The report proposes that private and voluntary sector contractors should manage the care and resettlement of short-term prisoners, those serving sentences up to 12 months. This would save money and reduce reoffending, the thinktank argues – the providers would be paid by results.
The idea bears a striking resemblance to the way in which support for the jobless has been contracted out as part of welfare reform. There’s one interesting difference of emphasis: in the employment field it’s the long-term workless who are to be served by external providers, in criminal justice it’s those with short-term sentences. But in every other way, the thinking looks very similar. So what lessons can be learnt from welfare reform and is it the right road for penal policy?
A number of immediate points can be made in considering the new report. The first is that contracting out of employment services has not yet proven itself. Evidence from other countries that are further down the track suggests that any early positive effects in terms of improved outcomes and efficiencies can wear off over time. What’s important is the way the contracts are structured – something that takes commissioners time to learn.
Second, the role of charities is already seen as contentious in the delivery of employment services on behalf of Jobcentre plus. Anxieties are widespread that their advocacy role will be compromised. Of course, inside expertise from a delivery perspective can help well-informed advocacy too. But the concern is real – those who are meant to speak up for the system’s users, and protect them from unfairness and abuse, are at least perceived as less likely to do so when they are paid to deliver the system themselves. If that’s a worry in relation to employment programmes, how much more of a concern is it for offenders, a particularly marginalised and vulnerable group?
Finally, we need to ask if the problem is really intrinsically poorer performance from the public sector, or whether the issue lies in structural design. Even the SMF seems to suggest lack of a joined-up system is at the root of the problem – something that contracting out of part of it is hardly going got help. The worry must be that what this really becomes is a way of delivering services on the cheap.
The failure of short-term custodial sentences to do anything for recidivism is well documented: something must be done. The answer surely lies in investment in better community alternatives, and keeping more people out of prison in the first place.
It might appear that men‘s equality sits on a mountaintop too high to reach in our lifetime. Feminist hegemony seems to reign like the Catholic Church in the age of Copernicus. Academics, government, media and the judicial system look like little more than extensions of feminist dogma. The workplace and even the social strata appear to have become feminist property. For a number of years, average men have been acting as though they lived in 1936 Berlin or 1970 Moscow, measuring their words carefully and casting a quick, vigilant glance over their shoulder before speaking. Others extol the virtues of feminism with sincerity that can only be properly expressed with help from a straw hat, a cane and some Vaudeville piano. And Some men are the real deal, born again believers in feminism, dancing though the socio-political morass like Hare Krishna’s in an airport, complete with dirty faces and donation baskets. Meanwhile, many Men’s Rights Activists, genuinely passionate about the cause, work under assumed names because of the very real danger of personal and professional retaliation if they are “discovered.” Vee know vaht you haff been dooink. It’s a sad testament to the reality that the thought police are not just imagined characters in some novelists dystopian fantasies. Men who mix the truth with their identities can be hurt by it, and have been. But there is trouble brewing for feminists. Not just annoyances from the cacophony of uppity MRA’s that plague their online comment threads, but real trouble of the catastrophic variety. In fact, feminism as we know it is going to unravel sooner than you might think. The First Great Wave of masculism is on its way. It isn’t a revolutionary tsunami, but it is happening fast, like flood waters rising with deceptive speed and force. And in the end, it will drown the feminist orthodoxy before they even notice the waterline is over their nostrils. If you think this is wishful thinking, keep reading. MRA’s are already influencing and shaping a new Zeitgeist. The evidence of that is clear and measurable and is already changing the collective consciousness of the western world. In little more than the past year we have witnessed events in the Men’s Rights Movement that range from relatively impressive to significant…to groundbreaking. There were two major court decisions in California and West Virginia that were very real, judicial cuts at the corrupt, feminist controlled domestic violence industry. Very recently the European Court of Human Rights dealt a severe blow to anti-father laws in Germany. In the last year we witnessed fathers rights protests in the presumably unlikely country of Mexico and the emergence of the movement in India. Men in Missouri recently won the right to use paternity testing in child support cases. And as just reported on Men’s News Daily, The On Step Institute issued a press release announcing a convention on creating men’s studies programs at the university level. This is not just more of what we have seen in the past in men’s studies, which amounted to nothing more than a women’s studies program dressed up with a fake beard and a pair of plastic, pin-on cajones. It’s an effort that will ultimately produce a tectonic shift in the academic landscape with lasting, positive effects for men in western culture. All these things leave one wondering what precisely has happened in recent times to spark such a flurry of events, seemingly unrelated, yet all bound to the common theme of positive changes on behalf of men. Why, after decades of trying, are things finally starting to happen, and why so fast? The answer isn’t complicated. The idea of speaking up for men is finally gaining acceptance. And that acceptance is all the culture ever needed to effect positive changes, the first of which was unclenching the vitriolic stranglehold that feminism had taken on our common sense. Feminists are no longer The Untouchables of western politics, and once that reality spreads some more, and it certainly will, the proverbial gig will be up. For this it is easy to credit to people like Warren Farrell and Christina Hoff Sommers; Kathleen