Yeah, right on BP, you’re so environmentally friendly. Workers blow the whistle on your polluting Alaskan oil wells, you shut down the wells while you investigate, the price of oil goes up again, you get richer. Have you seen that Howies T-shirt, “New Logo, same shit company”?
BBC NEWS | Business | BP shuts down 12 Alaska oil wells
Plus, more good news. The World at One on Radio 4 commissioned a survey about whether people are happy with the criminal justice system. The headline that came out of the survey was that just over half of the people they questioned (56%) feel that they are more at risk of being a victim of crime than they were ten years ago. Apart from the fact that if you look at the detailed results you’ll see that just over a third of people (32%) felt that things were about the same, isn’t that just a result of people getting older? Doesn’t everyone worry more about crime as they get richer and more settled? Funnily enough BBC News Online have that result much further down their story. Their headline is about the fact that “most people want more prisons and are prepared to face a tax rise to pay for them.”
They didn’t report the fact that most (52%) respondents were over 45 years old and only 11% were under 24. According to the Prison Reform Trust the average age of those sentenced to custody in 2003 was 27. A quarter was aged 22 or less.
It’s depressing, all this criminal justice headline/survey/chatter, I agree. Lots of real people get crushed beneath the wheels. A friend of mine’s son was just refused parole after doing 5 years of 12 for cocaine smuggling - he was more or less a dupe / mule, caught at age 18, and it looks like this crime hysteria’s more or less put paid to his chances of living anything like a normal useful life. Predictably reasonable and interesting stuff on this from the Magistrates blog here and here.