What IS Prison for?

Rehabilitation! We have that mantra trip from the lips of wooly minded liberal do gooders with monotonous regularity and like most things they opine it is sooo wrong on multiple levels. As an old associate used to say in his characteristically concise way ' you cannot rehabilitate those who have never been habilitated in the first place'. But I actually say that should not even be the aspiration. Prison serves one purpose and one purpose only: Punishment! Or should I say two purposes the other one being incarceration to protect the public from dangerous felonius criminals.

Even putatively hard line Conservatives like Anne Widdicombe seem not to get this point and bleat on endlessly about the R word. Sorry, Why does a good parent reproove his recalcitrant offspring if not to din into them the folly of their ways and course and to imbue them with a positive worldview and instill within them the discipline to live a good and productive life therafter? Prisoners are the end product of the absence of such an upbringing and prison is effectively acting as a surrogate stern albeit just disciplining loving father.Not a nurturing spoiling mother who gives it drugs and television and panders to its delinquency, rewarding it when it runs riot anthrows the equivalent of a tantrum and hurls its toys out the pram. Cause a riot and we will give you more amenities! Madness. Take All their toys away and throw away the key more like. And totally privatise the prisons and make the inmates work for their bed and board.And lastly but not leastly send all the armies of penal reformers packing with their pleas to half empty all the prisons of their inmates and deploying their lethal confection of  psychobabble excus- making, false, absurd, Marxist rationalisations, explanation and exculpationss for pure plain human evil.