Chapter 1

 

I am a recently graduated law student from Oxford. My father is Home Secretary and my grandfather, the Earl of Grantham. I am unsure where to head my life when a spate of horrible crimes hit England.

As the eventual heir to my grandfather, I inherited a large trust fund which meant I could pick and choose how to spend my days. I had been interested in the law and came out of Oxford with an honours degree but practising it had little appeal. However, during my course, we had touched on penology, that is the science of punishment and I found it a most interesting subject.

During my time at Oxford I had lived-in but gone home for weekends and of course, holidays and as I am very close to my father, spent many hours in his study, talking over affairs of state and particularly the prison system which was of course, once again within his bailiwick. As a result, I began to investigate the whole gamut of crime and its punishment and came up with some startling results.

Historically, prisons were used not so much to punish as to keep people from committing more offences, particularly against the person of the king. Punishments were various and included fines; mutilations (removal of ears or a nose, for example; humiliations (use of a pillory or stocks); torture; damages (in civil cases); confiscation of property including family members who were enslaved and sold, to name but a few.

Over the centuries, prisons became the standard punishment for crimes of all kinds and as they became overcrowded and more and more expensive to run, so venality and brutality became the norm. From the early parts of the twentieth century, the more brutal aspects were gradually abolished and we now remain with community service, fines and penal incarceration as available punishments for criminal offences and damages in various forms for civil matters.

Originally, prisons were horrible places and there is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that places like Newgate Prison were brutal - but then so were the times. Newgate closed in 1902 and the Old Bailey now stands on its site.

But while prisons may have become more humane, there is still corruption and some evidence of sexual abuse (of younger prisoners in both male and female prisons). But worst of all, to my mind, was their role as 'schools' for more crime.

The rate of recidivism (the return of prisoners to jail) is high. Prison is not a sufficient deterrent and to my mind, a wasteful and inefficient means of correction - and a huge drain on the exchequer, to boot!

I used to talk to Dad about this but his only responses tended towards raised eyebrows and an acknowledgement that while I was probably right, what other alternatives were there.

My mind was now seething. Well, perhaps not actually seething, but it was certainly mulling over all the various methods of state punishment used by all and every culture I could latch on to over the last few hundred years.

So far as I was concerned, everything was in the melting pot. To my mind, the solution was needed urgently. Street crime was now so bad people generally, but certainly the elderly, never ventured out at night unless in company. Home invasion was also on the rise, making it even more fearful for them.

Burglary, ordinary theft and corporate fraud was rampant; so was religious terrorism where hundreds of innocent victims at a time were now being made the targets of this widespread bigotry and intolerance.

Crimes against the person including rape, wife-bashing, abuse of children and common assault were daily events across the world.

Our own legal system, which used to be hailed as the best in the world has been emasculated by do-gooders who have put the rights of the individual over those of their victims so that while convictions still occur, the punishments that follow are a joke.

I wasn't in a hurry. And in any case, my investigations started out more as a hobby than any real hope of achieving change. In my mind, our system, corrupted as it had now become, was so entrenched as to be inviolable. Change, if it was to be effective, would have to be so draconian that I thought it absolutely impossible of achievement.

But that meant that I didn't have to take into account such notions as public opinion, the grey eminence of England's 'Establishment' or even the screams of the do-gooders at the slightest hint of watering down their over-zealous reforms.

As I said, I could include anything and everything in the melting pot of my at first hectic and quite disorganised thoughts.

I still discussed them with Dad but he just listened with tolerant amusement and I suppose, wondered when I was going to settle down to some real purpose in my life. He had chosen politics and had gone far. He knew his life as a senior minister and indeed as a member of the House of Commons was limited. Grandfather was now in his eighties and was rather frail. Upon his death, Dad would become the new earl and would then have to give up his seat in the Commons. Continuing as a senior minister from the Lords was fraught with problems and I knew he had every intention of giving up politics altogether and retiring to the life of a country squire and that he was actually looking forward to it in many ways.

But then, as I started to organise my thoughts along the lines of a world-wide rise in major crime and the singular inability of governments of all persuasions to adequately deal with it, things began to fall into place.

