Through clenched eyes I watched Brat Camp on Channel 4 last week.  It was difficult to believe that it was a documentary and not a deliberately sickening drama concocted by a hateful mind.

When it comes to crime and punishment, American ideas and attitudes are at best idiotic and ineffective, and at worst sadistic and evil.  To watch ten year olds being constantly bullied and belittled simply because they did not conform to their deplorable parents' concept of control, is to enrage my sense of justice let alone compassion.

What lies behind such barbaric behaviour is vengeance. It's a kind of scapegoating, where the punishers envy the 'rebels', but know that they are too spineless to rebel themselves - but of course are very brave in uniform beating the helpless.  Hence the severe hostility towards non-conformists.  They are obsessed with punishment alone and are not remotely interested in why people behave the way they do.

This year is the centenary of the establishment of The Little Commonwealth in Dorset, a 'reformatory' financed by the Earl of Sandwich and run by Homer Tyrrell Lane, one of the greatest educators who ever lived.  Lane was an American who achieved a near zero recidivist rate among his 'young offenders'.

So in the last 100 years, the American authorities in education have not only not progressed in their attitudes and methods, but have gone backwards into medieval torture mentality.

The fact that the US state and federal governments permit these camps to exist is a crime in itself.