I did two prison visits this week. One one occasion the inmate couldnt be found at all. On the second, the guy Id come to see couldnt be found at first, but the guy Id tried to see earlier in the week was there, even though he shouldnt have been. On both occasions, a skeleton staff of weary, ground down, but courteous and professional staff from HM Prison Service were doing their best to sort things out as well as their pared-to-the-bone resources would permit. Discussing the ramshackle state of affairs with one guard on my way out, he disclosed that assaults on staff were taking place daily in the prison, but theyd given up reporting them because the prison lacked the resources to deal with them. On the other side of the bars, as it were, recently-disclosed figures have shown that suicides and self-harm by inmates have reached record levels since a certain individual became Lord Chancellor. In my local court, courtrooms sits empty because HM Courts and Tribunals Service lacks the resources to open any more. Ludicrous numbers of cases get shoved through one courtroom, or, to be precise, fail to get shoved through one courtroom, with defendants and lawyers waiting all day to get cases on, only to be adjourned to the next day. Thats the very next day. Not a week or two weeks. Thats defendants with jobs having to phone employers and ask for more unbooked, unplanned days off. The reason it has to be the next day is because the Ministry of Justice has invented ridiculous arbitrary time limits for the processing of cases. Who cares if an innocent defendant loses his job, or if that happens to a dozen, or a hundred of them, as long as some pointless oxygen-thief at the MoJ can invent a meaningless target, and then claim to have achieved something by hitting it (or at least, missing it and then fiddling the figures afterwards)? Every day, *every single day* I come across cases where the police, starved of funds and staff the same as the prisons and the courts, have conducted slapdash investigations, with witnesses left unspoken to and key evidence missing. With the same frequency I see the same situation with the CPS. I cannot remember the last time I did a trial which took place on the first day it was listed to, because prosecution evidenced is never, literally NEVER, served on time. This is just the field in which I work, information I have from my own experience. Reports suggest, though, that its the same in every field which receives state funds: education, the NHS, social services, the armed forces, everywhere. And we are told that its because of THE DEFICIT. Its because there is no money. Not just no money to spare, there is actually less money than is needed. Thats why your 17 year old, mentally ill son is hanging dead from the bars of his cell in a noose he made from his own trousers. Thats why your aunt is dying from a preventable infection in a filthy hospital. Thats why theres no one in the classroom to give your dyslexic daughter the extra help she needs with her reading. Thats why your gran is going to spend the winter deciding between either eating or turning on the radiator that day. Theyre all sacrifices, noble martyrs to the painful but necessary scarification of lowering the deficit, the fire in which we are all scorched but from which we will emerge stronger and better like some Neitzschean rite-of-passage. Except, hang on. There a guy on the telly. He looks like what would happen if aliens whod only read a vague description of a human being tried to make replica of a photocopier salesman out of latex and sausage meat. Apparently hes the Prime Minister. Hes saying theres money to spare. Theres so much money to spare, he can afford to give a bit back to people who dont actually need it. If people who dont need it can have more then theres got to be oodles of cash floating around, right? Stands to reason, doesnt it? Doesnt it?
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 20:43:27 +0000
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