Jacket required
There’s one element missing from this little piece of vindictive public humiliation…
Branded high-visibility jackets must be worn by offenders carrying out work on community payback projects from today as part of a Government drive to ensure the public can see punishment being carried out in the community.
…and that is informing the rest of us how to react when we recognise an offender when he’s not repaying his debt or wearing his jacket. Is one to point and laugh when he walks in the pub? Refuse to look him in the eye? Throw fruit? Sneer? What if he lives next door? Not invite his kids around to play?
You know, how do we best ruin his life over his petty offence? Isn’t there a Home Office pamphlet with instructions to go with this announcement? Let’s make these people’s reintegration far more difficult, yes? Picking up dogshit without a dayglo vest lacks the requisite aspect of humiliation, don’t you think?
Or should we feel intimidated perhaps? We live in a society where lawbreakers are largely faceless, anonymous figures. It’s a nebulous, impersonal feeling. That will change once we start explicit pointing these people out in a daily setting, won’t it? The abstract threat becomes the specific, doesn’t it? Do I move to a new queue if I find myself behind one of these offenders in Tesco? I’m worried he might claim benefit while signing on in front of me or something.
Not that I’m entirely against the idea. Making Gordon Brown wear a fluorescent bib with ‘I AM COMPLICIT IN THE DEATHS OF HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE’ printed on it has a certain appeal. Or Jack Straw with one saying ‘MY MYSTIFYINGLY CONTINUING SUCCESS DEPENDS ON THE GUILT I SHARE WITH MY PEERS’. Or David Milliband emblazoned with ‘I REPATRIOT PEOPLE TO THEIR DEATHS’.
Sure, those slogans aren’t as snappy as ‘COMMUNITY PAYBACK’ but then I don’t have the millions in taxpayers’ cash to indulge my emotional shortcomings in a more practical and pithy fashion.
Posted on December 1st, 2008 at 7:24pm under Eye Catching Initiatives, New Labour
Maybe it would be a good idea for them to wear a bright yellow davids star.
Why?
Forgive the tangent…
In Neal Stephenson’s excellent science-fiction novel, Snow Crash, the United States has disintegrated into a multitude of walled enclaves each with their own system of government and police force. Given the cost of incarcerating criminals, most enclaves merely catch and expel wrong-doers leaving them to fend for themselves or find a home in another enclave.
Prior to expulsion, however, many of these local police forces have taken to tattooing the criminal’s forehead with the crime they were convicted of committing so that other enclaves are given fair warning. Nice and permanent.
There’s an amusing scene when the reader is introduced to a character built like a brick shit-house, armed to the teeth with all manner of scary looking weapons and with an aggressively psychotic look in his eyes. On his forehead is tattooed the phrase “Low impulse control”.
It’s been quite a while since I read Snow Crash, and when I did so I didn’t do it very attentively, but: wasn’t it “Poor Impulse Control”? Also, does this mean someone managed to *arrest* Raven and forcibly tattoo him?
You’re right… serves me right for not double-checking. I think there was an explanation of how Raven managed to get captured and the… er… counter-measures he subsequently took to avoid it happening again.
I’ve not read it since about the time it was published, so my memory of it is a bit hazy. But scarily, we do appear to be getting closer to a Snow Crash world. In social terms if not technological ones at least.
What is more humiliating: picking up dogshit with a fluorescent jacket saying OFFENDER, of doing it in a plain jacket because it is your paid employment?
Well it might be different elsewhere but round our way, and judging by the sea of turds on the street that greets me each morning, I doubt very much anybody’s being paid to pick up dogshit.
Apparently the people wearing jackets have already become targets for vigilante attacks.
The only way that they got a soundbite in the news yesterday was by having some offenders hidden away from the public eye picking up litter in a little private courtyard while Jack Straw spoke to the camera – which hardly counts as ‘visible’ as far as the public are concerned.
http://www.lettersfromatory.com
This is what America does.
How long before we start killing people?
Indeed. There’s a gritty ITV drama in this. Robson and Jerome are two hard-bitten cops with problems at home. They’re on the trail of a serial killer who’s offing COMMUNITY PAYBACK wallahs.
It turns out it’s the Minister of Justice who’s doing it to court tabloid opinion. The Daily Mail is loving the piles of bodies. Robson and Jerome risk their badges in exposing the establishment cover-up.
But when they play their covertly recorded tape on live TV of the Justice Minister inadvertently admitting to the murders, they’re immediately descended upon by a baying mob of tabloid editors who’ve been in on it all along.
The scene where Robson Green is beaten to death in slow motion by a screaming Paul Dacre wielding his tumescent-with-self-righteous-fury penis wins the series a BAFTA.
Nobody sees the carnage because Robson and Jerome mistakenly decide to broadcast on Channel 4 News on a Saturday evening. Their deaths go unreported and unmourned.
The scene where Robson Green is beaten to death in slow motion by a screaming Paul Dacre wielding his tumescent-with-self-righteous-fury penis wins the series a BAFTA.
…which then causes a broadsheet frenzy after somebody accuses the scriptwriter of ripping off A Clockwork Orange.
It’s une homage, innit.
Tell it to the judge.
[...] Hat Tip: Chicken Yoghurt. [...]
I guess that explains the people shouting “You evil no good scumbag!” at our local lollipop lady this morning.
I’m waiting for bodies of football stewards to start turning up in skips…
Well, I can think of a few…
Might be worth starting a sweepstake into how long it is before replica jackets start showing up in the shops and become the latest must-have fashion accessory.
In fact, there’s probably money to be made if you get in there fast enough.