
This comes after Shell announced a profit of £13.9b while UK motorists reel from paying a pound for a litre of petrol.
Can anyone come up with a convincing argument why we shouldn't be nationalising these companies and adding the profits to the pot for everyone instead of lining the pockets of the few bosses at the top of the chain who care more about profit margins then there increasingly squeezed customers?

Bye Bye Castro

They tried everything for the past 49 years to topple Fidel Castro and the man who is loved and hated in equal measure, survived everything the USA threw at him to dictate his own time and place of leaving. The man has class even if he hasn't got a beard trimmer. Classic moment when George Bush urged the release of political prisoners being unfairly held in Cuba. What can i say? Not the sharpest knife in the drawer is he.
It is no mean feat that in the face of the USA's crippling embargo, to achieve an enviable national health system, one of the highest rates of literacy in the Western World and one of the lowest infant mortality rates is definitely a superb legacy.
On the opposite side of the coin, the long dictatorship bought a bankrupt country, an impoverished population, a terrible oppression system, a lack of civil rights and one political party led by one man which is not such a hot legacy.
The argument about whether he was a good or bad influence will obviously split down left right lines but already the western leaders are leaping in to nudge the country towards Democracy which gives me a great plan.
We need doctors and Cuba is swarming with them. They need politicians and we are falling over them here. Let’s do a swap!
Send us a few hundred medical staff to run the NHS and we will send you the Labour Party to guide you in how to run a Democracy.
Yes i was joking so you can stop laughing now.