Living in Cloud Cuckoo Land

So Ken Clarke thinks the penal system has broken down because three out of four of those involved in the recent city centre riots had previous criminal convictions – shock horror, now there’s a surprise!

His, and Boris Johnson’s view, seems to be that all would have been well if only those criminals had been given more probation and less prison. It would be interesting to see how true this assumption is and how many times those rioters had been given the opportunity to reform, and rejected it in favour of a life of crime.

Of course, Ken Clarke, to whom punishment is a dirty word, is unlikely to reveal such statistics in case it shows that his pre-conceived notion that non-custodial sentences are not the Holy Grail after all and it is more, not less, prison sentences which are the best deterrence to criminality.

Truly this man is living in cloud cuckoo land but in case it's thought this is the 'get Ken Clarke blog' I do agree with him on one point when he says "the key to creating a productive member of society is to ensure that each person has a job, a strong family, a decent education and, beneath it all, an attitude that shares in the values of mainstream society".

That may well be the solution, the problem is how to achieve it.