As I have said before, prison workers may find that they are able to gain more public support by offering to give a percentage of the extra money they might earn to their victims. The majority of people are in jail for burglary, robbery and sexual assault.

 http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/ssdataset.asp?vlnk=6355

The link you give does not show the majority of people jailed are in for the offences you refer to.

Please expand on your point ........

You are right! I copied completely the wrong link...look at the following, from about page 9:

 http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/prisdec02.pdf

The report you link to clearly shows that of the prison population of England & Wales, for men and women, 7% are in for offences clssified as sexual offences, 11% for burglary, and 12% for robbery. Even adding those figures together doesn't make a majority.

21% of prisoners are in for "violence against the person". That isn't mugging, whcih is covered by robbery. It is fighting after the pubs shut, mostly. It's a violent world out there, after all. (Although of course killing 20,000 people in Iraq doesn't count)

But apart from that, you are deliberately missing the point. People commit crimes for many reasons, but the one factor that the vast majority have in common is that they have been brought up in a life of poverty, of oppression, of no hope.

The struggle against prison slavery is part of the wider class struggle. Prisoners are at the sharp end of the class war. They can't quit their "jobs", can't strike, have no unions, no representation, they are locked up when not working, get ripped off spending what little money they have on overpriced phonecards etc etc.

Sure, there are a lot of anti-social bastards around. Unfortunately, we have very limited means of protection against them, as the police and courts are against us. We know who the real criminals are. Not the young man who robs the off licence for a bit of cash, not the woman who sells a bit of crack to fund her own habit to ease the pain of her shitty dead-end life. And certainly not the guy who takes the rolex off some rich bastard.

The only way to sort these problems is for working class people to stick together and support each other - behind the walls or in the prison outside.

Don't do the crime.

Maybe wastrels who commit crimes which warrant a prison sentence SHOULD be made to work, instead of sitting on their asses all day like they do at home (when they are not out mugging old ladies or holding up terrified (working class) shopkeepers at knifepoint.

wilkinson has some dead-cheap products, but now i know why. honestly, i kitted out my garden for piss-all, but now i feel a bit guilty...
but at the time when i went there, the company ''logos'' struck me as odd, almost like a parody of a roy lichtenstein painting, a totalitarian shopping mall sort of thing. a huge banner proclaimed the number of staff employed, businesses supported, total turnover, all beneath a lurid union jack waved by a staff member dressed in a redshirt (ALL the staff have redshirts, i must point out). do these statistics include the prison part of their operation, i wonder ?

your outburst is remarkably naieve ! do you really think that all prisoners are violent muggers of old ladies, or that everyone falling foul of the prison system is guilty, or even that you are immune form the system ? remember, you advocate of working class rights (shopkeepers indeed!), you too could one day find yourself in such a forced labour situation, either on false charges or for some petty offence ? impossible ? are you familiar with the USA ''3 strikes'', which, in conjunction with ''zero tolerance'' can mean a ridiculous 20 years for shoplifting, and which has led to a massive 3% of the total USA population in the slammer, all doing enforced labour.
think again, devils advocate. you sound like blunketts advocate to me...

Well I have to agree with you ex-con. If you reclassify violence as a fun punch-up after a few drinks then of course there is less to worry about. You could go the whole way and claim murder is forgetting to let someone breathe, or rape, that well know element of the class struggle, as a friendly hug.