“Did you hear the latest? Some think prisons can serve to rehabilitate, too?”
The Independent doesn’t know quite what it is trying to be. It is clearly not conservative. However, it is not truly leftist either.
Being pigeonholed is not always a good thing, of course. Why be another Telegraph or another Guardian? Yet a clear sense of purpose is useful also.
My take is it is a paper that sees its audience as “liberal” in a slightly pompous (or some might well say armed with the “self-assurance” of one who knows he’s smarter than most) left-of-center, upper middle class, professional, “I read it usually over breakfast and can only shake my head at the disgrace that is Guantanamo, climate change, that idiot Bush (who is responsible for both of those and most every other problem in the world) and knife crime (my children would never go to such a school!), and then I turn to the travel section, where, ummm, oh, look, dear! Simon Calder went hiking in the Pyrenees just where we’ve been!…” sorta way. Today’s front page story is a solid expression of that:
The fate of Learco Chindamo throws down a challenge to liberal opinion. The Government wants the killer of Philip Lawrence to be deported. But why can’t the boy who is now a man be rehabilitated into British society?
Hmmm [ponder, ponder]. Overall, kinda [sniff, sniff] . . . touching, really. Where’s my Tocqueville biography?
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UPDATE: “Liberal” opinion indeed. In contrast, for some the argument over “deportation” v. “rehab” spans the debate all the way from A to B. Sam Tarran offers a “C” that would qualify as one of The Independent’s worst right-wing, Texas nightmares:
…“There is no evidence to suggest that the use of the death penalty serves as a deterrent against violent crime…”
Ah yes. And there was clearly no connection between the abolition of capital punishment in Britain in November 1965, and the murder of three policemen in the summerof the following year, the first shooting of a policeman since 1911. There’s clearly no connection between the abolition of the death penalty in 1965 and the subsequent rise in the rate of unlawful killings from 0.68 per 100,000 to 1.42 per 100,000. There’s clearly no connection that within ten years of abolition the number of murder convictions almost doubled. It obviously means nothing that in the United States, in the period between 1980 – four years after the US Supreme Court lifted the ban on capital punishment – and 2000, the US murder rate declined by 54%
Common sense informs you that the death penalty is a deterrent. You kill someone, you get killed. No parole. No reoffending after release. It is not a deterrent if you kill someone, then get a lifetime (read in the UK: six years) of free television, free video games, free medical care, regular exercise, and all the recreational drugs you could ever dream of…
Death penalty? Methinks I just heard Robert Verkaik (The Independent’s law editor, who is credited with the above Chindamo story) faint and crumple to the floor.
