A Cure For Society's Ills

A debate has broken out in work lately regarding the treatment of criminals.

During the lunchtime collective surfing of the BBC Newspages (which invariably contain a daily glut of stories about society’s transgressors), much head-shaking and grumbling is visible from the other side of my desk.

The head shaker’s solution involves a zero-tolerance approach to criminality, advocating the state-sanctioned termination of perpetrators irrespective of misdemeanour, from paedophilia to thievery to, err… scrumping, and to this end a number of inventive methods of snuffing-out have been suggested. These range from the use of large vats of acid, to quarries and lots of concrete, to gassing (though as I recall, a little chap with a cheeky moustache had a not dissimilar idea some sixty-odd years ago, much to the world’s chagrin).

These right wing solutions don’t sit quite right with me, and my woolly-hearted liberalism believes that using criminals as landfill can never be justified. Indeed, killing anybody, on a basic human level, is more than a little morally dubious, no matter how creative or amusing their dispatch.

By way of compromise, I’ll concede that maybe they could be given a fighting chance, with,perhaps, the new Wembley Stadium converted into some sort of gladiatorial arena where terrified rat boys can scamper round in rags in an effort to save themselves from a tooled-up Tony “Maximus” Martin wielding a blunderbuss to pepper them with buckshot.

To go down the route of social cleansing is foolish though. If there were no criminal fraternity in society, what would pensioners find to tut about? Or Daily Mail readers twitch their curtains at?

That’s not to say, however, that I’m not in favour of the systematic culling of the following individuals: Caroline Quentin (see posts passim), Cher, Chico, all weathermen, Matthew Davenport from Form 4G. I think the world would be a much better place without them. Well, my world anyway…