prisoners making christmas cards....

I've been thinking, that is sooo NOT GOOD. Me thinking I mean.

The newspapers have made a meal of this tale. Tesco stores, buying christmas cards, probably on the cheap, made by inmates in Chinese prison. Maybe in sweatshop conditions, maybe not, who knows?
But hang on a minute... Woah!....Time out... Let's have some perspective here..

These inmates are not manacled together in some quarry breaking rocks. For all intents and purposes, from the few pictures that we've seen, probably stage-managed, they seem to be fed and reasonably well clothed.
Many years ago, the town that I grew up in had a Borstal and attached to that borstal was a piece of land as big as a football pitch, probably bigger, it was tended and cultivated by the inmates, and in the summer months, loaded with home-grown vegetables. Imagine having to rake,hoe, and set, a vegetable garden as big as that, but they did. It looked a picture, never untidy.

Why shouldn't prisoners be put to work? Within reasonable working and living conditions of course. "Reasonable"?.. Well now, that's a different kettle of fish isn't it.

It's a non-story imo. Newspapers trying to make news, selling copy for copy sake.

Okay, you might rant about what the exactly, in Chinese society, constitutes crime and/or the sentences passed on said law-breakers. You might even want to rant about their living conditions. And you might well have a point but it's not Bangkok is it. Some of the stories of how British drug-mules are treated when they're caught and imprisoned there, well.

Just thinking, that's all.

the ster.