PRISONERS moaning about the food they get in the cells!! I nearly choked on my brunch when I read that.

Just in case you're not familiar with the story, people in custody at Blackburn's Greenbank police station are pulling their faces over the quality of fare served up in the cells.

The pasta bake takes a particular hammering (although the hot pot is said to be reasonable).

Poor lambs!

Imagine kicking someone's head in outside a club on a Friday night, then being thrown in the back of a van by burly officers and then being forced to spend the night in a poky cell. If that wasn't bad enough, they are forced to eat a pasta dish which, we're told, looks "disgusting".

I don't see a problem complaining about food when you've paid for it at a cafe or restaurant. But when you're a thief or thug who has had to be detained because you're just too plain bad to be on the streets, you don't have the same right to moan. We're talking about pasta here for goodness sake, not a diet of rats and grubs served up in some Burmese hell hole!

What's more, custody centres at police stations are not home to the wronged or the innocent, by and large. They are generally populated by a smattering of shoplifters caught red-handed or well-known bail jumpers in the day. Then when night falls -- especially at weekends -- they are overflowing with violent drunks intent on harming folk. About a third of all violent crime is carried out by drunks at weekends, in case you were wondering.

Not just violent drunks either. We also have the annoying drunks. The ones who kick off your wing mirrors and smash your fence on the way home. The ones behind the type of "anti-social" crime that police says drives up fear of crime and makes people, particularly the elderly, more scared than they ought to be.

The Government sees these low-level criminals as public enemy number one. David Blunkett wants to smash these rogues and end their drunken high-jinks.

The Home Secretary seems to come up with new measures every month to curb their over-enthusiasm and he generally gets knocked for some of the better thought out and more radical plans that years of research suggest would make a difference -- longer opening hours to avoid the mad rush at 11pm and 2am for example.

But it took a Lancashire Evening Telegraph story to show that we had all been under-estimating just how sneaky David Blunkett was being -- using bad food to deter people from going back to the cells ever again, what a genius!

Just how far will this man go to solve perceived problems?

Me, I'd have gone for electro-shock therapy on these drunken goons -- then force them to eat overcooked spaghetti!