If you can't do the time
... don't do the crime

YOU’D have thought David Blunkett had announced the slaughter of the first-born rather than a modest increase in the number of prison places.

The howls of outrage could have been heard by an old lag doing solitary on Dartmoor.

The Home Secretary was ridiculed, denounced as “populist” and, bizarrely, even accused of making Britain a more dangerous and violent place.

Go figure, as the Americans say.

In the USA they have no such aversion to banging up criminals.

Bad guys belong behind bars.

The Americans couldn’t understand the fuss about conditions at Camp X-Ray, where al-Qa’ida and Taliban terrorists are being detained.

So the prisoners were shackled and forced to wear orange jumpsuits. So what?

That’s how the US penal system treats all prisoners.

If you’re heading for Orlando this summer and are planning a day trip to Cape Canaveral, look to your left as you drive east on the freeway.

You’ll see a compound which makes Stalag 13 look like Ford Open country club. It has towers, searchlights and tall steel fences topped with lethal razor wire.

The only difference between this county jail and Camp X-Ray are that the buildings are more permanent and the inmates are certainly a lot less dangerous.

If you venture on to I-95, the main north/south interstate motorway, you might glimpse a gang of prisoners working on the hard shoulder under the supervision of guards in mirrored shades, bristling with weapons.

The Americans understand that the primary purposes of prison are punishment and protecting the public.

If criminals are behind bars, they’re not committing crime. That’s the deal.

Sure, they’ve got plenty of bleeding hearts of their own.

But they don’t take any notice of them. And they certainly wouldn’t dream of putting them in charge of the system.

But then American politicians are applauded for their “populism”.

Judges who go soft on crime are soon voted out of office. Police chiefs who dared to turn a blind eye to vandalism, car crime, burglary and robbery would soon find themselves standing by the side of the road with a “Will Work For Food” placard.

In Britain populism is a dirty word, at least among those who think they know best and manage to get themselves into positions where they can put their own prejudices into effect.

Then again, America is a proper democracy in the way that Britain isn’t — and never has been.

Here judges, magistrates, police chiefs, probation officers are all appointed. And they’re there for life.

They are never called to account for their decisions and it’s near impossible to sack them.

They’ve got it into their heads that criminals are their “clients” — poor, underprivileged lambs who need protection from the great unwashed.

Prison “doesn’t work”, they insist.

Well, the logical conclusion to that is to close all the prisons — which is pretty much what they have done in Northern Ireland.

Funny how prison only seems not to work in the case of career criminals, yet is somehow the right place for a frightened farmer who had the audacity to protect himself and his property from burglars.

Jailing still more people is a recipe for lynch-mob justice, they howl.

Wrong.

You get lynch mobs when those we pay to protect us from criminals refuse to do their job properly.

No paedophile, burglar or serial hooligan is ever going to be strung up by a mob if he’s safely tucked up in jail.

Where I agree with the Howard League For Penal Reform is on the need for prisoners to be treated humanely.

The conditions in some of our jails are Dickensian and they demean us all. Prisoners are entitled to dignity and proper sanitation, whatever they’re inside for.

That’s why David Blunkett is right to want to build bigger, better prisons.

If the jail population rises from 73,000 to 100,000, that’s fine by me.

If the scumbags are off the streets, they’re not climbing through my back window, stealing my car, vandalising and terrorising our families and our communities.

If drugs are the root cause of most crime, then it’s easier to get them clean and sober in a secure unit than at a self-help group run by a bearded Guardian reader called Ros.

The size of the prison population is not an indication of the state of our civilisation.

It is a reflection of the uncivilised behaviour of a sizeable minority within it. No-one has to go to jail.

As the saying goes, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.