'Pure Evil' or failed by the wrong priorities?

I was thinking about Shannon Matthews' mother last night. Like everyone else I'm shocked that she could have inflicted that on her daughter but it can't be a coincidence that she is a) inadequate, b) uneducated and c) lives on a sink estate in Dewsbury surrounded by similar people.

I accept that she was a liar, manipulative and uncaring. But don't we need to ask what made her that way? Or do we believe that by some strange quirk of fate, many people raised in poverty, failures at school and with no belief that things can change, turn out to be the same people who play the system and screw everything they can out of the state?

It's not too hard to imagine that when she picked up the Sun and saw the money pouring into the McCann family - who may not have subjected their daughter to kidnapping, drugs etc, but were certainly negligent - Karen Matthews thought 'wouldn't mind a bit of that' hatched a plan and roped in the even more inadequate Michael Donovan

And once they had started it would have been impossible to go back. In fact they had to rack it up because, as was admitted on Today this morning, the disappearance of a girl from the underclasses as compared to Madeleine McCann, was largely ignored at first by the papers.

We can carry on wringing our hands and talking about people being 'pure evil' but that's not going to change anything. At one stage the mother was probably a bright eyed kid like her daughter and I notice that the police liason officer on the case said she felt sorry for the mother, even when she knew what she had done.

What struck me was that the police search for Shannon cost £3.5m. We are now going to pay for these two people to spend a considerable amount of time in jail and presumably the state is forking out to bring up at least some of the seven children she has by five different men. I can't help thinking that money, spent elsewhere would do a lot more good.

Perhaps if we had more, better trained social workers, they wouldn't be so stretched that they are happy to ignore families like the Matthews and fail to pick up on situations like Baby P. People don't go into social work to do harm, so it is about time we looked at the real problem, which is probably that there aren't enough of them to do the job properly.

And in order to stop kids like Shannon going on to replicate the mistakes of her mother, we need to do more with them in school. That means great teachers and more teachers;m fewer kids in a class so no one can hide at the back of the class and fail to learn to read and write. And specialist teachers, especially in area like Dewsbury Moor, who understand the problems and have time to give the less bright kids at least the basics. One on one if necessary. It can't be a coincidence that you don't find public school kids from comfortable homes involved in cases like this.

It's no good saying we can't afford it. We can afford the Iraq war, half a million a year on taxis for the foreign office, millions to repair a failed 'big bang' experiment that has already cost millions. We can afford the huge sums of money to keep thousands of people in jail.