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https://news.sky.com/story/row-over-new-greggs-vegan-sausage-rolls-heats-up-11597679 (https://archive.ph/5Ba6o)

A heated row has broken out over a move by Britain's largest bakery chain to launch a vegan sausage roll.

The pastry, which is filled with a meat substitute and encased in 96 pastry layers, is available in 950 Greggs stores across the country.

It was promised after 20,000 people signed a petition calling for the snack to be launched to accommodate plant-based diet eaters.


But the vegan sausage roll's launch has been greeted by a mixed reaction: Some consumers welcomed it, while others voiced their objections.

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spread happiness@p4leandp1nk
https://twitter.com/p4leandp1nk/status/1080767496569974785

#VEGANsausageroll thanks Greggs
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7
10:07 AM - Jan 3, 2019
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Cook and food poverty campaigner Jack Monroe declared she was "frantically googling to see what time my nearest opens tomorrow morning because I will be outside".

While TV writer Brydie Lee-Kennedy called herself "very pro the Greggs vegan sausage roll because anything that wrenches veganism back from the 'clean eating' wellness folk is a good thing".

One Twitter user wrote that finding vegan sausage rolls missing from a store in Corby had "ruined my morning".

Another said: "My son is allergic to dairy products which means I can't really go to Greggs when he's with me. Now I can. Thank you vegans."

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pg often@pgofton
https://twitter.com/pgofton/status/1080772793774624768

The hype got me like #Greggs #Veganuary

42
10:28 AM - Jan 3, 2019
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TV presenter Piers Morgan led the charge of those outraged by the new roll.

"Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns," he wrote on Twitter.

Mr Morgan later complained at receiving "howling abuse from vegans", adding: "I get it, you're all hangry. I would be too if I only ate plants and gruel."

Another Twitter user said: "I really struggle to believe that 20,000 vegans are that desperate to eat in a Greggs."

"You don't paint a mustach (sic) on the Mona Lisa and you don't mess with the perfect sausage roll," one quipped.

Journalist Nooruddean Choudry suggested Greggs introduce a halal steak bake to "crank the fume levels right up to 11".

The bakery chain told concerned customers that "change is good" and that there would "always be a classic sausage roll".

It comes on the same day McDonald's launched its first vegetarian "Happy Meal", designed for children.

The new dish comes with a "veggie wrap", instead of the usual chicken or beef option.
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It should be noted that Piers Morgan and Greggs share the same PR firm, so I'm thinking this is some serious faux outrage and South Park KKK gambiting here.
 
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I agree with this decision! Hardened glass exists, why not use it. I've been around (but never lived in) enough American prisons to know that we haven't done that shit around here in decades, though the windows are always distorted.
 
Come 2025: they'll be trying to phase out prisons entirely since prisons in the UK housing murderers are more like holiday camps because muh human rights.
 
I don't know why this is so controversial as bars are obsolete since bullet proof glass is readily available, in fact in all the jails I've been to I have yet to see any bars.
 
Wallace said:
Recidivism also needs to be addressed outside of prison. When a criminal record disqualifies you from anything but the worst jobs, it's another incentive to stay a criminal.
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There's a thing called "through care" here which is supposed to address this and eventual release is meant to be planned for during the time someone is incarcerated. Of course it's woefully underfunded so the post-release period of monitoring and assistance is often cut short. Nonetheless, stability has consistently been found to reduce recidivism - so stable housing, jobs, and relationships do matter.

That said, it's not realistic to think that someone whose criminal endeavours have provided them with an upper middle class income is going to be happy with a minimum wage lifestyle - those people often see occasional prison stints as the cost of doing business.
 
repentance said:
This often comes up in coroner's reports into deaths in custody here and the short answers are that 1) the vast majority of prisoners will be released at some future time and how well they integrate back into mainstream society will be influenced to some degree by what happens during their time in prison and 2) people are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment.

