So Jack Straw is considering extending the nasty narrow minded ‘Community Payback’ scheme to kids. Adults sentenced to community service already have to wear the high visibility orange jackets. But now Straw thinks kids can benefit from this extra humiliation and degradation. How New Labour! How social authoritarian!
Research has shown that naming and shaming kids will inevitably make things worse, by avoiding this retrograde step many won’t turn up therefore they will break the terms of their community service, potentially end up in prison. Equally, there are fears this could lead to vigilante-style attacks on young people carrying out community service.
Nicholas Pamment, of the university’s Institute of Criminal Justice Studies argues:
Branding offenders is designed to make them feel shame and bring condemnation on them but it risks creating a class of outcasts.Fewer youths will turn up for community service to avoid the humiliation and that may well result in more of them being locked up.
Jack Straw described the hi-vis jackets as ‘vests of shame’ and this highlights the politics of humiliation and bully-boy tactics. Instead of looking at the underlying reasons of crime, NL prefer the short, sharp, shock authoritarian treatment. More punishments, disproportionate ‘justice’ and understanding a lot less and condemning a whole lot more.
And now lets turn to the world of science…..
There are plans to scan the brains of teenage gang members to see whether their brains have been damaged by neglect and abuse. So I assume it will be any kid in a hoodie being hauled in to have their brain scanned? And if the experiment on young hoodie-wearing lab rats indeed does find that there is a relationship between violent behaviour and years of abuse and neglect, what will the researchers conclude??
And furthermore from the wacky weird wonderful world of …ahem…science, we have the ‘gangster gene’ to contend with. There’s a gene for everything it seems and now they have isolated this one. Oh, and even the researcher states that the results shouldn’t be ‘over-interpreted’…..
I am highly cynical and sceptical about these studies as they smack of biological reductionism and determinism. Human behaviour is viewed through a biological vacuum. There is more to us than DNA and biology, humans are far more complex.
Actually, on the subject of scanning brains, here’s a thought. Instead of scanning the brains of NL clones (I wonder if there’s a ‘NL gene’?) how about checking whether they have a backbone….?
Just a thought.
Posted by harpymarx 
