(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Join the conversation: Readers’ thoughts on Palestine, prisons and ecocide [1] [] Date: 2024-05 Welcome to openDemocracy’s weekly reader comments round-up. We receive so many carefully considered messages about our work, that it seems a shame to keep them to ourselves! Once a week we will be showcasing some of the most interesting or thought-provoking comments made on our website or emailed to us that week. We know our readers are intelligent people from all walks of life, and this will offer a space for us to share your opinions, and maybe even engage in some healthy debate. This round-up will be emailed to subscribers of our daily newsletter on Fridays, while the rest of the week we’ll continue to send the best of our investigations, analyses and op-eds. Sign up to our newsletter here to ensure you don’t miss out. You can send your comments to be included by replying directly to any of our emails, or by commenting on our articles. If you’d prefer your comments to be anonymised or not published please let us know in your message. We’re a small team and we receive a lot of comments, so if yours isn’t featured one week, it’s not a reflection of its quality or importance to us – please do keep sending them! Get our free Daily Email Get one whole story, direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up now These comments aren’t necessarily a reflection of openDemocracy's editorial position. There should be far less use of custodial sentences for convicts presenting little or no threat to the public. Perhaps they could do unpaid social work or fruit picking etc. instead of rotting in cells where little if any effort is made to rehabilitate offenders (especially those serving short sentences) whilst the offenders themselves become institutionalised to the point where they are very likely to reoffend shortly after release. Each prisoner costs the taxpayer several thousand pounds to keep incarcerated. Whilst prison is the only solution for those with a medium to high risk of causing harm to members of the public, it is simply not appropriate for many of the offences which nowadays carry a prison sentence. -Brian Beesley Crime and punishment, those people involved in organised crime will never be rehabilitated, they will carry on even more so, they are brainwashed to be nasty villains. crime will spiral out of control, the mere suggestion is ridiculous, society will collapse. -David Palmer After last week’s article on the rising rate of suicide particularly in women’s prisons, it seems obvious that poor treatment and appalling conditions are not conducive to the rehabilitation of women offenders, or of the prison population as a whole. We had Elizabeth Fry on our banknotes not so long ago. She was feted as a heroine after her death. The Society of Friends is still active, but Heaven Forbid that we should take the lesson to heart! -Annjen Perhaps you cannot absolutely abolish prison, but you could have a massive rethink of who goes to prison and why. There has just been legislation passed to put cyclists who cause death by careless riding to be imprisoned. Women and men, but mainly women, are imprisoned for small financial misdemeanours TV licence, benefit fraud etc. Surely the reasoning and criteria for prison needs to be revisited. Are you a danger to someone or to society as a whole. If not then why are you locked up? Does it make sense in a society to disrupt families, condemn people to losing their employment, their housing etc and can we justify the expense. Is there a different more constructive way we can deal with those who challenge societal norms? There are some for whom prison is the right answer. However it has become a revenge and not a constructive policy for many. -Millie Munn There need to be alternatives in place to address the causes of crime and to help people find alternatives to problem behaviours. To prevent crime would mean removing every cause of inequality (financial, social, etc), establishing a non-discriminatory way of thinking that starts from birth, and would still need provision for extensive therapy for people who slip through the net. Not to mention that prisons are big business, of course. Locking people up has been proven to not solve problems of crime, but there's money in it. -Lou Venison Read the original story here. In the mid-60s when I was a new first-degree graduate, I was a visiting laboratory worker at the Sidney Farber Children's Cancer Foundation Hospital in Boston Massachusetts. I learned very quickly how different the US blood transfusion system was from the free system I had known in Britain. In the US, donors were paid and blood came from drug and alcohol addicts, people in prisons and the homeless. HIV was unrecognised at that time but other blood-borne diseases, notably Hepatitis were common amongst these people (and subsequently, HIV too). This was common knowledge in the US at that time, and I was made aware of it immediately by the hospital authorities. In the 1960s, blood transfusions and products derived from this blood in the US were known to be dangerous in a way unknown in Britain's blood transfusion service, and I had never imagined such products would find their way into the NHS and the British system. How can it be that if I, a raw new graduate, knew this in the mid 60s, it was unknown by the health authorities and politicians even 20 years later? -Dr Judith Varley Read the original story here. Yes, this is clearly an appalling case that shows clearly why the right to freedom of speech is important and must be upheld. But we didn’t need to go as far as Nigeria for it. The Scottish Hate Crimes Act, which you have studiously avoided mentioning for the last couple of weeks, is a terrifying restriction of freedom of speech, which defines objectively provable statements of biological reality as hate crimes, but not apparently death and rape threats, as long as they are made against gender critical feminists. In light of the way Israel is currently using the concept of hate speech to deplatform legitimate criticism of its depraved behaviour, and in the context of UK libel laws which encourage libel tourism, we need to return to the standard socialist position exemplified by Noam Chomsky, that free speech must be an absolute right which must be protected, and nobody’s commercial interests or fragile delusions can take precedence. - Bobbins 123 Read the original story here. Ecocide should also qualify as a crime against humanity. It should also be known that the term and concept of " Latin America" is a lie and false - born of French imperialism an invention of Michel Chevalier for the empire in the Americas Napoleón III dreamt of creating - NO SOMOS LATINOS - correct terms are Hispano America / América Hispana and/or Iberoamérica as inclusive with Portuguese descendants. Time to be done with the "Latino" lie. -JoseMarinero Read the original story here. Have more thoughts? Sign up to our newsletters today! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/reader-comments-palestine-gaza-prison-ecocide-latin-america/ Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/