and "justice" for all

So it seems that David Blunkett has fallen on his sword, and no-one will be more glad to see the back of him than me, although he may be waiting for science to give him the ability to see the back of himself.
But I wish it was our own minister for "justice" that was being given the heave-ho. After all, he's constantly curtailing civil liberties and abusing his power, and in addition he's from a party that only get about 4% of the vote, yet have 2 major ministeries.
When the Fianna Fail/PD coalition came to power in 1997 they were warning us all that crime was getting out of control and that the only solution was "zero tolerance". Yet whether you judge by statistics, media or film coverage, or your own experiences walking down the street on a Saturday night, things have gotten immeasurably worse.
And that's exactly what the government want us to think, so that when they put more police on the street, they can claim that they're merely responding to public demand.
Yet the Gardai seem to want to erode public support for themselves, maybe because having more police on the street will result in less overtime oppurtunities for the cops already on the beat.
Recently they almost put an elderly woman in jail just for feeding a stray dog, telling her that she didn't have a licence for the animal. What sort of cowardly, petty, monsters would act in such a way, and why would the public want more of them patrolling the streets?
What amazed me most about this story was not that the guards would act so small-mindedly, which is hardly a surprise, but that there was actually room in a jail for this misfortunate woman.
The country has one of the lowest proportions of people in jail of any country, not because crime is low, but because the ratio of prison officers to prisoners is so high, amazingly, there is one officer for every prisoner, in most countries the ratio is between 3 and 4.
Prison officers protest that their job is a difficult, dangerous one, as if they were doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, when they get paid €100,ooo a year. One told the Tribune that prisoners will often hide a syringe that could be infected with HIV under the lock of their cells and they often have to wait weeks for the STD test to get back. Not that I'm unsympathetic, but if there's one officer for every prisoner, surely it isn't beyond them to ensure that they don't get syringes in there in the first place?
Mad Mullah McDowell is taking on the prisoners union, and for once I have a modicum of sympathy.
I'm curious, though, that the new pay deal he's offering includes bonuses for "Productivity"
I'm a little worried about this, as it seems to suggest that he thinks that incarceration is a business like any other and this could lead to prison contracts being farmed out to private concerns like Group 4.
But what exactly constitutes productivity for a prison officer?
Maybe at the moment they have one officer on each side of the corridor banging the cell bars with a truncheon to wake the prisoners in the morning when this job could clearly be done by one person if they gave him really long truncheons.
Will prison officers put in for a pay rise claiming that they've been looking 20% tougher this year? Will they claim that they've broken more spirits, that they've reduced more immigrants who can't speak any English to tears?
I think more prison spaces might be a solution to the crime problem if it was the people who deserved to go to jail were the ones who ended up behind bars.
But, as Monday's Prime Time shows, this is clearly not the case. In a survey of district courts throughout the land, they found some alarming anomalies. In one case, a dangerous drunken driver whose victim was so permanently brain-damaged that he can never work again got away with a fine, while someone who sold 6 Ecstacy tablets for €40 got three months in prison.
The going rate for E is about €5 a shot these days, so he wasn't nicked for below-cost selling. But there's an alarming moral relativism at work here, where someone can ruin someone else's life and walk away, while selling some drugs that'll merely leave someone depressed a few days after goes inside. It's the result of a system that gives so much discretion to judges who are most often untrained political appointees.
The system is clearly in need of a radical overhaul, and it ought to be clear that putting more cops on the streets won't improve the crime situation that much, particularly when so many of them are deployed trying to stem the flow of recreational drugs and trying to ensure that nightclubs close earlier.
The logic behind this move is particularly Orwellian, as they claim that the longer people spend in nightclubs the drunker they'll get and thus likelier to get into a fight. Yey anyone who does get into a violent fight will get away with a suspended sentence, while the vast majority of non-violent clubbers will be punished for the actions of a small minority.
How would Michael McDowell like it if the powers of the minister for "justice" were reduced so there was less likelihood that they'd be abused? This would be following the exact same logic.
Last night there were riot police on horseback patrolling the streets in case people rioted in oppostion to the proposed new law. Of course, nothing like this happened, as most Irish people are decent, peaceful people, in contrast to the Manichean view of people like McDowell who believe that we need to be under some sort of Totalitarian jackboot before we behave.
The PDs have clearly had too much power for too long and this power has gone to McDowell's ugly bald head. I can only hope that after the next election we get a "justice" minister worthy of the name.