Investigates, Discovers, Questions This week: Short, Sharp Shock
' It will take the laugh off their faces-and about time.'
' Just red meat thrown to the blue rinses.'
Two reactions to the Home Secretary's recent proposal to restore, experimentally, the punishment known as ' short, sharp shock'.
Its aims are simple: for a short time life is made so tough that young offenders will be both punished and then deterred for life.
But will it work? The plan's opponents say that if you put a teenage criminal behind bars (and the number has trebled in ten years) you will neither reform nor deter him - between 60 per cent and 80 per cent will be back again within a year. So what's the answer and how do other countries cope? On film and in the studio, David Calder , Michael Dean and Jack Pizzey put that question to both sides.
Producer DESMOND LAPSLEY Editor TIM SLESSOR