Crime & punishment

All too often in the media we hear of criminals not being sent to prison and instead being served with cautions, small fines, suspended sentences and electronic tags. In many cases the reason quoted is that the prisons are overpopulated and there is no where to put these convicts, never mind enough funds to support their incarceration.

So essentially an individual can commit a multitude of what may be minor, but often violent crimes with little or no punishment whatsoever. Clearly this policy creates the sort of increasingly lawless society that we see in our country today.

It is understandable that prisoners cannot be kept locked up if there is not enough funding to support it, but if it is costing the British taxpayer over £40,000 per inmate, per year – surely reducing this cost is the answer.

Apathy

Something that concerns me a lot is the lack of interest in politics and other issues that affect us all as individuals. Indeed it seems that the majority of people in my social circle have either very limited, media-influenced views, or more often - no view at all!

I feel it is fair to say that the majority of people in the UK are “entertained to death”. I have come to know this phrase to mean that we spend so much of our free time entertaining ourselves with television, internet, computer games and alcoholism that we spend very little or no time at all thinking about or observing the state of our society, our country, and the world as a whole, never mind taking action to change it. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.