Western nations were the worst affected. Here were the roots of all the 'reforms' thrust upon us by those misguided altruists whose bleatings have negated any remaining punishment aspects of imprisonment. Oh, it might be unpleasant and a nuisance to be locked up for a time, but it now lacked the punishment aspect totally.

Those nations such as Singapore and Malaysia who retained corporal punishment as part of their penal system fared better, but when I researched the penal system in Nazi Germany, I discovered that there, it was so feared by the populace at large, that ordinary crime was almost non-existent. That made me investigate it further and I found (although the evidence was pretty scrappy) that severe corporal punishment including what we would call pure torture, was the rule in their prisons.

So was humiliation, including sexual use of prisoners of both sexes (homosexuality, while legally banned and punishable, was rampant throughout the Nazi hierarchy).

That got me to thinking. What if we abolished prisons altogether and instituted state slavery instead. State slaves would be stripped naked and denuded of all hair on their bodies. This would shame and humiliate them totally and their nakedness, even in the cold of an English winter, would be taxing, to say the least.

They would be employed outside in labour gangs. They would not be chain gangs in the literal sense for modern technology has come up with a chip that may be glued to either a male's testicle, or the clitoris of a female that will keep them in due bounds. Any straying outside of the permitted area will result in a shock so bad they will end up on the ground, curled up like a foetal ball, screaming for someone to turn it off.

Their labour would be an all-day toil. No lunch break; no smoko for morning or afternoon tea and in fact nothing to eat between sunrise and sunset.

Their food would be in the form of slave-chow. This is a product I read about during my researches into slavery and although it doesn't exist (yet) seems to me to be a very suitable nourishment for slaves. It is in the form of pellets, rather like chook pellets, used for decades to feed domestic hens. In the fictional stories, it was made by steaming cheap vegetables, meat and cereals until cooked, masticating the mixture into a paste which is then partially dried and extruded as pellets which are then fully dried and bagged.

The pellets contain all the necessary food elements as well as vitamins and minerals and according to the story, two handfuls followed by as much water as the slave can drink, causes the pellets to reconstitute in their stomachs as cooked food which is ultra-healthy and the two handfuls, twice a day will do very nicely. It is tasteless and uninteresting - Good! It's cheap and easy to deliver, store and deal out - Good! It can be digested quickly and easily - Good! It obviates the needs for very costly catering departments in prisons and the like - Good!

To me and my researches, such treatment of prisoners would quickly bring them down to taws. Their nakedness and its shame and discomfort would underline to them the fact they were now less than animals.

The hard labour would be useful to the community but boring in the extreme, although it would tax their strength and endurance as much as could be designed into it. It might be road work with pick and shovel; manual garbage collection where the automated trucks could not reach; the manual cleaning out of drains and sewers - there are any number of similar low-grade, manual tasks that will really tax their strength and endurance and as it will mostly be out in the open, accessible to the public who, on the one hand might enjoy the spectacle of stark naked and nude prisoners working under severe duress, but on the other hand, send a message to criminals or would-be malefactors that this was the punishment that now faced them if they continued (or started out) on their nefarious activities.

And in my scheme, female prisoners would be treated in exactly the same way as the males. They would be issued with the same picks and shovels and put to exactly the same tasks as them. The guards would be armed with whips and canes, not because they were necessary, as the tiny chips glued to their sexual organs was a far more effective instrument of punishment than either of those tools - but because of the theatre attached to the sight of a guard whipping a slacking prisoner back to work

But it had other advantages as well.

In the case of the religious zealots who were trying to impose the extremes of their religion onto peoples that didn't want them, being stripped naked, depilated nude and then forced to labour in full public view with pick and shovel or the like, would be a punishment far worse than death.

But as I delved further and more and more deeply into my ideas, my thoughts turned to sexual crime: notably rape, wife-bashing and child abuse and I decided that these evil people needed a mark to identify them as such and as well, particular punishments to suit their crimes.

You see, although I had no thoughts that anyone would take my ideas seriously, I did, and I wanted my system to cover the whole gamut of criminality.

Accordingly, I decided that this class of prisoner would be branded. Yes, with a red-hot iron, on their left buttock. This punishment (branding) existed in Britain up to the nineteenth century and while it is both bizarre and extreme, my researches had led me to the belief that it was again very necessary.