Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Tough On Crime ... Part 124

"Teenage muggers who rob with "minimal force" will be spared jail under new sentencing guidelines issued today.

Juvenile muggers can also cite peer pressure as a mitigating factor under the guidelines from the Sentencing Guidelines Council ... an idea proposed by Home Affairs Select Committee, which suggested that judges should treat young robbers differently if a crime was committed in a group."


I see. Mug someone solo - go directly to jail. Unless you've used 'minimal force', of course. Mug in a gang ? "They made me do it, guv ! All of us made each other do it !"

"Fair do's - community service for you all !"


The council is chaired by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers.

Ah yes. Educated at Bryanston and Cambridge, lives in Hampstead. Perhaps he should live in Stockwell for a few years before coming out with any more pieces of idiocy.


UPDATE - different in NY.

Left-wing academics deny that law-abiding inner-city residents desire an orderly environment as fiercely as the wealthy. Enforcing loitering ordinances or open-container rules in minority neighborhoods, they charge, is simply a racist attack on the oppressed. Many such academics have obviously spoken to very few poor people, so as not to disrupt their fantasy of a revolutionary vanguard ready to attack bourgeois conventions. Andrew Karmen of John Jay College of Criminal Justice sees crime “as a distorted form of social protest.” Inner-city residents beg to differ. Asked what activities bother her constituents most, Nadine Whitted of the Bushwick Community Board bluntly replies: “Drugs still being sold, youth crime, people hanging out, loud music.”

Tsk tsk. Fancy demonising the poor kids, imposing middle-class values etc etc

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

One might guess that being mugged by a gang is usually more frightening for the victim than being mugged by a lone individual.

However, neither current custodial regimes nor 'community service' seem particularly good ways of dealing with, say, some fifteen-year-old toerag mugging another teenager of a mobile phone.

It won't happen here, but public humiliation via something like the stocks or pillory, or corporal punishment are probably better ways of taking the wind out of the sails for swaggering teeny louts.