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It's called cold turkey

by Whaleoil on June 28, 2010

The hand-wringiners are out in force.

Stop Smoking Cold TurkeyA comprehensive cessation programme must be available to prisoners if smoking is banned in jails, the Rethinking Crime and Punishment group says.

The Government is reportedly looking at making prisons smokefree from next year, with Corrections Minister Judith Collins expected to make an announcement early this week.

The Corrections Department is concerned taxpayers could be liable for legal action from prison officers exposed to inmates’ second-hand smoke and also the potential threat of lawsuits from nonsmoking prisoners, bunking with prisoners who do smoke.

Corrections Association president Beven Hanlon told Radio New Zealand prisoners did not like change.

“People coming off nicotine can be very unpredictable, can be very anxious, aggressive and we’re going to have a large part of our prison population going through that and we’re (prison officers) going to have to manage them,” he said.

You can’t get a more comprehensive cessation programme than cold-turkey. Once the crim enters the doors of the prison, they stop smoking, and they stop for the entire stretch. My bet is that troughers like Shane Bradbrook will be lining up to line their own pocket to provide smoking cessation programmes to criminals in jail. They are not needed. Cold Turkey will stop them smoking for sure.

Implementation is simple too. Announce a date when smoking ceases, enforce it, end of implementation  programme.

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  • grizz

    This is not about smoking. This is another initiative to get the crime rate down. Not being able to smoke may well be a greater punishment than going into prison itself. Look at how the smokefree prison in the Isle of Man has reduced crime on the Island.

  • http://roarprawn.blogspot.com/ American Gardener

    Unfortunately the reality of forcing withdrawal anxiety on an already wound up population of impulse driven criminals may be less rosy.

  • michaels

    Put 3 men in a a cell of their own.
    first man smokes one hundred fags a day.
    second man drinks 3 bottles of whiskey a day. (no, neither are Winston)
    third man is riddled with cancer.

    Leave all 3 in their cells for 12 months being just fed and watered.

    At the end of 12 months what are the results???

    The smoker and the drinker come out feeling better and healthier than they ever have.
    The man with cancer is dead.

    NEVER EVER EVER tell me that alcohlism or smoking is a disease, it’s not. Those that try to cure love the scare factor of the disease theory. How dare they compare.

  • robf

    In theory I like the idea. I have long thought of our five star prisons as better than how these people live in the real world and all we are doing is giving them a vocational all expenses paid holiday. It would make there stay a little bit less pleasant during the withdrawal process and might even make them better citizens on release.
    But lets get real, our prisons are like a sieve, drug use is rampant you have to ask the question how does it all get there, yes we search a few visitors as a PR exercise but it does not account for what seems is a sea of drugs.
    Will it just become another income source for those with the ability to walk it in? Drugs of any description are big business and big money. Where you have large sums of money to be made easily you will have corruption.
    Don’t forget that criminals have more rights than Joe and Jane average citizen. It’s alright to tell everybody else where not to smoke, but criminals. Yeah right.

  • workingman

    DO we let people in prisons drink because they may become irate and not able to handle not having any drink? No, there is no, legal, alcohol available in a prison.

    There will always be illegal drugs in prisons, and tobacco will become another one of them. I would imagine though that illegal tobacco smoking will not be taking place in front of guards, so that should reduce the risk to them (if there is any but that is another issue). Smoking cigarettes is also rather smelly, so hopefully the prison authorities mayb able to track down who is doing it.

  • mediatart

    Its allways easy to spot a crim on the outside , because of the way they hold a cig, to hide it. Mostly not because they dont want the screws to see it, but because other smokers will want to cadge a smoke.!!.
    And smoking in cells will be a dead giveway from the smell, easy enough to find out .

    Michaels, technically you are right, that alchoholism isnt a disease, however treatment is based on the ‘disease model’.
    Just like swine flu, somepeople arent affected, some people will get sick and recover , some will get sick and die.

  • michaels

    Mediatart, not tehnically, I AM RIGHT.

    AND…. as long as they keep treating it as one, they will continue to fail.

    AA is a cult and full of shit and the other programs that use the 12 step programme are nearly as bad.

    Beating addiction is not rocket science but the one things it takes first is self acceptance. The rest is easy. Furthermore, one can even continue to use without the addiction, but it does take practice to get it right.

  • paranormal

    Isn’t it amazing – an anti smoking measure that must have originally come from the left is being ridiculed by others on the left. A master political stroke.

    Paranormal