They say you get more right-wing as you get older. I haven’t noticed this general trend in myself, but I do occasionally like to holiday on the right wing — to spend some time exploring right-wing thoughts — just for a change of scenery. My generally liberal ego takes a breather in the passenger seat and my right-wing id gets to take the wheel.
It was in this mode that I found myself considering the report by the cross-party Justice Committee that says building expensive new prisons would be a “costly mistake” and that we should, in fact, reduce current prison populations by a third.
It costs, on average, more than £40,000 a year to keep someone in a British prison. Why doesn’t one of the main parties offer to reintroduce the death penalty as a cost-cutting measure? I think most of us, at our untutored core, feel that the population of modern Britain could do with a bit of an edit. A priest told me that he’d once seen a sign on a monastery door that read “everyone who enters this place brings joy to its inhabitants, either by their presence, or by their departure”.
That sign could be the key to a genuinely constructive death-penalty policy.
Every citizen should have a duty to bring at least a sliver of joy to other inhabitants of the planet. If they’re, instead, such a profoundly negative force that they bring joy only by their absence, the solution is obvious. There’s a theory that only about 3 per cent of people are truly bad and a similar amount truly good. The rest of us are followers, choosing the easiest course of action, dependent on prevailing social pressure.
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If I’m giving the Archbishop of Canterbury a lift home, I’ll stop for that old lady at the zebra-crossing because I know the archbishop will like me for it. If Charles Manson’s my passenger, I’ll blast my horn and give that old girl the V-sign because Charles will think it’s hilarious. You might argue that Manson’s evil influence is curtailed simply by his being locked away in prison, but we can’t afford such indulgences any more. Any political party that promised to chip away at that corruptive 3 per cent while saving all those £40,000 annual outlays would surely be on to a winner.
Let’s consider the case of 16-year-old Jordan Horsley who poured bleach over a woman because she asked him to be quiet in the cinema. He was given a 12-month sentence. I’m not saying Horsley is truly bad. I choose him merely as a random criminal from this week’s news. The 46-year-old woman, Annette Warden, though physically recovered, is still too scared to leave home without her husband but, to most people, a death sentence for Horsley would have seemed excessive.
OK, let’s dig a little deeper. The original falling-out took place during a screening of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince — an unlikely movie to attract a gang of five rowdy, disrespectful youths, one of whom was Horsley. It makes me wonder if there wasn’t at least one lovely lad among them — a secret Potter fan, entranced by the glittering moral fable. But Horsley, six foot three with a beard, would clearly be a dominant force in the group.
The reports say he purchased a bottle of Domestos from a nearby petrol station and “demanded” to be driven to the restaurant where Mrs Warden and her family were eating. Could he be one of the bad 3 per cent? If Horsley was, by nature, a follower, surely the good-versus-evil yarn that is a Harry Potter film would have influenced him for the better that night, but no. Despite all the film’s persuasions to the contrary, he chose the way of Voldemort. Instead of a life-enhancing road-to-Damascus experience, he took the road to Domestos.
Horsley had been previously convicted for hitting someone with half a brick. Let’s imagine he’d been identified as one of the 3 per cent back then and thus edited out of that night at the cinema. The four lads would have watched the movie, perhaps somehow absorbing its uplifting moral lessons, and Mrs Warden would have had one of those simple but beautiful nights that epitomise the joys of family life — a good film followed by the chance to discuss it, over a restaurant meal, with her husband and two sons. And the taxpayer would have saved £40,000 and countless other expenditure. This is not to mention how many otherwise ruined nights would have been rescued.
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Many liberals will be horrified by my id’s nasty thought processes but consider the good this policy would do our prison population, forced to endure overcrowding and the presence of intimidating bullies who create a context where any urge to go straight — which would, in the long run, save the nation even more money — is a betrayal of the gangster code. The bad 3 per cent, whoever they really are, bring joy only by their departure.
Let’s hurry that along. Of course, the problem with the death penalty, we’re always told, is that some are wrongly convicted. I could be hanged for a crime I didn’t commit. Yes, but I’m much more likely to die at the hands of someone who wouldn’t have been around if we had the death-penalty policy I’m suggesting.
That’s enough now. I worry if I sojourn too long on the seductive right wing, I might not be able to get back again.