Trends in criminal justice and corrections change over time. There are periods where most of the emphasis is on rehabilitation and reintegration and other periods where it's more on retribution and restraint. The prevailing policies at any given time are always an experiment in terms of long term outcomes.



A lot of countries have supermax prisons for those who refuse to change. The problem with this arises when corrections systems start using supermax as a punishment for minor infractions.
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I don't disagree that many prisoners will eventually be released, and I agree that helping those that will be released to rehabilitate into society is good. But in your own words, being sent to prison is a punishment. What is the purpose of the punishment if it isn't that severe? As much as prison time is a punishment, it's also a deterrent. I see what you're saying, and I'm not advocating for making prison experiences actively worse then they are (Though my knowledge on what, exactly, the prison experience is like in the England is admittedly rather lacking), but I feel like making prison experiences more lenient is going to make the threat of prison time toothless. This change is a small one, and not one I'm honestly all that against, despite the way I put it in my other post, but I'm more bothered by the apparent reasoning behind it, and that implementing it could open the door for them to, in a few years, introduce some other change to improve the quality of life for prisoners in the interest of "Preserving their dignity", and then possibly another change in a few more years, and so on and so forth until such a time as the danger of being sent to prison doesn't deter anyone from committing crimes. If they're going to allocate funding to making the prison system more effective, then put the money towards making sure that people are able to reintegrate into society better near the end of their sentence, or after they've been released so that they're less likely to commit further crimes, not into actively making the bulk of the punishment less effective.

Might have droned on a bit too long there.
 
Don't worry, it's just Chris Grayling doing a test run for when all flights are grounded after Brexit.
 
ThatManInTheTopHat said:
Come 2025: they'll be trying to phase out prisons entirely since prisons in the UK housing murderers are more like holiday camps because muh human rights.
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Sadly that’s pretty much what’s happening in Scotland - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-40768115

It’s lead to situations where, to give a local example, a 17 year girl was standing at a bus stop and someone in their 20’s came along and punched her in the eye for no reason which lead to a damaged eye that she nearly lost and the excuse the attacker gave was basically ‘Lol I was drunk’ and received a community service order.
 
TheCapybara said:
This change is a small one, and not one I'm honestly all that against, despite the way I put it in my other post, but I'm more bothered by the apparent reasoning behind it, and that implementing it could open the door for them to, in a few years, introduce some other change to improve the quality of life for prisoners in the interest of "Preserving their dignity", and then possibly another change in a few more years, and so on and so forth until such a time as the danger of being sent to prison doesn't deter anyone from committing crimes. If they're going to allocate funding to making the prison system more effective, then put the money towards making sure that people are able to reintegrate into society better near the end of their sentence, or after they've been released so that they're less likely to commit further crimes, not into actively making the bulk of the punishment less effective.

Might have droned on a bit too long there.
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Generally speaking, the threat of prison doesn't act as much of a deterrent to the commission of crime anyway - or at least not in the groups most likely to re-offend.

Just as there's no one, unified theory of what creates criminality, there's also no one, unified answer to dealing with it. Criminals from different groups commit crimes for different reasons, making their criminogenic needs (what it would take for them to not commit crimes) different, too.

I am somewhat cynical of the move to more and more community based justice programmes here because I think it has happened primarily for economic reasons without much reference to demonstrated effectiveness or the type of offenders the community believes should be incarcerated.
 
Is the point of prison to further punish someone by fucking their brain into that of a criminally insane person? I don't think so, but the way people act you'd think it was.

From a utilitarian standpoint, prison is for getting people unsuited to regular civilization away and in a place they can't do harm. Ideally, the criminals would be somehow reintegrated, failing that, what is the point of holding them for some length of time, then releasing them? I guess they're out of the public for that time...

It comes down to how much you want the justice system to be retributive, rather than rehabilitative. I mean... revenge feels better, but I don't see how it leads to a better society. Some dude assaults someone, you send him to lord of the flies land where depending on how strong he is or whatever he gets to have power over people or people have power over him. Neither scenario results in a predictable punishment, it's all about what the other random ass prisoners and guards decide to do.

