Having spent a large chunk of my life as a copper, I have always felt that people should be sent to prison as punishment, but it seems that I was quite wrong.

Modern liberals seem to think that the very idea of bad people being punished for their crimes is entirely wrong They want to excuse the killers, the rapists and the thugs who beat up frail pensioners because of their ‘mental health’ issues, their poverty-stricken childhoods or their drug problems.

It seems that in these enlightened times, actual victims of crime don’t matter – only the perpetrators who apparently need to be handled with kid gloves and given every consideration.

Two particular stories over the past week have made me shake my head in despair. First, a new report says prison officers in women’s jails must not shout at inmates in case it upsets or offends them. The report says officers must create a ‘more positive living environment’ for the convicts. Not only that, but they must no longer use loudspeaker systems or shout on the landing to get someone’s attention.

This report was compiled after visits to five women’s jails one of which was HMP Low Newton where triple killer Joanna Dennehy is serving a whole life sentence. Dennehy is the vicious serial killer who murdered three men and knifed two more – both of whom miraculously survived even though she did everything to ensure that they did not.

She even threatened to kill Rosemary West who was in the same prison, yet this is the kind of creature officers are being asked not to shout at and to treat with respect.

Another totally mad initiative is the new ‘Welcome to Prison’ plan which is being trialled in six jails where inmates are being offered the chance to take up yoga and meditation to relieve the stress of being banged up.

“Coming straight from court and being thrown into an induction wing is very stressful,” says Victoria Green from the Prison Phoenix Trust which is heading the initiative.

Of course it ruddy well is! It is supposed to be stressful dammit! God forbid that villains think they are in prison to be punished because they did something hellish – and you have to have done something pretty hellish these days to even be sent to jail.

Are these do-gooding prison reformers really so out of touch with reality that they think that if you speak softly to a killer or a rapist or teach them a few yoga positions they’re suddenly going to become decent human beings?

Of course they are not. The re-offending statistics prove that. A Prison Reform Trust report shows that reoffending rates currently stand at well over fifty percent.

As for rehabilitation schemes in jails, former prisons boss, Sir Martin Narey, says they don’t work and should be scrapped: “The things we did to prisoners, the courses we put them on, the involvement of charities made little or no difference,” he said recently.

Prison is supposed to be hard dammit. It is not supposed to be a glorified holiday resort where you can de-stress and people speak softly to you. Let’s face it, in this country at the moment the perpetrators of crime get more time, money and sympathy lavished on them than any of their victims.

Yes, I am sure that large swathes of the prison population suffer mental health problems but then so do their victims, very often for the rest of their lives. For every violent crime there is a victim, a wrecked life, a devastated family, none of whom know how to cope with the aftermath. Can you imagine how it must feel for parents whose child has been murdered to discover that the monster who did it is having yoga lessons in prison to de-stress?

And even worse, that whatever sentence he or she received, they will only serve half of it at most?

As a nation, Britain has to stop looking for excuses for people committing horrible crimes. Yes, they might have hard lives but so have millions of other people whose response hasn’t been to go out and murder and rape people.

The truth is I could not care one jot what happens to the paedophiles, the killers and the rapists. My sympathies are one hundred percent with their victims whose lives have been scarred forever by these unfeeling people.

Priti Patel talks tough but it really is time she got stuck in to the prison system and stopped these idiotic initiatives. It is the general public who need protection, not the unfeeling cretins who break the law.

Meanwhile the chief executive of NHS Providers, Chris Hopson tells us all that he agonises from his position of ‘white, male, middle-class privilege’ over how he can make our health service ‘an effective anti-racist organisation.’

He should be agonising over how to reduce the hospital waiting lists which currently stand at well over six million people and the number is still climbing.

 I am sure we would appreciate that more than listening to his guilty feelings. What a pathetic man he must be.