Twice in one day!

It's been a while since I wrote here and I have a few minutes to spare (for the first time in three weeks) so I'm going to give you a second entry today. Firstly it's my brother's birthday, so happy birthday to him. He came to see his new nephew on Friday and was suitably impressed. He didn't smoke a single cigarette all the time he was there and, although he hasn't given up completely, you have to admire him for trying. He does appear to be serious about it this time.

I want to talk about prisons. I read a report yesterday about prisons in the US. It seems that 1 in 140 US people are in prison at any one time. That's a huge number of people. In fact it's over 0.7% of the population. Apart from anything else, that must represent a huge cost to the tax payer.

There seems to me to be only three reasons to put someone in prison; revenge or punisment, rehabilitation, and to keep him from offending again during the period of his imprisonment. Of those three reasons, only the last can be clearly shown to work. And while keeping someone locked up does generally prevent them from offending, even that doesn't work if the sentence allows them out of prison. In Brish prisons this seems to becomming normal practice. Lord Archer for instance, was apparently allowed to drive himself to work in his own car and even attend a dinner party whilst ostensibly in prison.

So I'm interested to hear from the Americans out there. Abby, you're a traditional christian right winger, what's your view on the enormous US prison population?

There seems to be a large fuss this morning about people being cautioned for rape. Apparently there were 40 people cautioned in 2004 for rape. This figure has apparently doubled over ten years and there is a something of a public outcry. I can see that on the surface it seems that a caution is insufficient punishment for a rapist. But 40 people a year seems like a very small number to me and I suspect that these people that were cautioned were unlikely to be convicted in court anyway. One caution for instance was given to someone who admitted raping his sister 50 years previously. I can't see that very much evidence would have survived for a court case.

Rape is a strange crime in that it nearly always comes down to one person accusing someone of rape, and one person denying it. Even when DNA evidence is available, the accused can claim sex was consensual. So what do you do to increase the conviction rate without possibly convicting innocent people? I think the law should also take into account the fact that not all rapes are the same. Coming home drunk from the pub one night and one thing leading to another is completely different to being dragged at knife point into the bushes as you jog through the park.

It looks like Silvio Berlusconi is going to lose his post after the Italian elections. He has a lot of problems to contend with now, not least of which are accusations of bribery involving the husband of Tessa Jowell the British culture secretary. What exactly does the "culture" secretary do?