Tolja

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This - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1215389/Abandoned-parents-betrayed-schools-young-boys-turning-criminal-gangs-protection-sense-belonging.html - is without a doubt the best and most important article printed by any British newspaper in months if not years. And Harriet Sergeant is an exceptional journalist - I have seen other items by her, and she is brave as a steel sword. But I regret to say that I foresaw every word of it before I ever started blogging, and described it in my article about the Tony Blair generation two or three years ago.

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Actually, there are some interesting data. In Italy, in spite of our chronic organized crime and social disorder problems, and of unmanageable levels of crime among the immigrant population, the jails hold some forty thousand people; and that already seemed too much to the Italian public, which welcomed a mass amnesty a few years ago. Italy has sixty or so million inhabitants. The kingdom of England (that is, England and Wales) have ten million less; but they have at least 78,000 inmates at present. What is more interesting is that since 1995 the prison population has been growing uncontrollably, and that the country has had to build one new prison a year. Check the figures here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_population_of_England_and_Wales . And bear in mind that they are probably an underestimate, since the British government tend to lie.