Dominic Fisher of the Prague Tory is spitting feathers yet again over a scandal he thinks he’s uncovered. Horror of horrors, Cherie Booth is a Howard League Ambassador for Penal Reform, which implies to Dominic (although I suspect Ms Booth would happily plead guilty on this count) that she believes we should use prison less.

While there is little doubt that prison works on a limited and temporary basis (i.e. offenders can only victimise each other once inside) more than half of offenders commit more crime on release, having failed to learn their lesson.

A criminal justice system should punish in proportion to the crime, but remember that no punishment can undo a crime. Meanwhile, to put your faith in punishment as a deterrent is to put your faith in the rationality of drug users and the mentally unstable and to forget that those healthy criminals almost certainly committed their crime in the expectation of getting away with it.

But the biggest barrier to prison working is that a crime has to be committed before it can be invoked; a criminal justice policy with prison at its heart assumes law enforcement and crime prevention are doomed to fail.

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With the rather ugly building that was home to the Dutch Pancake House on the corner of St. Peter’s Square cleared for redevelopment, a Manchester institution has bitten the dust. But few will miss it.

The Dutch Pancake House was almost a great success. Huge plates of savory pancakes followed by huge plates of sweet pancakes. As cheap and simple as pizza.

But the decor seemed unchanged since the 1970s. The menu unimaginative. The giant plates were chipped. The service poor as could be.

Some places survive best in affectionate memory.

This posted via mobile via Flickr. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

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Blink and you miss it. The ad after Popworld features a young girl with near perfect skin exclaiming that she has a spot.

Thanks to TiVo we can pause and rewind to the moment horror strikes… and guess what… there is no spot for Clean & Clear to work its four hour magic on.

What’s that all about? Let’s see how Clean & Clear copes with a proper pizza face.

This posted via mobile via Flickr. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

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Ryan Florence might not be the sharpest tool in the box and he may not have known who David Cameron was, but his mock shooting gave the Sun all it needed to ensure the Tory leader’s much derided ‘hug a hoodie’ campaign (he actually said they should be shown ‘a lot more love’) is holed below the waterline. It’s a classic front page.

Yet there is a bigger tragedy here. Mocking Cameron is the easy option and while it does good by undermining his leadership of the Conservative Party, it also makes it difficult to sensibly address the social problems of places like Wythenshawe, where the incident took place. Kids like Ryan Florence are very much products of a sub-culture that has done nothing to encourage them to think beyond where they find themselves today.

Cameron was right to try to move the debate towards understanding this and how the kids’ worldview might be undermined in the long term and replaced with something positive. But he forgot that understanding is all too often confused with excusing and that we’re right to refuse to excuse crime. There is nothing in calling for hoodies to be shown ‘a lot more love’ that makes us think the Tories would create real opportunities for kids to change.