Classic

The Manchester Evening News reported yesterday:

TODAY the Manchester Evening News appeals to our readers to help catch the city's dumbest hoodie.

The hapless hooded thief was well and truly caught on camera after he staged a raid in David Arathoon's CCTV camera shop.

The culprit was filmed from every possible angle as he posed as a customer and asked to look at some cameras before snatching a £700 laptop from the counter and running out of the shop in Dale Street.

Some of the comments at the end of the story are interesting. Here's my take on the story.

Like it or not, the clothes you wear tell people a lot about you. Bikers have a similar "bad image" with the leather jacket look that scares some people, and hoodies are also now getting a bad reputation. Front-page stories of a boy in a hoodie robbing a camera shop is going to do nothing whatsoever to repair that bad reputation.

Someone else commented that CCTV cameras are useless at preventing crime. With the youth of today absolutely nothing is going to stop them committing a crime, even the very real possibility of getting caught. However, that's not going to deter the "feral youth" of today. These kids treat prison as a holiday - a place where they get three meals a day and a bed for the night. The problem today is that the punishment does not fit the crime. Someone pointed out that all he's going to get is a slapped wrist. They're probably right - that's no deterrent at all. I'm not suggesting we go to the extreme of chopping hands off or anything like that, but a month in solitary confinement with basic food and a mattress in the floor should at least give him time to reflect on his actions. As an aside, there was a programme on TV earlier this week called Supernanny. In order to change the behaviour of a wayward nine-year-old, the nanny put her in a "reflection room" for nine minutes (one minute for each year of her age) so that she had time to think about what she'd done. This is solitary confinement in disguise, and the fact that it's in a dining room and not a prison cell doesn't make any difference. After a while, the child stopped sulking and started to think about what she'd done to get herself put away for a nine-minute stretch, and eventually she realised that being sent away on her own was no fun at all and so she started to behave herself.

If this hoodie is put away in a room on his own for a few days (one day for each year of his age) surely he'll decide that the punishment is no fun? Of course, he's got to get himself caught first....