Credit, College of Community Innovation and Education, Megan Small Story
Cell Phones
by Bill Hartley
The governor of a women’s prison once confided that she preferred middle aged men for her senior management team and that she was prepared to fly in the face of Equal Opportunities to get them. In her view, most women are in jail because they mix with the wrong men. She even provided a mini bus to take discharged prisoners to the local railway station. But not from altruism. Rather, she had become tired of watching forlorn women waiting for the promised lift home from men who didn’t show up. She realised that what most women prisoners lack in their lives is a positive male role model and she set about providing them. ‘After all’, as one of her team told me, ‘handle them wrongly and some are quite capable of barricading in a cell and feeding bits of themselves under the door’. Self-harm is one of the principal ways by which distraught women express their distress.
All of this came to mind, on reading that the Prison Service is planning to provide in-cell phones for prisoners. A predictable storm of outrage ensued in the press, together with comments about making jail ‘soft’. Equally predictably, the Prison Service responded that the scheme would be carefully controlled; only approved numbers could be dialled and the idea was to reduce the sense of isolation and incidents of self-harm. This hostile response was inevitable. The Prison Service and the Ministry of Justice have never sought to get the public onside when it comes to rehabilitation. The Service lacks a coherent, overarching approach. Instead, we see add-on proposals which are badly received when they go public. Continue reading
The Asylum Racket
OFO, Foot Crossing at San Ysidro, credit CBP Photography
The Asylum Racket
by Ilana Mercer
The Wall is crucial, but it’s not everything. Caravans of human cargo are filing into the United States because … they can. U.S. law allows it, even invites it.
Here’s how: provided you’re not a white, South African farmer—in other words, a real refugee—you may plonk yourself at an American “port of entry,” say San Ysidro in San Diego, and simply assert your right to petition the U.S. for asylum.
Then and there you claim asylum on the grounds that your race, religion, nationality or politics expose you to persecution in the country you want to leave.
Compared to a multicultural mecca like America, where faction fighting is rising, Latin American arrivals seem homogeneous. Dare I say that they’re largely Hispanic Catholics? Dare one ask who precisely is persecuting them in their homelands? Continue reading →
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