I was rather disturbed this morning by a report that a 19 year old young man from Gloucester has been jailed for 16 years. From his picture, little more than a child.
Inspection of online reports from the BBC and the Daily Mail revealed someone who is seriously disturbed, who had been plotting some kind of mass shooting and who had dabbled in child pornography. Who seemed to have serious money to spend on this sort of thing - at least £1,000. We are told nothing of his family background.
Disturbed on two counts. First, that such a person should exist and be able to buy serious firearms. Second, that our response is to throw him in jail, say for a decade, when he will be around 30. Maybe that is the best that we are able to do, given all the circumstances, but it does not reflect very well on the rest of us that this should be so. One thinks that there ought to be, certainly in a rich country like ours, a better way to do things: he might have been plotting to destroy our lives, but we have, in some large part, actually destroyed his. What on earth will we do with him when we eventually let him out? And how did things get as far as they did, without anyone noticing?
That said, I associate to some mental health campaigners who prefer that disturbed people who commit crimes should be sent to jail for a determinate sentence, rather than that they should be sent to secure psychiatric institutions - like Broadmoor - for an indeterminate sentence, at pleasure, as it were.
And to the world of Dostoevsky, where people of this sort would be sent to prison in Siberia for some term of years, then released to exile for life in that same area. Far from the civilised worlds of Leningrad and Moscow. Now that we can't transport people to Australia any more, not an option which is available to us.
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