IT'S JUST THE DRUGS TALKING

(The Week on Radio by Robert Hanks)

The drugs debates rages on. In Thursday's Front Row (Radio 4), Mark Lawson
was talking to Ken Kesey about drugs and the Sixties. Kesey was in favour
of both, but, particularly, the drugs: "Drugs don't kill," he said. "Kids
in cars kill. Guns kill. Bombs kill. If OJ had been smoking a joint he'd
have said: 'Uh, we'll kill the bitch tomorrow. Let's go see what's in her
refrigerator.' "

An effective anti-drugs argument came in last week's opening episode of
Crime and Punishment (World Service, Friday), a wide-ranging documentary
about penal systems around the world and through history. John Pickford was
riding in the back of a police car in London's Soho when a member of the
public banged on the window and blurrily explained that he had been the
victim of a crime: he had just attempted to buy some drugs, but, when he
opened the bag, it was full of brown paper. "You were trying to buy drugs?"
one of the policemen asked, by way of clarification. At this point, you
could almost hear the crackle and pop of disused synapses snapping back
into life. Eventually the victim came up with a suitably neutral formula:
"Allegedly," he said, before stumbling off into the night.

Pickford's thesis, announced at the beginning of the series, is that
studying how a society deals with crime can reveal deep truths about that
society. The first programme was packed with examples, short on
conclusions; last night's second programme, on how prison systems operate
in different countries, started to draw some of the threads together. In
Britain, we learned, punishment is intimately involved with sexual
puritanism - in South America, conjugal visits are positively encouraged as
a way of maintaining the family. Family structures are taken less seriously
here, as Pickford demonstrated in a troubling interview with a woman
prisoner who had been separated from her baby nine hours after birth and
had ended up shortly afterwards in a psychiatric ward.

Another, possibly related, quirk of the British system is the underwear;
apparently, regulation-issue pants are absolutely enormous. The reason for
this may have been unwittingly touched on by an inmate discussing why
convicts are given serial numbers: "It's to make you feel very small,
powerless."

Still, Crime and Punishment hasn't lived up to the title's Dostoevskian
promise. As an assemblage of anecdotes and incidents, it is ambitious and
intriguing - in Japan, prisoners are forbidden to make eye contact with
guards; in Peru, guards patrol prison perimeters while inmates run the cell
blocks for profit. Pickford's attempts at depth have not been impressive,
however. "Every prison is the same and every prison is different," he
intoned solemnly at one point. Later, he tried a variation: "Every prison
is different, every prison is the same." It still sounded like a cliche.

You can learn much about a country from the way people gamble. Place Your
Bets (Radio 5 Live, Sunday) is a series about the state of gambling in
Britain, full of eye-popping statistics: when you count in the wins that
get recycled as new bets, we are now betting UKP40bn a year, more than
Ireland's total GNP; 90 per cent of us have done the National Lottery; 60
per cent do it every week. So, we are greedy, lazy and have no grasp of
probability. We ought to be locked up for our own safety.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)