If symptoms persist. . .

0 CRIME! What liberties are commit- ted in thy name!

Prison is, of course, by far the safest place to be for a law-abiding citizen like myself. At least I am protected there from the activities of criminals by prison officers built like bomb shelters. When- ever I see the relatives of the prisoners lining up at the gate to visit, I realise by what a slender thread I hang on to my wallet, my house remains unburgled or my car unvandalised. There is no one to protect me outside of prison. Why, even the three-year-olds already look like hardened and determined criminals.

They learn their psychopathy young round here, on their father's knee — quite literally. Last week, I was listening to a murderer's tale of woe — 'and the next thing I knew, doctor, she was on the floor and I was begging her to get up' — when a prison officer entered the room flushed and out of breath.

'Can you come down the visits, doc- tor?' he asked. 'There's a sick child there.'

'Excuse me,' I said to the murderer, just as he was coming to his explanation of how his wife got on to the floor in the first place. 'I'll be back in a minute.'

Grabbing a stethoscope and one or two other instruments, I rushed across the yard, patrolled by alsatians, to the large room in which prisoners sat at tables across which they spoke to their visitors, desperately trying to cram as many words as possible into a few min- utes. One prisoner, however, was sitting on a single chair, surrounded by worried looking officers and with a nine-month- old baby on his lap. The prisoner was huge, his offspring tiny.

'Sorry to bother you, doctor,' said one of the officers. 'But the mother was visit- ing Smith when she ran out and left him holding the baby.'

The baby was sweet, with big bright brown eyes and a little gurgling smile. But the officers were more frightened of its nappies than of a prison riot.

'I don't need a fucking doctor,' said the father. 'I need the fucking welfare officer.'

I returned with relief to my nice polite murderer.

'As I was saying, doctor, me and my missis was having a few rows like . . . '

In the next room I could hear two women officers discussing the recent shocking events in another establishment (as the staff call prison).

'The inmates held her up in the kitchen and grabbed her gold chain,' said one, describing how a woman officer had been mugged by prisoners.

'It's getting as bad as the streets,' said the other.

Well, not quite. Sometimes prison depresses me — or does my head in, in prison parlance — so I went later that day to a bookshop in the city, to reassure myself that a better and more cultured, civilised world existed. But as I walked towards the shop, about six security guards rushed past me, nearly knocking me over, in pursuit of a thief. He fled into a ladies' wear shop and wouldn't come out. The security guards waited for him outside, anticipating with pleasure his inevitable, though possibly violent, capture.

'See you on the in,' I thought as I con- tinued on my way.

The first shelves in the bookshop were dedicated to True Crime.

Theodore Dalrymple