The Con - lessons learnt from the imminent release of Tracey Connolley

The average person in the UK has a life span of around 80 years, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) who make estimates that men live for around 77.8 years and women live for 81.9. I'm 18. I have, potentially, 63 more years at life. I'm lucky and, if you're alive today, you are too. Others are not so. Baby P, as he was nationally known, lived only 1 year and 5 months. That's over 75 years of potentially life changing decisions and energy lost and wasted.

But what is more shocking, in the grander scheme of things, is that Peter Connolley didn't have a choice. Before he could even be in control of his life, it was taken away from him. I am, now, as independent as I ever have been. I'm at Uni. But that's not to say I'm fully unconstrained. No human is fully individual. There are people; friends, families, colleagues and other, abstract concepts which mean that we shall never be eternally free. The decisions we make everyday usually are formed due to the restraints that are put on us by other people. If I wanted a cheese toastie with ketchup, as do my flatmates, making it wouldn't be the only stumbling block which involved me making a decision. One of the first points of call would be; Do I actually need this? This is a simple and commonly used sentence, not least by people like me. But the reason that I would have asked myself that question is because I am bound by a series of transcendent connections. Do I actually need this would be a question that derived from the fact that those extra calories could make me put on a few pounds. Worse, it could lead to a break out of spots. Would it be worth it? Would my friends notice? By these questions alone, I would be bound.
  If I then went on to eat the sandwich, slicing the cheese and allowing the molten wax to dribble from the toastie machine, I would still be bound. Where should I eat it?
  Questions, as well as people and attachments, keep us far from freedom. So, if we are never free and always, though begrudgingly, reliant on something; is it ok for those attachments to dictate us? Should we listen? Should we take notice to the point that we could die?

Baby P was innocent. And, in the grand scheme of things, he has reached a more attainable freedom through death than anyone alive can have a hope of knowing.

So what is it to be free? There is no such thing on earth. I believe you can never be free; just free-er. Tracey Connolley is to walk 'free'. A 6 year term for the death of a baby doesn't seem much. Think back 6 years. A lot can happen. In the first 6 years of my life I learnt to walk, to eat, to go for a wee on the toilet rather than in a nappy. I learnt to sing, to laugh, to smile, to run, to watch TV, to count, to write, to play, to draw, to love. A lot of things. And these are the fundamental aspects of my childhood. These are the things Baby P didn't get.
  I could count the mistakes I've made too. I could count the purposeful wrong. However morbid, if Tracey Connolley were to repeat her actions, in her lifetime she could potentially be linked to the murder of 5 additional children. To me, 6 year imprisonment, doesn't seem just. Tracey Connolley - hypothetically - served 1 year in prison for every 12.5 years that she took of her son's life. I fail to see the atonement in such a 'punishment'.

The Baby P case infuriates me. For one, I find it incomprehensible that someone could actually abuse someone, no less a toddler, in this way. But second, the pure injustice of it all. How could a sentence of 6 years, or even 5 as she should have served, be a deterrent for anyone. Prisons, as I've posted before, are barely a hardship. The guilt of crime doesn't even seem to exist anymore. What with the need for humane ways of treating criminals (which, don't get me wrong, I am not against), punishment doesn't even seem to incorporate its fundamental concept; to punish.

I get particularly passionate about life, and rightly so. You only have one and if it is taken away from you at the bitter age of 2, when the only experience given to you was abuse, then that is not worth having.

Freedom shouldn't be an early release from prison or a return to normality after murder to shop as you would have in ASDA or Tesco. Nor should it be an eternal rest from life on Earth, regardless of religious affiliation. Freedom should be living; simply, unchallenged with no strings attached.

"Death is punishable by death" - the outstanding logic of our world

I remember having this debate in our Politics class last year, sitting as the current US Supreme Court. We weren't discussing the current situation; the gang rape in India, but it was a similar scenario. Can you punish death by death and, more importantly, murder by murder? Is this the only, feasible punishment?

  You can't please everyone - that's a given. Where there are a multitude of ideas, thought-processes, ideologies, it's so very hard to know what's right. You could even argue that there is no such thing as 'right'. Every action has consequences; like eating a greasy take-away (think double portion of chips with your battered cod and a chow mien on the side with a sugared beverage of your choice) because you're hungry and your boyfriend just dumped you via text. You wake up in the morning to go to your aunt's wedding with a massive red pimple smack bang in the middle of your forehead. Did the consequence outweigh the need?

  The four men convicted of misleading and raping an Indian lady who later died of her injuries are bad people, in my opinion. You can't do that and get away with it! But...does 'getting away with it' mean being punished in anyway that does not involve them losing their lives? I think not.

What about prisons? Life in prison, I imagine, can be as miserable as torture or knowing that you're on death row (so long as you're not in the UK). I understand how important human rights are. You can't, very well, have people in prison who are denied three meals a day and exercise. But prison shouldn't an incentive. TV's, Xbox, opportunities to complete your degree - that's not what prison is about. It's not a holiday camp. They're not meant to be advertising freedom - albeit rather ironically supplied through the confinement of a cell and restriction under guards. But I suppose that may be what 'freedom' is. As law-abiding people, the general public is just that - a society governed by the law; restricted, rightly and wrongly.
  Those in prison are meant to be bad. They've broken the law. What they have done is wrong. But, then again, if there may be no such thing as right, 'wrong' may, also, not exist.
  If money is the problem, invest more in prisons. Heavy investments in the 'space race' or creating the tallest building won't help our immediate problems. Sometimes I just think countries create the buildings and wonders for show. 'Look at us, we've broken the world record!' It obscures the real problems, let's everyone live in denial and it works. Ok, we shouldn't be pessimistic and apathetic towards change but, perhaps, priorities are needed. If we're living in the 21st century and treating murder cases by murdering the perpetrators why not just lock people up in the stocks and throw rotten tomatoes at them? And I know what the answer will be: It's undignified. And is death really so much better?

  It's a toughie and things won't get solved like this (she clicks her fingers) but something needs to be done. Death isn't the answer. But who knows what is?