Dreamers

Twilight

Stand with Tibet - support the Dalai Lama

Urgent, this global petition to the Chinese Government from each of us now, can make a difference, they care what the world thinks.

www.avaaz.org/en/tibet_en...ence/22.php/

Pass it on.

Simon

Stella Maris

New painting, finished last week.

Man on a tightrope

New painting, finished last week.

On the path to mass incarceration

Juliet Lyon - director of Prison Reform Trust:
"We need to talk to communities, rather than grandstanding through tabloids, if we hope to curb our prison addiction.

Our national addiction to prison has landed us in a trap. Like most addicts we have lost self-control without noticing it. We are locked into an endless, accelerating cycle of prison building and reoffending. Each place costs £100,000 to build and more than £40,000 a year to run. And yet prison still delivers a reoffending rate of two-thirds. Our prison system is and will remain in a state of permanent crisis. Meanwhile politicians of all parties are outbidding each other in a populist auction of toughness, regardless of the terrible damage that brings to institutions at breaking point.

We have carried on pouring good money after bad for so long that we are now reaching the terrible position of taking money from the public services or the taxpayer to fund our prison addiction. Many US states, just a few years further down the road we are on, have had to starve education and health budgets to feed the prison beast. This year, in the toughest spending round in recent memory, runaway sentence inflation, caused by a decade of tough-talking, will greedily suck money away from everything else. Already three-quarters of the Youth Justice Board's money is poured down the drain of child jails rather than being invested where it is needed - in youth crime prevention and family support.

The extraordinary rise of the prison population is not caused by more crime, or by more people being convicted. It is caused by more punitiveness. Research from the Prison Reform Trust found politicians responsible for passing harsher laws and for feeding a media climate of vengeance, to which sentencers respond. In the early 1990s the average sentence from a crown court has risen from 20 months to 27 months. Life sentences have more than doubled. And this is at a time of falling or stable crime. A recession and an increase in the crime rate would lurch the country towards bankruptcy.

Even with crime stable, sentence inflation carries on year after year. We have what amounts to a "Weimar Republic policy" with runaway hyper-inflation on sentencing. On the one hand sentences get longer every year. On the other hand, sentences achieve ever-less because it is difficult, nigh impossible, to deliver effective rehabilitation in the teeth of a permanent accommodation and funding crisis.

But even if we build enough prisons to escape this crisis and to exceed the enormous growth that the Home Office predicts for the future, we would still be facing sky-high reoffending rates and we could still be investing in failure. That is because we are using prison inappropriately to cover the gaps in mental health provision, drug treatment, youth services and the void where an national alcohol policy should be.

Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both spoken about reaching out to local communities, charities, faith groups and campaign groups. They have talked about situating power nearer the people, and placing it in the trust of civic society, rather than having the reins only in the hands of ministers in Whitehall. The way off the terrible path towards mass incarceration we are on, is the real political leadership to reach out to the country and have an open conversation about treating drug addiction, hazardous drinking, breaking the taboos around mental health and discussing what works to tackle crime at root. We can either build prisons till we go bust, or we can build the tools and the confidence in local communities to deal with crime and to administer punishment away from the grandstanding politicians and the tabloid press."


This article appears in The Guardian 27 January 2007

Aldershot in spring

Aldershot, cake in the park beneath the closed circuit television cameras.

Aldershot is an army town, a few miles from where I live. I visited a friend there one rainy afternoon in May.

Just a short note on bees

Around Easter the rosemary bush at the front window fell silent, though it was still in flower. This room, previously humming gently, became silent.
Last week there were bees again on the cotoneaster at the back, the senses sighed with relief at the familiar presence of droning. buzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Today it was quieter, much quieter. Are the numbers falling again?

England changing

They have stilled the bells. It is quiet on the terrace. Above the tops of the trees the landscape unfurls in birdsong.
Cameras are blossoming out of streetlamps so the sensation of privacy is lost to the inhabitants of towns, frequenters of railway stations and public parks. Your private discourse with the sky has been ripped from your consciousness, wide swathes of your nature will be hidden from you henceforth for you will be watched, you will be recorded by the machine mind that missed compassion and respect in its programming. This is not fine and rosy. This scours the soul.