Thank Goodness for Operation Safeguard!

With prisons set to overflow by the end of the week, someone needs to think outside the box, or cell in this case. Options on the cards are:

Move prisoners in secure prisons to "open prisons".
Last week I arrested someone for Failing to Appear in court who told me brightly that he gave up his tenancy of a flat in anticipation that if he had no fixed address when arrested, he would have to be kept in jail (an open prison). This was a good thing.

Move prisoners into police cells.
If we want to kill our offenders off with boredom, this is the way to go.

More community sentences in lieu of prison.
Don't worry, "This is not a soft option." You really will get a good telling off if you refuse to paint the wall assigned to you.

Here is the Bloggs solution to the crisis:

• Take every case before the Crown Prosecution Service, even ones where the person has admitted it or is obviously guilty. Their exacting charging standards which require ludicrous things like doctor's statements and scenes of crime reports BEFORE charge, will reduce our charging rate to virtually nil, or at least delay it by 6 months while we wait for these things to come through. Some will never come through.
  
• Give out Fixed Penalty Notices for a wider range of offences such as Failing to appear in court and Burglary. No one will ever pay them, but that isn't the point.
  
• Stop doing Area Searches (driving about looking for the offender following an offence). As this is the only way to ever catch an offender who has not been named, this will massively reduce the number of people convicted. Some police in my area have begun this already, in kindness to the prison system.
  
• Rather than initially halving the sentence and increasing it for bad behaviour, it could be divided by three, or four.
• Sentence no one to more than two years in prison. Actually forget that, they're already doing it.
• If someone pleads guilty at court, just let them go. They are obviously sorry. Dammit, they're doing that already too.

This is harder than it seemed...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright of PC Bloggs