The article is uncharacteristically sympathetic from Katie Hopkins. Actually, I suspect her usual bombastic persona is just an act in the cause of entertaining the readers. But here, she seems to have shown a genuine interest and received an unpleasant surprise at what she found out.

It was very clear from her writing that prisons are deeply unpleasant, inefficient and ineffective for inmates and prison staff alike. One commentator said that when a prisoner attacks an officer, he's not attacking the individual, but rather the nearest available representation of the system with which he really has a grievance. It's a metaphor for the dehumanisation that current policy (if it is policy, rather than just incompetence or lack of interest) pursues. It's a disturbing mixture of the Gulag and the Romans throwing the condemned into the arena to fight or be tormented for the amusement of the mob.

So what do we do instead? By the time we get to (very expensive and destructive) criminal courts and prisons, it's far too late. Back in the 70s there was an attempt to "engineer out" crime through changes to the urban form. Concrete brutalist housing complexes were the result and didn't achieve the intended result. But I think the principle is sound, if one thinks of the organisation of social systems rather than the physical environment.

An example would be legalisation and regulation of recreational drugs. Driving offences could be reduced by a revamp of driver training and testing and some improvement of transport infrastructure. The small number of genuine so-called sex crimes can be largely prevented by better sex AND RELATIONSHIPS education in schools, not by throwing a man in prison for many years. I'd also suggest a new concept of consent, which is linked to informed competence , rather than pinned arbitrarily to a birthday.

Overall, I'm just talking about good government. If there were a generally well-managed society where people received a good education to start them off and then had a reasonable chance of getting a good job and flourishing in life, most crime would indeed be engineered out. What the UK offers instead is a shit education that will waste your time until 18, then you can get a shit job for shit money that just covers your living costs, slaving all day to make profit for the plantation owner. And you only have that job until the plantation owner manages to get the immigration rules relaxed by his pal in government, and then you're gone, replaced by someone who will accept a lower standard of living and can thus accept a lower wage. In contrast, there are drug dealers, burglars and women who wiggle their big asses on Instagram who make more in a month than most do in a year. In fact, I'm thinking again about Rome and its decline through decadence and diminished aspiration.

Here endeth the rant.