One further thought on knife crime.
It's all very well suggesting that offenders meet victims to see the impact of their crime, but if I was the victim of a stabbing the very last person I would want to meet would be the thug who stabbed me. Indeed, I find the whole move towards so-called restorative justice (in reality yet another excuse to avoid imprisonment and proper punishment) to be, at best, insulting. The only place I would want to see my assailant would be in prison.
I imagine that most people would have the same reaction.
I have been assaulted twice: a mugging and a kick in the balls by a complete stranger. And if I saw either of them again, I would - unhesitatingly - seek to give them a dose of their own medicine and kick them where it really hurts.
UPDATE: Heaven help us. There's some chap on FiveLive at the moment who organises meetings betweens offenders and their victims and says how it helps the victims to realise that the offenders can themselves be victims of 'life's circumstances'.
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