Mexican Entrepreneur Escapes Detention

From CNN

After Mexico's most notorious drug lord stepped into a shower and slipped into a tunnel to escape from a maximum-security prison, authorities vowed it wouldn't be long before the Sinaloa cartel chief was behind bars again.

Prison security cameras last recorded images of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman on Saturday night, just before he apparently crawled through a hole in the shower area of his cell block at the Altiplano Federal Prison.

Authorities said they later discovered a lighted and ventilated tunnel nearly a mile long that stretched from the prison to a half-built house, where investigators were searching for signs of Guzman's whereabouts Sunday.

I really hope he had a poster of Raquel Welch covering it, just to properly take the piss.

"UK mulls ban on car key fobs which resemble mobile phones"

From the BBC:

UK officials are considering banning the sale of large car key fobs designed to resemble small mobile phones.

A government spokesman told the BBC that it was discussing the issue with the National Trading Standards Board and the Serious Organised Crime Agency. It follows a report by the Times suggesting some of the Chinese-made products were being advertised with prisoners in mind.

Prisoners in the UK are not allowed access to motor vehicles as they could be used in an escape attempt. Being in possession of car keys while in jail is a criminal offence.

The devices, in some cases marketed as the "world's largest car key fobs", are available from mainstream retail websites including eBay and Amazon.

Those crime stat's

There's a lengthy and interesting article in today's FT about the alarming rise in crime figures between the 1960s and the 1990s and the subsequent dramatic fall. Just to whet your appetite...

... criminologists have struggled to explain the decrease, leading to the flourishing of conflicting theories. Some say that advances in policing have tamed criminal behaviour, while others suggest a new generation of youngsters, who drink less, take fewer drugs and apply to university in droves, is increasingly uninterested in criminality.

Alternative hypotheses link the fall to the legalisation of abortion – a controversial idea that fewer unwanted children has led to a drop in crime – or to the declining use of lead in paint and petrol, which are thought to have an adverse effect on the developing brain...

But that argument does not explain why violent crime has decreased significantly over the past 30 years. Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, suggests that the western world's "three-decade binge of crime" starting in the 1960s was itself an aberration in a longer-term trend of society slowly "civilising" over thousands of years.

The online version doesn't seem to have the charts which are in the printed edition. One of them says that the number of crimes committed/reported (in the UK) rose from about ten million to eighteen million per year and then fell back to eight million and that the UK prison population was constant at about 40,000 until the mid-1990s and has doubled to 80,000 since then.

We know that most crimes are committed by a very small number of people, so increasing the prison population is one perfectly plausible explanation for the fall in crime (providing you lock up actual criminals and not people whose only offence is ranting on Twitter or refusing to pay their Council Tax bill), but is it really possible that those extra 40,000 inmates would have committed an average of 250 crimes a year each?

Does anybody know how to calculate or estimate the deterrent effect? Perhaps those extra 40,000 inmates would have committed 100 crimes a year each (just about plausible) and a further 100,000 people were "deterred" from committing another 60 crimes a year each?

Is that all? So who are these naysayers doubting the ability of Chris to deliver to his timescale?

'The risk register is quite clear about what is involved. The 35 existing probation trusts are to be replaced by 21 government companies "delivering all functions subject to market competition", and the establishment of a new national public probation service to deliver the remaining 30% of the work involving public protection and high-risk offenders. It means transferring 18,000 employees to new organisations, reallocating 250,000 offender cases, recruiting 22 new management teams and merging more than 2,000 existing computer packages. All of this needs to be in place by October next year so that it is up and up and running by the May 2015 general election.

The justice minister, Lord McNally, told peers that Grayling intends to use existing powers in Labour's Offender Management Act of 2007 to "create and sell companies, and to transfer the delivery of a large proportion of the probation service to the private sector via contractual arrangements involving the formation and sale of a number of new community rehabilitation companies" '.

18,000 "new" private sector jobs, 18,000 "fewer" public servants.  On that basis alone this plan must surely be allowed to proceed, and without delay.   And as for the small matter of merging 2,000 existing computer packages, I am sure if a big enough carrot is dangled some private sector organisation with a proven track record will step up and deliver.

"Ibis hotel inmates must work harder for privileges"

Ibis CEO Simon Williams said, "I want a regime that sends the right messages – turn your life around and there'll be some incentives, but if you come back pissed at 3am and wake up other 'guests', then you'll lose certain privileges.

"But the word 'privileges' is misleading and it implies there is a lot of luxury in Ibis hotels, which really is not the case."

For rest of the article, go to Newsthump.

Islamist clerics behind bars: Abu Qatada

Islamist clerics behind bars: Abu Hamza

Юлія Тимошенко

First they reduce your sentence by half and then they reduce it by a third instead and call it 'tough on crime'.

Another one in the queue for porridge

I hope he enjoyed having porridge for breakfast

Unfortunately Chosen Phrase Of The Day

From iol.news.za:

Former South African President Nelson Mandela is recovering from a collapsed lung and could be released from hospital as early as Friday, a source close to Mandela told Reuters on Thursday.

