Shoes made for walking free

Silly Andrew Ryan. As a member of the underclasses he won't have been aware that Ken Clarke will only allows Judges to dish out prison sentences for crimes in two categories; 1) the heinous child murdering type crimes that are front page news and 2) offending Muslims.

Unfortunately for young Ryan burning a copy of the Koran - a poor rip off of the Bible - is obviously rather offensive to Muslims. So off he will now go to jail for 70 days.

If only he had chosen instead to burn poppies on Remembrance Day like young Emdadur Choudhury who was able to escape with a £50 fine for his efforts which I'm sure he'll be able to afford once he's sued the Met Police for religious bigotry and received about £250,000 compensation.

Ken Clarke doesn't think prisons work see. He quite rightly points out the high re-offending numbers and therefore concludes that in the long term there is no purpose to simply warehousing criminals where they learn new and interesting skills from other criminals.

This is of course true. But then, if I thought the only punishment I might receive by robbing a post-office again having bungled my first effort an gotten caught was 18 months in what is essentially a bit of dirty budget hotel only slightly better as it will have free drugs and Sky TV, broadband internet and a pool table - I might re-offend too.

If however prisons were austere nasty places where you were fed and clothed and had a bed, but it was made perfectly clear to you that while you were there you had the right to breath and not be tortured, but that was about it, then you might think twice about whether you wanted to come back again.

Sadly we are of cause doomed. Crime is too much of a problem now. We now have generations in the underclasses who simply don't know how to behave, don't understand that crime is wrong. Ken Clarke's solution to tackle crime is simply to not make anything a criminal offense. Blame everything on deprivation. Insist that everyone is beautiful inside and we just need to help those poor souls find a place in society.

Meanwhile he lives happily in a community where the average house price is probably about £1m and he will continue to live some distance away from the problems he can afford to ignore. Not for long though. Let's see how he feels about crime the first time he finds an urchin in his living room rifling through his collection of jazz records.