egafd.com

I heard the Richardsons were more violent than the Krays

If you looked at sales figures for books by 'Mad' Frankie Fraser and his ilk, and at the Kray Twins documentaries that appear in the ITV4 schedules from time to time (there were some on C4 recently inc one about John Bindon) you would have to conclude that there is a market out there composed of individuals with varying degrees of interest, fascination and idolatry.

Reggie Perrin wrote:
> What prejudices did you have in mind exactly?

Well, towards freedom of the individual in general.
As a libertarian I am forced to take the general line that one must
be free to commit any sort of crime, PROVIDING one is fully aware
of the potential consequences.
As the Spanish dicho goes: "take what you want- AND PAY FOR IT".
We have nowadays far too many laws and way too few ethics- as the
recent parliamentary 'scandal' shows. I guess I'm really banging the
drum for the rather Jesuitical idea that we are REQUIRED to take
charge of our own lives and must bear the consequences of any
ill-conceived decisions, rather than run for the nearest ambulance-
chasing lawyer.....
... not a coherent answer, I know- but I thought you might need to
know where I was coming from.

Reggie Perrin wrote:
> ....Having to apologise nips
> all that East End folk hero crap in the bud and shows him to be
> the loser in all this.
I'm not aware that [outside of the denizens of the Jeremy Kyle show]
anyone regards him as a 'hero'.



> The process of justice makes an example of people by depriving
> people of their liberty and by depriving them of it even more
> if they fail to show that they have shown some contrition.
That's the theory, at least. A better analysis is that it takes them off
the street for a while without fixing the root-cause of the problem.
I do have tie for the notion of reform but my cynicism tells me that
it's unlikel;y to work in the majority of cases- and the evidence seems
to bear that out. At any rate, a young criminal going in for, say, a
two-stretch, tends to come out embittered, more vicious, much fitter
and with a vastly increased knowledge of the techniques of crime.



> Biggs was convicted fair and square so the issue of his not
> being guilty doesn't come into it. The point of sending people
> to prison is that it sends out a warning to all those who want
> to try the same career path.
Rubbish- as I said before, can you statistically back up imprisonment-
rates with reduced recidivism? There is NO answer to crime- there will
always be a proportion of the population who, whether from stupidity,
laziness or cowardice [and I've accused a few East End 'hard-men' of
the latter in the past, opn the lines of it being far braver to go and
do a shitty job to keep your kids in Play-Stations, and lived to tell the
tale] will take the easy road and deprive honest people of their rightful.
The only relevant question is how to mitigate it- and very few of the
historical methods seem to have had any great effect.
The most efective seemed to be the NYPD's hard line with their 'three
strikes' policy- although abused by officers themselves and certain
inherent flaws, it did seem to have a beneficial effect on ALL crime-
although I doubt any governance's will to keep with it for the long-
term. Howsoever, the murder-rate in NYC is still, ten years later,
lower than the UK's.....