Last updated 13:06, Thursday, 24 April 2008

Compensation culture has broken out across Britain and nowhere is it being practised more scandalously than in our overcrowded prisons.

Of all the jobs I would least like to do, being a prison officer in this day and age comes easily top. It’s got to be a thankless, frustrating and sometimes dangerous task.

While the Government bleats about falling crime figures, how do they square it with the fact that prisons are at bursting point and criminals who ought to be firmly under lock and key are walking the streets, often committing further offences, because there’s nowhere to put them?

Meanwhile inside the jails, it appears that the drug culture is rife. So much so that some inmates at open prisons are applying to be transferred to more forbidding looking institutions, in order to escape being dragged into the drugs scene.

The whole prison system is a mess and politicians have dithered over taking action for far too long.

And now there’s another glaring example of how criminals are laughing in the faces of their victims and the people responsible for keeping them locked up.

It was revealed earlier this week that £750,000 in compensation had been paid out to 200 drug addicted prisoners at English jails.

What for you might ask? Well, it’s for breaching their human rights by making them go cold turkey and do without their regular fixes.

Incredible I know, but they have received the money for what is regarded as “assault” through denial of their drugs.

It’s not that long since a suicidal prisoner at a young offenders’ institution in the north of England was handed a £750,000 out of court settlement, the details of which have never been fully explained to a mystified public.

The fact is that the addicts are running the prisons. You would be excused for thinking that these poor, downtrodden, misrepresented souls were forced into drug taking and crime.

Nobody seems to give a care about the misery they spread into the lives of their victims, the people who suffer as a result of their criminality and greed to feed their drugs habit.

Some drug offenders are even being given tickets to Premiership football matches as an incentive to beat their addiction.

The real victims these days are hard working, decent, ordinary people who don’t take drugs, and don’t disrupt society and steal and commit acts of violence.

While offenders have do-gooders running after them, plain Joe Bloggs gets no reward for paying his way and probably ends up forking out extra tax from his meagre wages into the bargain.

Human rights don’t appear to extend to the honest, upright citizens of this country.