The daft do-gooders

Just as we were all supposing that a stop had been put to the ridiculous and offensive social-worker idiocy of treating criminals with safaris and swimming-with-dolphins therapy that only made them laugh up their sleeves at society and then carry on mugging and thieving, it is disclosed that some 40 to 50 first-time offenders had been booked into a Pontin's holiday camp in reward for their criminal activity.

That they menaced the decent folk who had scrimped and saved for their stay there and had eventually to be chucked out will come as no surprise to anyone with half a brain.

For that is all that it takes to realise that if you accommodate scum in such fashion, they will carry on with the anti-social antics that got them this soppy treatment in the first place.

Heaven knows what rewards they might have earned if they were repeat offenders - probably a fortnight in a Pontinental hotel on a Spanish costa.

But whenever these insulting instances of kid-glove treatment by social workers and probation officers are revealed, we hear little justification from them for this approach - probably, I suspect, because its advocates are too busy cavorting with the scum in a holiday camp disco or on a faraway whale-watching boat.

Yet, should we not give them the opportunity of proving the merits of their free-holidays-for-criminals therapy?

If they are so confident of it, I am sure that they would not mind it being coupled to their pay in terms of results - with a handsome rise for every offender on their caseload who stays crime-free for, say, five years after his or her free stay in Pontins or the Caribbean and, to be fair, an automatic pay freeze for the same length of time for each one falling by the wayside.

Well, why not?

These do-gooders are making us pay for these crime "cures". Let them put their money where their mouth is to convince us it's worth it.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.