Hope is not a plan

UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has proposed a "scared straight" plan for young folk in England and Wales who are caught carrying knives.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said seeing "gruesome" injuries would be a tougher deterrent than sending all knife carriers in England and Wales to jail.

...also...

Ms Smith told the BBC: "I'm concerned particularly about the way in which those who are carrying knives and those who are the victims appear to be getting younger."

"I just think that's a better way of making people face up to the consequences of action and making them more likely not to carry knives again in the future."

Showing a young person that they can, in fact, inflict serious injuries on people using just a knife may not have the deterrent effect MP Smith is hoping for. Certainly, seeing that you can kill or cripple someone with a knife suggests that they actually do "help you to be more safe."

As part of the ongoing attempt by UK politicians to climb to success on the bodies of their own nation's youth, members of all the major political parties are making their own counterproposals to deal with the manufactured knife crisis. The Conservatives want more jail time, and the Liberal Dems say the government is "in denial" about the scale of the knife problem.

That last statement? Assuredly correct. The government, like the other parties, has been acting as if there's a major upswing in violence and a massive, demonstrable "knife crisis." The numbers, however, continue to not support this proposition. Consider:

According to the British Crime Survey (BCS), overall violent crime has decreased by 41% since a peak in 1995.

Knives are used in about 8% of violent incidents, according to the BCS, a level that has largely remained the same during the past decade.

What does the Home Secretary have to say about the lack of support for this wave of fear?

"I think all of us understand, whatever top-level statistics might say, that this [knife crime] is a serious problem - that even if it isn't happening down your street makes you feel nervous and unconfident - and that's what we need to address".

What?

Translated from English to, well, English, MP Smith is saying, "Despite the lack of any evidence that knife crime is a serious problem, we assert that it is a serious problem. You should all be afraid."

Specifically, afraid of teenagers.

It's not uncommon for people in power to attempt to scare people as a political technique. Certainly, our own president is ready to blurt out the words "Al Qaeda" whenever he can't come up with a decent defense for one of his positions, but the remarkable thing in the UK right now is that the fear card that's being played is of the nation's own children.

Curiously, no one panicked years when I and many other teenage boys were given Buck Knives on earning our Eagle in Boy Scouts. That knife has since been preempted in daily use by my Benchmade, but it's interesting to think that either one could earn me jail time in the UK, and would have put me in that fearsome "teenage knife culture" demographic back in the day.

It all makes one sigh.

BBC article