Another big problem is if prisons are for punishment, and anything that happens to the people is considered to be deserved, you're letting other criminals have the time of their lives. What kind of punishment is that? It's not as if prison power structures are arranged by the least immoral criminal to the most.

I mean, for fuck's sake, we KNOW for a fact that minors are being forced to fight one another, to the point of skull fractures being a regular occurrence, at Ryker's island. This was revealed in an investigation years ago, and NOTHING has changed. Some fucking 16 year old goes away for whatever dumb shit, gets some brain damage and a hatred of his fellow man, and then gets released at some random point in the future, with a black mark on his record so he can't reintegrate into the society that sent him to this hell even if he wanted to.

It's not easy, and of course, you have to have a system that satisfactorily dispenses justice so that people aren't just taking it into their own hands, while preferably actually reducing crime somehow. But the american system is nowhere near even trying to be good.
 
Hal said:
The way I see it when you break the law and go to prison you lose most of your rights as a american citizen and should have to suck it up and not complain about being locked up. People should know what they have coming to them when they do something they know could end them up in prison.
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Dunno, this is probably a good idea to limit contraband and create an environment of normalcy.

In a prison, you want people commuting, working, attending reform programs and and buying things in stores. You don't wanna end up with institutional people and social autists that have to fall back on criminal connections to survive.

Regardless of whether or not there should be a punitive aspect to prison, I think it should be agreed upon that reform should be the main goal of a prison.

TheCapybara said:
They're prisoners, the whole reason they're there is because they committed a crime. Why the hell do we care about their "Dignity and respect"? They're fed, housed and contained. That's what a prison's supposed to do, and bars contain them just fine.
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I guess we could have permanent solitary and one meal of gruel a day for prisoners to save a few bucks but I'd like to think that people can be reformed and that prison shouldn't be a place where people are locked away forever and left to degenerate.

There is also that whole issue of wrongful convictions. Poor people go to prison all the time based on nothing but hearsay because they can't afford a lawyer.
 
TheCapybara said:
I don't disagree that many prisoners will eventually be released, and I agree that helping those that will be released to rehabilitate into society is good. But in your own words, being sent to prison is a punishment. What is the purpose of the punishment if it isn't that severe? As much as prison time is a punishment, it's also a deterrent. I see what you're saying, and I'm not advocating for making prison experiences actively worse then they are (Though my knowledge on what, exactly, the prison experience is like in the England is admittedly rather lacking), but I feel like making prison experiences more lenient is going to make the threat of prison time toothless. This change is a small one, and not one I'm honestly all that against, despite the way I put it in my other post, but I'm more bothered by the apparent reasoning behind it, and that implementing it could open the door for them to, in a few years, introduce some other change to improve the quality of life for prisoners in the interest of "Preserving their dignity", and then possibly another change in a few more years, and so on and so forth until such a time as the danger of being sent to prison doesn't deter anyone from committing crimes. If they're going to allocate funding to making the prison system more effective, then put the money towards making sure that people are able to reintegrate into society better near the end of their sentence, or after they've been released so that they're less likely to commit further crimes, not into actively making the bulk of the punishment less effective.

Might have droned on a bit too long there.
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The deterrent theory of prison doesn't work, as @Cosmos points out above. In addition, you might consider that the reintegration into society and the severity of the punishment are linked: the more severe and brutal the punishment, the more likely you are to cause permanent psychological damage to someone. This is illustrated best by the most extreme examples: crime was rampant in antiquity. During antiquity, the punishment for most crimes was death or maiming. Despite this, there were many recidivists and organized criminal groups (bandit gangs, etc.). So either you believe something has changed in human nature, or that the ancients simply weren't trying hard enough.
In addition, the attitude of "they're criminals, who cares about their dignity?" is fundamentally rooted in the idea that criminals are inherently diseased and cannot be reformed, which would contradict your earlier statements.
 
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