Young people need guidance, not prison

Is it only me? Or is this new policy of throwing away the sentencing guidelines incredibly dangerous and utterly pointless?

Don't get me wrong, I was appalled as anyone by the violence and looting during what are now christened 'The August Riots', but the response to it seems to be just as out of proportion as the original act, so any moral high ground is slipping away.

I singularly fail to understand why we have the mentality that says everyone who does something we don't like has to be locked away, preferably for a long time. Agreed, those who consistently indulge in violence against other people do need to be removed from society for everyones good, but most of the others, the vast majority, need to be dealt with in other ways. Why on earth have the people arrested during the riots simply not been made to clean up the mess they made?! Line some of them up to clear the rubble from the site of the furniture shop in Croydon; make them clear the streets of the bricks and glass that they put there.

Most of the young people who get involved in gangs do so for security, status and something to do. We can't always blame the families - many of them are desperately trying to hold things together in a state of poverty, and no parent, working or otherwise, can be in sight of their teenage children all the time, nor should they be. It is wholly wrong for the chattering classes to blame parenting when they don't know where little Tarquin is all the time either. 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone' comes to mind.

The gang is there when the kids need it to be. Being part of it gives status on the streets, where they live - carrying the badge means you are somebody, not just another statistic. The gang, often controlled by criminals in their late 20's for personal gain, gives them things to do, even if many of those things are illegal and often violent. They get money and can get the 'stuff' they constantly being told that they need in order to be fulfilled.

The advertising industry is constantly looking for more and more ways to get into everyone's lives. Nothing, no social network or simple game, can be developed without the marketers looking for an angle, so we can't be surprised when the first thing they did was to acquire the things they had been told they needed.

There is a bigger picture and it is true that they have no hope. Nobody wants to educate them properly - they are forced to follow a middle-class 'National Curriculum' that does nothing to prepare them for work, and, at the higher level, prices them completely out of the market. As a result, nobody wants to employ them - employers seems to be obsessed by overstating the paper qualifications required, probably because the mass migration to University has cheapened all the qualifications down the line.

Sending them to prison for a few weeks/months can only have a negative effect. They won't receive any education or remedial support in there - they aren't there long enough to qualify, and anyway, the Prison Service is being cut to such a level that the service they provide is rapidly disappearing backwards beyond the Victorian establishments. What benefit is it to take a young man and coop him up for 23 hours in a 3m x 4m concrete box? How will that benefit him and the society he inevitably has to return to? All that will happen is that a large group (gang?) of very angry people, with a lot of pent-up energy and emotion, will be released back into the very place that they came from. I suppose that, by then, the media and politicians will have moved onto something else and won't be bothered.

We have a cultural 'to-do' list of jobs - hedges that need trimming and laying, instead of smashing up with primitive mower blades, canals that need clearing up to make into attractive and positive resources, general weeding and litter-clearing from our towns and villages. Jobs that weren't done in good times and certainly aren't even considered during these hard times. So many jobs that need doing, and a huge resource of people who need to be made to do something positive.

Giving them stuff to do, and using prisons as 'overnight accommodation' with, perhaps, some form of 'citizenship' education, will stop them hanging around getting into trouble. Being visible to peers and wider society would be punishment enough for image-conscious young people but, more importantly, it would be a positive recompense to the communities they have rebelled against.

By over-sentencing them, there is a danger that the more manipulative among the gang leaders will realise the power they have been given. They can terrorise the communities and society at large by simply inciting kids to throw bricks at the Police and smash a few windows. Their power will grow at every incident and the young people will look to them for guidance, instead of the preferred options. These kids look at the Police and Government and read about phone-hacking, expenses-fiddling, stories of abuse and privilege and they wonder why this is being promoted as the right way to live. If everyone is trying to get their noses in the trough, then why shouldn't they?

We have to look at another way of enabling these kids to have respect for the authorities and an understanding of the citizens place in a reasoned and democratic society. Firstly we have to make these institutions worthy of respect. All we seem to do is to recycle the same old arguments over and over again, and the young people feel more and more alienated from a greed-based society that they can't access.