YOU learned this week that magistrates in this fine shire are no soft touches.
According to the Howard League for Penal Reform the coves on Nottinghamshire's benches are three times more likely to dish out a stretch than justices in limp-wristed parts.
I heard the chorus of joy when you read the news. Nobody likes a toe-rag. Prison is the best place for him.
So three cheers for the majors, the charity busybodies and the retired union secretaries who dish out justice to B-list criminals.
Of course, it's an utterly worthless statistic.
A large regional city where organised drug rackets drive violent crime and indirectly cause most of our acquisitive offending is always going to generate a considerably less savoury remand list than a rural market town where the nearest thing to a villain is a bumpkin on the cider.
We simply don't know enough about the processing of criminals by Nottinghamshire's magistrates to be able to deduce anything.
Now then, did they deserve prison? Probably.
Will prison make a difference? Almost certainly not.
It costs £45,000 a year to keep a criminal in jail for a year, and that is on top of the major one-off expense, given by some sources as an average £65,000, of investigating their crimes and then collaring and prosecuting the wretches.
If we were getting zero per cent recidivism, and therefore less crime and a dwindling prison population, the expense might be justifiable.
Alas, 43 per cent of those jailed for 12 to 24 months will re-offend within one year.
The alternative to prison is a community sentence, but you'll have to be a gifted orator to persuade me that they are, as they stand, a panacea.
More than a third of adults who were given community orders between April 2010 and March 2011 re-offended within 12 months (Ministry of Justice statistics, 2011)
That's better than 43 per cent.
But not so much better that community sentences command the confidence of the public.
I've yet to hear of the offender who has done his 100 hours of leaf-sweeping telling his mate: "I say, Cedric, that's the last time I mess with the law."
The older I get the more I realise that most prisoners shouldn't be inside at all, and that a minority – violent offenders, and those whose crimes are less serious but frequent enough to indicate permanent contempt for the law – should be inside for much, much longer than the comedy sentences they receive.
Punishing the guilty, deterring others and guarding the innocent have long been unfashionable elements of justice but one hopes that long prison sentences will always be there for really serious crime.
For the rest, and certainly for non-violent and sporadic offenders, there must be effective community justice linked, where appropriate, to education and training.
The regime must be positive enough to engage offenders but rigorous enough to concentrate their minds.
Done properly, it may not cost a lot less than £45,000 per person per year.
But it is much more likely to get results than sending a thick, impressionable young man to an overcrowded prison full of career criminals.
That way, we are certain to perpetuate the problem.