A man is having an affair. He earns around $600,000-1M a year. He is terrified his wife is going to divorce him and worried he will lose a lot of money. One evening he has a violent quarrel with her and kills her. She suffers, during the course of the 55 minute argument, over 40 visible injuries before he eventually strangled her.
But its ok not only is he wealthy, but he is a banker so he must be respectable. So no life sentence for this crime that he was well motivated to commit. No. This banker with 3M savings by his own admission gets a mere 8 years which in the British penal system translates to around 5 years so long as he is reasonably well behaved.
Justice in the UK is all wrong. Some offenses are treated so leniently its a joke but others are treated in a most draconian manner. Its time for a complete review of the sentencing and penal system.
What should happen?
For starters a mandatory death penalty should be brought back for offenders over 18 for the following offenses in cases where the identity of the offender can be proved beyond a shadow of doubt via CCTV, DNA plus one other confirming forensic identifier (fingerprints, fibres etc).
Rape (hetero and homo), Murder, Manslaughter when the death of the victim could reasonably be foreseen by the attacker (ie if he is strangling her he knows she is going to die, if he pushes her and she hit her head then he may not have done).
Self defence should be an allowable defence where the deceased had a weapon, a history of violence against the attacker and came to seek the attacker with the objective of doing him or his family some harm.
The age of criminal responsibility for crimes carrying a custodial sentence should be reduced to 13. Why? Because a child should definitely know right from wrong by that age. If he is being hired as a drug runner by older drugs dealers this is not really an excuse where the publicity about drugs, fire-arms and knives is so prevalent. If he watches TV or even walks down the street and sees posters he or she has to know what they are doing is wrong.
The use of 'soft option' sentences for young offenders has to stop. Many youths sentenced to hundreds of hours community service simply fail to turn up and are not punished for doing this. All sentences should be lock-down type sentences, even if the prisoner is allowed to go home to sleep he or she should be in a known place during their sentence term.
Some driving offences that are really serious should carry mandatory custodial sentences as well. Driving without a licence, or whilst banned from driving should result in permanent ineligability for a licence and a short custodial sentence. Parking offences should also be revised to add a single point per offence to the driving licence and the number of points before a mandatory 12 month ban should be increased accordingly from 12 to 17 (allowing one parking offence per year plus the existing points system).
What to do with all these new custodial offenders? First we must classify them into violent and non-violent. Violent offenders have actually harmed people and not merely threatened to do so. I am really in favour of tattooing violent offenders in a non-obvious but visible place, such as the rear of the knees. Definitely rapists should have an R there to warn prospective girlfriends.
For the non-violent offenders there is a simple option. Let them work on the land. We now have a lot of idle farmland so lets give our farmers a new crop. Simply equip each prisoner with a GPS tag, put a reciever and computer on the farmstead and if the prisoner strays off the farm send him to a traditional lock down jail. Meanwhile while he is on the farm he can grow food and help[ preserve the countryside, lay hedges and so on. Hard manual labour. Persistant shirkers and anybody who causes real trouble can be simply passed on to the violent offenders system.
For the violent offenders American style prisons where they live behind multiple layers of barbed wire, outdoors with minimal shelter, rather than in air conditioned TV equipped luxury would seem to be the best answer. Place these prisons in the uninhabited and underpopulated places. Back this up with soundproof Japanese coffin-hotel style solitary confinement cells for those who are still problematic. The prisoner who serves two years with no real problems can step back onto the farm system which gives an incentive.
For the most violent offenders, they will undoubtedly eventually commit murder or homosexual rape which leads to the death penalty. All executions should be carried out within 14 days of sentencing with no appeal possible (since conviction will only be by secure technical evidence plus statement/admission). The method of execution should be cheap - perhaps a return to the methods used by the Germans during WW2 would be expedient.
This is an effective design of penal system that I believe gives a balanced system of deterrance at a reasonable cost whilst giving society a chance to rid itself of the really 'bad eggs'.
