Examples of “Brutal Fact” thinking
The National Health Service in the UK is an ever-growing black hole of public expenditure. During 2007/8 it will consume nearly £89 billion, or some £1500 for every man, woman and child in the country. The radical answer is to focus on health, rather than sickness. The lion’s share of bed, hospital and doctor use is taken up by adults who smoke, eat and drink too much. Britain’s level of health would be transformed by refusing free healthcare – paid for by other taxpayers – to the overweight, excessive drinkers or smokers. Why should the rest pay taxes to shore up people who cannot even lead half-sensible lives? We would quickly have a more healthy community, and release massive funds to look after old people and others with real needs. This approach has been well known and understood, to my knowledge, for the last twenty years – no one has the leader’s courage to make it a reality.
Prisons in the UK are disastrous. Overcrowded and offering little or no opportunity for re-education or new hope, they serve only to return criminals to society more embittered, more antisocial, more desperate, and better equipped to continue a life of crime. Until we confront the root causes of criminality (poor education, poor housing and poor job prospects), and until we use the prison sentence to re-educate, and restart prisoners’ lives, we are just wasting funds.
Law enforcement experts have recently pointed to prisons as ready-made seedbeds for cultivating terrorists – and not just in the UK; in Spain (October 2004), police arrested 13 terrorist suspects – part of a group that began as a collection of unacquainted men jailed for minor criminal offences like weapons possession, document fraud or robbery.
But their time in prison transformed them into the Martyrs for Morocco, a terrorist group planning to blow up the national court in Madrid.
“It has confirmed that the nucleus for recruitment is centred on people convicted of common crimes”, Baltazar Garzón, the judge investigating the case, said. Prisons in other countries have become recruiting grounds as well, experts say. One of the men accused in the March 11 terror attacks in Madrid had served time in a Morocco prison, though before that he had been just “an ordinary criminal who drank too much” a Spanish intelligence official said.
In Britain, Richard C Reid, who admitted to trying to blow up a passenger plane with explosives in his shoes, converted to Islam during a stay in prison.
“In the prisons, one finds people who are young, alienated, with a taste for adventure and for risk taking, and who feel their lives have been a waste.” Juan Avilés, director of the Institute for the Investigation of National Security, a research and teaching organisation in Madrid, said in a telephone interview. “You can find all the raw materials for forming terrorists.”
In both of these examples, and we could as easily have reviewed schools, universities and the military, government “leaders” curry favour by hiding behind their commitment to greater investment – instead of focussing on the far more challenging reality of achieving results