With prison no longer shameful, where’s the punishment?

PUT aside that you may feel the crooked oul skinflint got what was coming to him. Put aside your qualms about him being an old, old man and God love his family.

Has George Redmond's imprisonment improved your life in any noticeable way? Is there a song in your heart as a result of him being behind bars?

My theory is that he and Liam Lawlor have devalued prison as a scary threat.

If your notion of jail-time is based on books about the Birdman of Alcatraz and movies like The Green Mile, imprisonment to you is all gang-rape, the thrown contents of chamber pots and botched executions with smoke coming out the top of people's heads.

Which doesn't seem to match the Liam Lawlor experience. Liam goes into prison talking. He comes out of prison talking. According to the best sources, he talks pretty much all the time he's inside, on an assortment of mobile phones. This is punishment?

Whatever happened to hard labour? Why is he not picking oakum? I have no idea what oakum is, but I do know that back when Oscar was in Reading Gaol, all those guys in the stripy suits had to get through a certain amount of oakum-picking every day, or else.

If nobody's picking oakum now, mountains of unpicked oakum must be building up somewhere. Illegal landfills awash in it. Next thing we'll have oakum-slides swamping our houses.

Now, you may say Liam got an easy version of prison because he got only a small serving of porridge for a crime not involving violence or death.

True. Yet, even murderer Catherine Nevin's incarceration seems to add up to a smallish room, a constrained social circle and lots of starchy food. Same as a cruise, but without the sea-sickness or the killer infections.

But what about the humiliation and shame and mortification going to prison holds for middle-class people? Sure any decent white collar criminals would never get over a period in clink. Their heads would hang. Like weeping willows, they would droop, head-wise, forever after.

The fact is that even if our Liam wanted to make like a weeping willow, he'd have problems. That's because of a physical idiosyncrasy you may not have noticed: his head is attached directly to his shoulders.

His neck-deficit is almost total. (Could growing up as Liamo No Neck have stunted his moral development, maybe? No. OK. Just a thought. I do like to posit the odd mitigating factor, you know.)

Lacking a neck means Liam's head stays upright and demonstrates no shame as he heads in the prison gates. Even if he feels shame. Which I very much doubt.

The thing about being ashamed is that you need to have the shame gene, and I'm not sure either Redmond or Lawlor have that gene. Those psychologists who are always picking habits out of rats should do a study to see if some humans get born without the shame gene.

Maybe, just as some people are born with a risk gene that makes them want to race cars, drink hard, smoke hard and break laws, other people (or maybe the same people) are born without the shame gene.

They could start by doing a case study on George Redmond. Starting with one obvious bit of data. During the trial, George tells the judge that he has to go home at lunchtime because he can't afford to buy lunch. A restaurant offers him a free lunch.

He accepts it, even though he knows they're up for publicity and so it will tell the world or at least the media. The next day, he goes back for more. At which point they explain it was an "All you can eat" deal, and yesterday's lunch is all he can eat.

Clearly, this is not an easily mortified man. This is a man so grasping that to put him in a place where he gets three square meals a day, free, gratis and for nothing, will suit him down to the ground, hypothetical bars on the windows notwithstanding. Where's the punishment?

More to the point, where's the reparation? No, I don't mean apology. Apologies are not worth the air they're written on, and anyway, everybody's doing them.

Bill Clinton apologised for slavery, the Vatican apologised to the Jews, (although not, yet, to the millions of women they burned into crispy dead critters during the Witch Craze of the Middle Ages) and the Taoiseach apologised to the victims of child abuse.

None of this contrition seemed to make anybody feel better and most of the victims and descendents of victims effectively retorted: "Too little, too late."

CONTRITION is an over-rated virtue. Judges are always sticking tougher sentences on people who don't show contrition. Me, I've seen enough crocodile tears in my time to be unimpressed by someone showing contrition. Reparation is much more to the point and much better for the offender, too.

That's why two of my all-time heroes are a murderer and a maritally-unfaithful perjurer who leaked secrets to a call-girl who was also sleeping with a Russian spy.

The perjurer's name was Profumo, a Minister in London's Houses of Parliament who, back in the swinging '60s, told state secrets that didn't amount to a hill of beans to Christine Keeler (who also didn't amount to a hill of beans but for a time was notorious and regarded as beautiful, which she wasn't) who was part of a kind of a conspiracy oh, you don't want to know.

It was all discount 007 stuff with suicides thrown in for emphasis. Just like Capone, who got done for tax evasion rather than mowing people down in basements using sub-machine-guns and obedient 'made men', Profumo got done because (shock, horror) he lied in Parliament.

From that day to this, he has worked for free or for a pittance, quietly serving the disadvantaged. Nobody can put a face on Profumo, because he hasn't publicised his moral turnaround. Profumo has done more for humanity as a result of being caught out than he would ever have done if he hadn't been caught out.

The same is true of my murderer hero: Jean Harris. Mrs Harris, divorced mother of two. School mistress. Mistress, too, of a doctor who invented the Scarsdale Diet, which swept the world just like the more recent Atkins regimen.

The minute he got famous and rich, the diet doctor traded in Mrs Harris for a younger model. Mrs Harris, understandably if not admirably, shot him. She then served more than a decade of a life sentence in a high security prison.

No picnic for a middle-aged woman used to a bit of deference. Her published prison letters detail the infinitely varied humiliations visited by systems and those they employ on prisoners they believe to be their social inferiors or superiors.

The royalties from her letters went to a foundation Mrs Harris set up to help the children of drug-addicted teen mothers she met in prison. Released, sick and in her late '60s, she continued to work for those children.

Shame and reparation are in decline. We have replaced them with punishment that doesn't work and compensation paid out of insurance policies.