A comment just made on BBC Radio Five Live — “the newspapers are full of crime” — just about sums it up – you could even call it criminal. Hello folks – crime rates are going down, your risk of being the victim of serious crime if you are a normal, law-abiding citizen is very low (and the risk almost certainly, if you are female, comes from a member of your own household).
A piece in the Observer today sums it up well:
Almost 100 years ago, Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, sought to define a civilised society by the way it treated its prisoners. He said in 1910: ‘A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the state, and even of convicted criminals against the state … these are the symbols which, in the treatment of crime and criminals, mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation and are the sign and the proof of the living virtue in it.’
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