Ideas 7...Imprisonment

The average citizen has an intense fear of the police, and especially of imprisonment. For any normal person at normal times, such a fear is a deterrent to committing crime. Once a person has experienced prison however, it is no longer a deterrent, since beforehand most people rate imprisonment as being far worse than it actually is.

Without a doubt, prison to me was a sickening example of the ineffectiveness of government. I was left with the impression that it would have been more humane and effective to flog me, than leave me rotting in a human dustbin for two years and ten months. For the average habitual offender, I was left with the conclusion that flogging would be more impressionable, more positive, and certainly more cost effective. Since we live in what we regard as a civilised society, corporal and capital punishment are taboo. There is however no doubt in my mind that the last place one should put an habitual criminal is in a traditional British prison, where in no time the inmates dulled brain will have become institutionalised, and brain washed by other offenders. In no time they look upon prison as being better than home. From what I heard and saw, a long term prison is preferable to a life on the dole, particularly to people who crave for friendships. Crime for many was a way of life, an occupation, a necessary evil.

As with the marines, prison inmates should be torn down, then built up to become model citizens. This would be carried out by the British army. It would involve character building and special education where necessary, leading to permanent employment. In a truly caring prison system I considered a fixed term of imprisonment inappropriate. Release should be through the inmates own personal effort based on good behaviour, work output, wages saved, educational attainments achieved, and response to medical treatment where necessary. Prison inmates should be trained for release back into the community. They should have their own cell and shown how to look after themselves as regards housework, including cooking, ironing, hygiene, shopping, manners, etc. How to manage finances, including the paying of utility bills. Each prison should have its own genuine factory, not pathetic workshops, making prison clothing , mail bags and road signs. The working week should be ten hours per day, six days per week, on a production line where team work was important. Inmates should receive union rates of pay, and charged rent and income tax, etc. They would be required to save up enough money, which would be spent on furnishing a flat or buying a home immediately prior to being released. However, based upon my personal experiences, the Home Office does not possess the necessary professionalism to make it work fairly.

Upon attaining a certain level of achievement, inmates should be encouraged to cohabit with inmates of the opposite sex. When they had earned enough on the production lines, inmates would be paid whilst they attended educational classes, relevant to the state's employment needs, upon their release. Inmates would be allowed to wear their own clothes. Offenders would be put in solitary. In short, prison would be a hard working, positive minded society, with standards higher than in the community at large. There would be no drugs, no alcohol, no tobacco and no junk food. It would be a government designed microcosm, a place where social designs could be tried out before implementation in the world outside. Those inmates that consistently failed within this regime should be relegated to sheltered communities, where they could be supervised. Prison should be a place to build, and not destroy.

Of course the obvious answer to the prevention of crime is to deny people the freedom to commit it in the first place. The creation of a command economy, where everyone has to work for an approved organisation between certain hours. Where there is no alternative welfare state and no retirement. Where every individual's minute of every day is controlled by the state, is one way to prevent crime. That is an Orwellian view. The alternative is to control everyone's mind, perhaps through the use of surrogates. That is, replacing one's self with an android, where face to face communication is required. Reducing interaction periods between people by requiring them to work from home via the internet, enhancing communication via 3D images, like Star Trek's Holo Deck. As someone who has spent over 35 years living alone, all I can say is that it's OK as long as you have plenty of things to occupy your mind with. After that it's depressing. Which of the these alternatives is best? Doing nothing is not an option, since with advancing technology it leaves potentially horrendous technology in the hands of irresponsible people. If this problem is not addressed by parliaments, then there will no doubt come a time when the human race will solve the problem by becoming non-physical. That is transmorphic. Perhaps the human race will end up existing within a huge computer system, so advanced that it can portray persona, charisma, etc. Alternatively we may exist as spirits in a non-physical world, based upon physics that we as yet have no knowledge of. And all because our governments cannot address the fundamental issue of how to prevent people breaking the law.

For violent repetitive offenders, I can only hope that medical science through better diet, electro-convulsive therapy, drug implants or whatever, can contain the situation. Crime is an awful scar upon any civilised society. To find an amicable solution to the problem is virtually impossible, but there must certainly be a better way than that which I experienced. Decades later I was to realise that bioengineering of a person's genome may be the only cost effective answer.

there are of course other crimes for which there is no punishment. Crimes that are not listed in statute books, and crimes that are not regarded as serious enough to warrant a prison sentence, but which could trigger a crime that would. Whilst living here I have had one fox scarer stolen from the back garden, one canna- tropicana stolen from the front garden and the waste paper pod stolen from my recycling wheelie bin. It's pathetic.

Throughout the years I looked after my wife, and throughout the years I spent in prison, I lived in hope. Hope that one day we would all live in a better, more democratic and more caring world. It was this hope that kept me alive, I dreamt of a utopian world where social democracy flourished. Where there was a place in society for all human beings, regardless of their capabilities. A better world where trust and love proliferate. A world fit for children to grow up in. That world has thus far not arrived. Governments behave more like financial institutions than social workers. It is my belief that the global economy will collapse, either due to rising commodity prices, unaffordable insurance premiums due to climate change, putting firms out of business and thereby causing a global banking collapse. Global terrorism triggering super volcanic eruptions and mega tsunamis, H5N1 pandemic or global warming which could trigger a third world war. After all this misdirected effort, maybe the surviving remnants of the human race will see the error of their ways and create a world technocracy.

My autobiography, Utopian Dream, was produced in 1987 on an Amstrad PCW 8512, printed off on a dot matrix printer, scanned using OCR onto a PC, only to find that not everything was scanned correctly. After proof reading this and hopefully replacing all those commas with full stops (period), it occurred to me that if husbands had been made responsible for the actions of their family, including the actions of their wives, it is likely that I would not have ended up in prison. But of course there is still no law in the UK designed to deter people from nagging (goading) others into becoming violent or suicidal.

Thirty two years later I still believe in the creation of a world technocracy (WT), which would undoubtedly lead to a new civilisation, second to none. At the age of seventy-three I have lived all my life under the threat of global thermonuclear war. It's now obvious to me that there are now many members of the global electorate that have had enough of politicians maintaining this unacceptable state of affairs. Governments ignore this movement at their peril. It will not end with the Arab spring and the troubles in eastern China and Hong Kong.

This website gives more detailed information on how a WT should be structured.