Fat profits from prisons

It is clear the Con-Dems don't know or care how our already overstuffed and understaffed prisons are supposed to absorb nearly 3,000 extra inmates transferred from the closed jails.

But then they won't have to suffer the consequences of their policies, either on the front lines in the shape of prison violence and even riots, or further down the road when poor communities are hammered by reoffending as a result of prison officers' inability to spend time rehabilitating inmates properly.

The mega-prison planned to replace the closed jails hasn't even got off the drawing board yet - which means years of overcrowding while the plan stumbles towards completion, even assuming it doesn't meet the same fate as Jack Straw's doomed "Titan" prisons.

----

On top of that ministers aren't saying how the new prison would be funded or run. But you can bet your life the private sector won't be missing out on a chunk of the action.

The Con-Dems may even be ready to go as far as bringing disgraced privateer G4S in from the cold after it was stripped of one prison contract and missed out on several others in the wake of its Olympic security shambles.

This plan takes us another step down the road towards the US prison-industrial complex where vast prison companies wield huge political influence and make huge profits from running mega-jails.

Privateers lobby politicians to lock up more and more people then make a double profit from all those inmates. First they land a juicy government deal for running the prisons, then they contract out prisoners as dirt-cheap labour with no employment rights.

It's a complete corruption of the justice system - and it's where the Con-Dems are taking us.

Police shocker

Hands up who'd trust our police with water pistols, never mind tasers. You won't see too many hands going up from the legions of left-wing activists who have been brutalised on protests and picket lines and know all too well the injuries the police can wreak with batons alone - never mind with deadly electric shock weapons.

Because tasers are deadly, as the police are having to grudgingly acknowledge with the weapons' reclassification from "non-lethal" to the hilariously clumsy euphemism "less-lethal."

They are supposed to be used only in dire need - but the result of handing them out willy-nilly is that police both here and in the US, where taser use was pioneered, have become more thuggish than ever.

Tasers are now routinely used as punishment on anyone refusing to obey the police's every whim - leading to such shocking cases as a US woman being tasered for refusing to get out of her car to accept a speeding ticket, due to being seven months pregnant.

Over here the toll is not as grim as the estimated 500 deaths caused by trigger-happy taser-wielding police in the US, but there is every sign we are heading that way.

The case of Colin Farmer, a blind man tasered after police mistook his white stick for a samurai sword, would be laughable were it not so distressing for the victim and so disturbing for society at large.

Again we see reckless officers endangering an innocent person's life over a "threat" that exists only in their heads.

We will continue to witness case after case like Farmer's until tasers are taken out of the hands of ordinary police and issued only to trained firearms officers where life and limb are genuinely at risk.