It's just the drugs talking

THE DRUGS debates rages on. In Thursday's Front Row (Radio 4), Mark Lawson was talking to Ken Kesey about drugs and the Sixties. Kesey was in favour of both, but, particularly, the drugs: "Drugs don't kill," he said. "Kids in cars kill. Guns kill. Bombs kill... If OJ had been smoking a joint he'd have said: 'Uh, we'll kill the bitch tomorrow. Let's go see what's in her refrigerator.' "

An effective anti-drugs argument came in last week's opening episode of Crime and Punishment (World Service, Friday), a wide-ranging documentary about penal systems around the world and through history. John Pickford was riding in the back of a police car in London's Soho when a member of the public banged on the window and blurrily explained that he had been the victim of a crime: he had just attempted to buy some drugs, but, when he opened the bag, it was full of brown paper. "You were trying to buy drugs?" one of the policemen asked, by way of clarification. At this point, you could almost hear the crackle and pop of disused synapses snapping back into life. Eventually the victim came up with a suitably neutral formula: "Allegedly," he said, before stumbling off into the night.

Pickford's thesis, announced at the beginning of the series, is that studying how a society deals with crime can reveal deep truths about that society. The first programme was packed with examples, short on conclusions; last night's second programme, on how prison systems operate in different countries, started to draw some of the threads together. In Britain, we learned, punishment is intimately involved with sexual puritanism - in South America, conjugal visits are positively encouraged as a way of maintaining the family. Family structures are taken less seriously here, as Pickford demonstrated in a troubling interview with a woman prisoner who had been separated from her baby nine hours after birth and had ended up shortly afterwards in a psychiatric ward.

Another, possibly related, quirk of the British system is the underwear; apparently, regulation-issue pants are absolutely enormous. The reason for this may have been unwittingly touched on by an inmate discussing why convicts are given serial numbers: "It's to make you feel very small, powerless."

Still, Crime and Punishment hasn't lived up to the title's Dostoevskian promise. As an assemblage of anecdotes and incidents, it is ambitious and intriguing - in Japan, prisoners are forbidden to make eye contact with guards; in Peru, guards patrol prison perimeters while inmates run the cell blocks for profit. Pickford's attempts at depth have not been impressive, however. "Every prison is the same and every prison is different," he intoned solemnly at one point. Later, he tried a variation: "Every prison is different, every prison is the same." It still sounded like a cliche.

You can learn much about a country from the way people gamble. Place Your Bets (Radio 5 Live, Sunday) is a series about the state of gambling in Britain, full of eye-popping statistics: when you count in the wins that get recycled as new bets, we are now betting pounds 40bn a year, more than Ireland's total GNP; 90 per cent of us have done the National Lottery; 60 per cent do it every week. So, we are greedy, lazy and have no grasp of probability. We ought to be locked up for our own safety.