Don't you have to be mental.
to buy a Gamecube in a new box, that does what the Playstation2 did 10 year ago with the EyeToy?
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 …
Thorough, well thought-out research has shown that leaving a wii-fit unused in the corner of the living room does nothing for fitness. Not "quite" the same thing as you claim. In further astounding news, paying £1500 for gym membership and only going twice makes only your bank balance lighter. To paraphrase an old parable, you can take a fat, lazy lard-arse to a treadmill but you can't make him run.
From the article:
"In addition, daily Wii Fit use per household declined by 82 percent, from 22 minute per day during the first six weeks to four minutes per day during the second six weeks"
Helps if the participants actually *want* to get fit, you don't get fit by merely owning gym membership. Likewise you need to use the Wii Fit to see any benefits.
Idea for next article: Diet Coke with Burger & Fries not effective dieting...?
And your point, if any, is? You demand fitter inmates, so let's invest in large fitness centres? Hm. With all machines specially modified that they can't take off any parts to use as a weapon (metal bars, weights, chains, etc)?
5000quid for several inmates is a laughable cost on the basic cost of even keeping 1 inmate 1 year. Yeah, let's vote for longer prison sentences and against a budget to cover it.
Plasma TVs? Wiis? Where do these low-lifes get off?
If they are due for release I don't see much harm in getting them ready for the real world (which would include a TV for the cultural input) but for those still being held? A 10x10 concrete cell should be enough. Prison is meant to be a punishment, not a holiday camp.
£5,000 on Wiis and god-knows-how much else on plasma TVs while pensioners freeze to death in their homes? I see Labour has its priorities correct. One set of crooks and scum looking after another set of crooks and scum.
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.
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.
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")
Wish to hell I could afford a Wii !! OK - I wouldn't actually buy one, but the cash would be handy. But then I'm just an ordinary law-abiding pensioner who's paid his taxes for 50 years and gets nowt out of the system but sympathy and leaflets...
Where did I put that axe...
Poor thing, with only a £10k minimum income guarantee, and free prescriptions, dental and eyecare, housing benefit entitlement, pension credit, reduced rate gas and electric bills, cold weather payments, fuel allowance, free or reduced public transport, free leisure activities and after a certain age free tv. etc.
Meanwhile, disabled and terminally ill people are stuck, through no fault of their own, trying to survive on the appallingly low benefits they receive. Try living on less than half of what you get, paying full rent, council tax and power, for prescriptions and transport, with no cold weather or fuel payments to keep you going. It was -7 here last night. How long would you last living like that? It's not a temperature that's particularly compatible with a comfortable existence when you just cannot afford to switch the heating on because it'll mean going without medication or food and drink.
When my mother (who has cancer, arthritis and heart problems) reaches 60 her income will more than double, and her outgoings will drop by two thirds, just for being 5 years older than she is now. She'd quite like a DS to entertain her in hospital. Pity it would take her about a year to save up for one.
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.
Err really?! Is this really true (or Wii-lee true)? Of course, it's easy to be outraged. The first duty of any justice system is to protect the public - not punishment. Here the inmates have been removed from society - and so that's got to be a big tick in the "protect the public" box. Now I guess keeping the inmates compliant is damn helpful and the odd diversion seems like a good way to do it. We don't execute, and sending inmates into insanity seems like a bad policy (especially if they already have mental illness). If this keeps them reasonably easy to control, and away from the rest of us, well fine... If it's even true.
If this seems rather too much, try and remember someone has to guard them - we don't want to make their job any harder than it already is (I wouldn't want to have to do it).
In my opinion, there are far more important things to worry about than a couple of grand spent on Wii's for mentally ill people.
No one would bat an eyelid if it were for mentally ill people in any other hospital in the entire country.
Those who are critical of the government on this are way off the mark. I expect that the NHS trust that runs Broadmore have a budget and this was felt to be useful for all the patients that are treated there. The money that has been spent, would always have been spent on those patients, be it games consoles or more rubber wallpaper.
This story is tabloid journalism at its worse.
A group of barefoot people, clad in white hospital gowns play their Wii consoles happily. Merry electric sounds fill the air. Suddenly, the lights flicker and there is a powerful electrical hiss as the lights go out.
All is darkness and silence for a number of terrifying moments before, one by one, with a click, the lights come on up the corridor and eventually the consoles spring back to life.
"Ah," says one patient, "I guess Sutcliffe finally lost his appeals then. Baggsy his nunchuck."
So they have Wiis in hospitals do they? Wow! Good to see Murdoch's papers providing quality journalism yet again by telling us. No wonder they want people to pay to read their crap when the stories they dig up are this hard hitting.
I seem to remember they had a similar story in either the Sun or the News of the World a year or two ago about Ian Huntley moaning at the prison authorities that he wanted them to upgrade his Gamecube to a Wii. Wow, award them a Pulitzer quick!
At least Ninty have the convicted murderer gamer market sowed up now too. I always knew Pokémon was evil!
This is the classic judge's dilemma: Mad or Bad?
You can be sure that the psychiatrists that diagnose mental illness and report to the judges are very good at their jobs. It is also worth noting that there are patients who are not committed of any crime in Broadmore, also that in the normal prison population in the uk has a diagnosable mental illness rate at something in the high 90%.
Now add to that - The justice system represents justice for society and the perpetrator of the crime, not the victim.