“In the US I have seen chain gangs out clearing highways – why can’t we do that here?” he said. “We have criminals expected to pay back – why not get them out there doing something of use?” Mr Percy has written to the Highways Agency to about growing piles of litter on the M62 and A63 in East Yorkshire following complaints from his constituents.
“We need a British equivalent of the US chain gang,” he said. “The only risk we have in this country is there are too many do-gooders claiming it’s against [prisoners’] human rights. We don’t necessarily need them to be wearing orange jump suits and chained together, but what we should be looking at is we’ve got all these people sat in prison who could be working in the community.”
Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, is a supporter of short “community sentences” where people work in their neighbourhoods rather than go to prison. He has also unveiled plans to get prisoners to work for private companies within jails in the hope of instilling a culture of “purposeful hard work”. The minister has promised to double the number of inmates working up to 40 hours per week because they are a “wasted resource”. However, Britain has never had “chain gangs” like America, where Arizona is thought to be the only state still making its prisoners do hard labour.
2 comments:
Technically, that task in the United States is most often performed by misdemeanor offenders on community service sentences, rather than felony "chain-gangs." The latter are more rare than they used to be, due primarily to the same sort of bleeding-heart types here in the States.
Traditionally, felony chain-gangs performed more strenuous maintenance work, such as ditch-digging and agricultural clearing. It's been many years since I've seen an actual chain-gang, and I live in Texas. Prisoners used to make automobile license plates and other such state-issued consumables in prison shops, but even that has largely ceased. Can't make the little darlings work too hard, you know. All they did was steal from, injure, rape, and murder innocent people -- other than that, they're upstanding model citizens.
I personally feel that if a criminal want's to take from a community, state, or from are federal government then they should pay it back with sweat, not just setting on their ass while people who didn't break the law pays for it. You would think that they would jump at the chance to get outside in the fresh air, maybe if they feel back breaking work, they will think twice about taking from someone else.
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