Fun Online Polls: Votes for prisoners, Wills and Kate

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll (a high turnout with 149 votes, but it ran for two days longer than normal). Results as follows:

What do you think of 'votes for prisoners'?

All the more reason to leave the EU (even though this was an ECHR decision) - 41%
I am opposed - 37%
I am not bothered either way - 15%
Other, please specify - 7%

So there we have it. I personally am not bothered either way, but if the issue helps stoke anti-EU sentiment, even if the case was decided by the European Court of Human Rights, which is a quite separate institution, then it's all good.

As far as I can see, as long as we have first-past-the-post, then most people's votes are effectively worthless anyway, so whether prisoners are allowed to cast a worthless vote or not* is neither here nor. Indeed, I lived in Germany for nine years and being a foreigner, wasn't allowed to vote at all, big deal.

* As Leg-Iron points out, it might get a bit icky if all inmates were allowed to vote in the local elections wherever the prison happened to be.
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On a lighter note, apparently a celebrity jobless couple from the South of England, referred to as Wills and Kate by the media have decided to get married at some unspecified point in the future. Our current Prime Minister, possibly the most out-of-touch politician in British history, responded thusly:

"As well as this being a great moment for national celebration, I think we also have to remember that this is two young people who love each other who have made this announcement, who are looking forward to their wedding, and we must give them plenty of space to think about the future and what they are about to do."

How about giving a moment's thought to all the young couples who have jobs and are thinking of 'settling down', and addressing the issue of why they can't afford to buy a house, let alone for Mum to give up work to have kids (unless they are out of work, in which case they would appear to have our Prime Minister's blessing), eh?

So that's this week's (belated) Fun Online Poll: "Wills and Kate have decided to get married: what do you think?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"George Michael 'sobs' as prisoners sing Freedom at him"

The Metro confirms what we were all expecting would happen.

He didn't see this one coming? I wonder whether he has a quip ready for the night before his release when his cell mate says "Wake me up before you go-go", and indeed whether Kenny Goss is thinking up a quip for when he greets George Michael at the prison gates in eight weeks' time and George Michael says "I knew you'd be waiting (for me)".

What happens to bent coppers when they are in prison (Episode One)

The first instalment in this hopefully long-running saga was in The Daily Mirror:

Disgraced police commander Ali Dizaei was knocked out and had excrement poured over his head in a violent* prison attack...

I'm looking forward to regular updates on Dizzy Ali's mishaps while he's in prison over the coming months and years.

* That adjective seems a tad superfluous.

Ten reasons to hate the Tories (10)

Point 10 from Cameron's Blueprint for Britain was this:

10. We'll double magistrates' sentencing powers from six month to a year and make sure knife offenders can expect to go to jail. And we will get more police officers on the street by slashing paperwork, including the stop and account form.

JuliaM posts endless tales about ridiculously lenient sentencing in this country, so mucking about with maximum sentences is pointless; it's minimum sentences we ought to be thinking about*. The only politician I'd trust with this is Michael Howard, who was prepared to take on the whole "criminal law industry" wholesale and made them actually do their job rather than seeing it as a gravy train. And he got results. It was far from perfect, but he got results.

* UPDATE. Jackart in the comments says that "bureaucratically defined minimum sentences" are a tad illiberal. Maybe so, but can we make a start by ensuring that offenders actually serve the sentences that are currently being imposed, rather than a small fraction thereof or none at all? For examples see JuliaM.

As to the second sentence, as WOAR explained a couple of days ago:

The simplest way to get more officers on the street is to abolish the PCSOs. Each one costs approximately 2/3 the cost of a proper officer but in utility terms is less than half as useful plus many of them are a complete liability when they open their mouths in public. Three plastic plod costs £60k and offers 1.5 worth of utility value. Two real police officers cost £54k (starting) and offer 2.0 worth of utility value.

We lose value on every single PCSO. Madness. Don't worry about paperwork at this stage. Cut the PCSOs immediately.

I hope that you've found this weekend's series thought-provoking. No, I don't claim to absolutely right on absolutely everything, but I can say for sure that the Tories are absolutely wrong on nearly everything - the only bit of their blueprint that wasn't complete rubbish was the first half of point 8. Anyway, time for a birthday drink.

Cell 'phone joke

From The Metro: US inmates answer 118 enquiries

Outbreak of commonsense

In among all the others lies obfuscation and large gummint dross in this morning's Andrew Marr interview, Dave The Chameleon showed a small glimmer of intelligence with his idea that it was silly to have prisons in inner cities where property values are high - these should be sold off and the money could be used to build a much larger prison out of town. Transcript here.

In other words, although the Prison Service might not pay rent for such buildings, a serious cost accountant resets the clock and asks "If the Prison Service had £x millions in the bank, would it buy or rent in an expensive area or a cheap area?" And if the Prison Service chooses to use valuable buildings, that should be treated as notional income and expenditure.

Having grasped the concept of notional costs, we should extend this to ALL government buildings, including council estates and offices in Whitehall, which leads to all sorts of interesting conclusions.

Funnily enough, the gummint kicked off the idea of Asset Management Plans, whereby all local authorities were supposed to value their properties and work out notional rents, but it was never really followed through - which is why there are so still many government offices in the centre of London which are worth billions.