Parker and Stephen Baskerville. Or the handful of others published and well known within the men’s rights community. And no doubt they have done much good. But there is something else afoot here; something even more powerful. It is rooted in the collective consciousness of the society we live in, and it is much more dynamic than any given handful of writers or activists. Forty years ago feminists steamrolled their way into the limelight of our attentions. Riding on the coat tails of the civil rights movement, they forced, with a less than legitimate agenda, a pendulum swing of such momentum that it literally swung out of sight. It moved so far away so fast that it appeared primacy in the gender dialogue belonged to feminists, and always would. That pendulum is swinging back Recently a fellow MRA pointed me to some very interesting statistics regarding the internet and gender activism. And what they reflect is that MRA’s are taking over the online world. Fact is, we already have. In 2007 if you did a google search on both men’s rights and women’s rights you would have gotten the following results. Women’s rights: 4,270,000 hits Men’s rights: 511,000 hits Exactly two years later you can do the same search with these results: Women’s rights: 48,300,000 hits Men’s rights: 70,600,000 hits In other words, we went from lagging by over 400% to a very substantial lead in two years flat. You may wonder why the internet matters considering the feminist influence in the mainstream media. It matters very much. Some elements of the mainstream media, largely as a result of the internet, are on the decline. Print media is clamoring against ever narrowing profit margins, cutting costs as much as possible but still falling behind the curve. Cable and network news outlets have been forced to integrate the internet into standard operations to reach the increasingly valued demographic of consumers who blend traditional and online sources for news. Political discussion forums and online campaigning are growing astronomically. Even political fledglings are using social networking sites like Facebook to launch their ambitions. It all points in the same direction. The internet is the mainstream media of the future, and it’s nature doesn’t allow the traditional gags to be placed on alternative ideas. In other words, in the online world, when the media talks, we get to talk back. And that fact makes it impossible to ignore any group with sufficient numbers and the will to voice their ideas. MRA’s have the drive and will, and the exponentially growing numbers. We are literally changing the way people think each and every day. And feminists are hardly in a place any more to stand in the way. Their dominance in so many areas has been long taken for granted, standard operating procedure if you will. But it is highly vulnerable for a variety of reasons. After a generation of debunked assertions, bad science and overtly sexist propaganda, their legacy of lies is finally making it’s karmic return to the source. Keeping a grip on power at some point hinges on having a grip on reality. Failing at this, modern feminism has become a paper tiger, caged in it’s own hypocrisy, subsisting on a diet of delusion and hubris. Which is another way of saying they are eating their own excrement. A once almost unassailable socio-political fortress, the gynocracy is now gimcrack on it‘s way to rubble, and feminism’s no longer a sustainable movement, but just a profoundly neurotic hitch in social evolution that is in the early stages of being corrected. Going though demographic information provided by sites like Alexa.com and others, you get a pretty clear picture of average people keeping abreast of gender issues. When you compare feminist websites like Feministing.com to sites like mensnewsdaily.com® it paints a pretty embarrassing contrast for feminists, assuming they can be embarrassed. Their demographics, particularly in education, look to be drawn from a mosh pit in an urban hell hole. Intelligent, informed people seldom stay with shaky logic and false premises. As feminism continues to exceed the average life expectancy of bad ideas, those that cling to it are often the only ones dumbed-down enough for the job, or those so hopelessly brainwashed that they no longer can tell reality apart from deified victimhood. So while men’s rights activism is on a steamroll and will soon be barreling like a locomotive right at the feminist power structure, the gate keepers won’t mount much of defense. The worm has already turned; consciousness of the truth is already being instilled into the culture on a growing scale. And truth is the ultimately terminal blow at any bogus ideology. We won’t know about this from picketing, shrill demonstrations or flaming effigies on the streets. There won’t be a trumpet call or a celebratory parade. We can simply see that the tide is turning each time a court inflicts justice on the tainted domestic violence industry. Our evidence will be the demise, one by one, of rape shield laws, the prosecution of paternity fraud and lying for the purpose of a restraining order. Or crying rape when sex was consensual to cover guilt, or simply to cover the “victims” reputation with the person to which they were supposedly committed, but betrayed. We will witness it in the eventual end of Title IV-D funding to corrupt family courts and the enforcement of shared parenting. The groundwork, and more importantly, the consciousness, for all this is being laid out as we live and breathe. This movement will find it’s way into social circles where statements like “Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them,” are met with stone cold glares and the righteous indignation they deserve. And we will know how real it all is as we hear the increased wailing of feminists who claim MRA’s are about misogyny and denying equal rights, followed by the dull thud as it falls flat on ears that grow more and more weary of histrionics and crying wolf. Feminism will die from a synergistic overdose of stupidity, smugness and sexism. And the men’s rights agenda will prevail because it is one of justice and equality under the law. That agenda isn’t just carried by those in the limelight. It is a groundswell of outrage that has been corked up for nearly a half a century. It is legions of men and women who are finally waking up and deciding that enough is enough. We have reached the time that if you want to get on the train, you will have to get a move on for a good seat. But it will be worth the effort. Or, as I recently read from another MRA, “This train is the only one that knows where it’s going.” All aboard.