Yorkshire Ripper loves Wii Bowling
Nintendo consoles installed in Broadmoor
Even multiple murderers aren’t immune to the Wii bug: nearly two dozen of the Nintendo consoles have been installed at Blighty’s high-security psychiatric Broadmoor Hospital and Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe is a fan.
UK taxpayers have coughed up £5000 so that the facility’s inmates can while away their sentences with a spot of Manhunt 2 Mario.
A Broadmoor spokesman told The Sun that Wii Fit is part of a strategy to increase the amount of exercise inmates/patients get at the hospital.
Each Wii is fitted to a plasma TV -and costs the hospital roughly £180 to install, the newspaper said. Additional £25 Wii Remotes and games have also been ordered.
Sutcliffe – convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 women - has a fondness for Wii Bowling, a source at the Berkshire-based hospital told the newspaper, adding that the murderer has played the game while watched by Robert Napper, the killer of Rachel Nickell.
Cue some faux outrage: “This cash could have been spent improving care in the wider NHS... all we hear is laughter as patients play with their new toys,” the Sun's source added. ®
COMMENTS
Err
It's a maximum security psychiatric hospital where people guitly of crime, due to their mental state are sent to be cured, not punished, it's not a prison.
Even if it were a prison, only part of the reason for a prison is to punish, the rest is to rehabilitae, you aren't going to rehabilitate people by brutalising them.
Couple of points
Broadmoor isn't a prison, it's a secure psychiatric hospital. Not everyone in there is a murderer, rapist or criminal. Some of them are just so mentally unwell that they're beyond help and unsafe in the outside world. Should they be deprived fun and entertainment while also losing their liberty through no fault of their own? Don't fall for this Mail-lite faux outrage designed to enrage white van men.
Also, pensioners? Not as bad off as many. They have a ten grand yearly minimum income, are entitled to greatly reduced power bills, and get massive heating allowances. My father in law's yearly heating allowance covers two years power bills, and then he gets cold weather payments on top. He's perfectly healthy, could still work, has thousands in savings, yet pays out virtually nothing. Meanwhile many of the disabled and terminally ill are living on virtually nothing, no cheap utilities or free prescriptions, full rent, no heating or cold weather payments. Nobody asks to become ill, yet the govt punishes them by making them live on as little as £4k per year. How much out of that would you have after paying rent, council tax and heating? Exactly.
NHS budget
The NHS budget for 2009 was £90B, that is 9, followed by ten zeroes. How exactly is £5000, one eighteen millionth of that amount going to make a spot of difference to patient care in any meaningful way? Not that I particularly condone giving games consoles to the criminally insane, but I really don't think the kneejerk nonsense from the Murdoch-mouthpiece the Sun is anything other than mind-numbingly stupid.
Segregation and Rehabilitation
Prison serves two purposes; To rehabilitate offenders, attempting to turn them into productive members of society, and to segregate offenders from society until such a time that they are rehabilitated. As we have no way of accurately determining a state of rehabilitation ("I's sorry, Gov. I's nevar do it 'gain!") we set arbitrary time periods for certain types and classes of infraction, and attempt rehabilitation within that time period.
The only thing slamming a person in a bare 10x10 cell for a decade will do is bread resentment and hostility. That is not something you want to do to someone who is already capable of performing potentially violent acts.
Besides, £5k for some shiny-shiny is bugger all in the big scheme of things; I easily pay that much in tax every year by myself. If that helps a con to keep his self-esteem up and speed his rehabilitation into becoming productive, so be it.
(I expect plenty of thumbs-down points as a "bleeding heart liberal")
Oh FFS...
"Lock them up in concrete vaults!" and "Put them to work on treadmills!"
How very Dickensian of you all. Glad to know that the 19th century sense of justice is still alive and well in the 21st century...
