Were you one of the August rioters? If so, the Guardian has a few polite questions to ask you.

Yes, in the absence of a public inquiry into last month's riots in London, Manchester and elsewhere, the Guardian and the London School of Economics have launched a study titled Reading The Riots.

They will interview not just residents, police and judiciary, but also the rioters. My guess is that those rioters will have few stunning insights into why they did what they did, no big ideas on how to mend Broken Britain.

Many will employ dog-ate-my-homework reasoning – embarrassed and implausible justifications for crimes whose only logical explanation is their own fecklessness. Some may even trot out the oldest excuse in the book: “There's nothing to do around here. We're bored.”

I have been hearing such reasoning since I was a cub reporter in 1979 talking to the disgruntled residents of the long-demolished Fort Beswick – the ugliest public housing scheme ever perpetrated by Manchester's city fathers.

At first I believed the simple equation, that bored young people inevitably make mischief, ergo, giving them something to do will reduce anti social behaviour. But experience taught me two things. First, the young people who occupied the slum terraces which pre-dated Fort Beswick had even less to amuse them, yet were not so badly-behaved. Second, if you provide an adventure playground or community centre for kids who “have nothing to do round here”, those same kids have a nasty habit of destroying it.

When those Guardian investigators go looking for reasons for the riots, they will have to consider the police shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham. But the London rioters did not lay siege to their local police station – as they did in the Moss Side riot of 1981. Instead, they battered down the doors of JJB and PC World, or “liberated” themselves a big TV from Currys. And any suggestion that the riots were a response to allegedly insensitive policing of a black community in London seems even more ludicrous when it comes to white youths in Salford battering their way into the local supermarket.

An interesting statistic this week is that, of those aged 18 and over, charged with riot offences, three quarters already had prior convictions. Stealing stuff is what they do anyway; the riots merely presented them with an unmissable opportunity to do it in like-minded company.

As for the remaining one in four – those previously-upstanding citizens who helped themselves to a pair of trainers, a packet of chewing gum or a few paltry bottles of water in the melee - we can perhaps explain this as the madness of the crowd. In a blizzard of self-fulfilling riot prophecies on Twitter, these innocents somehow signed up for the most malign flash mob ever.

Since so many of the rioters were already no strangers to the law, Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke now says that this is proof of a “broken penal system”. The logical conclusion from that is that all those rioters given exemplary prison sentences will emerge not rehabilitated but even more hardened criminals.

What do we do about a “broken penal system”? There is an answer, but the hang-em, flog 'em brigade will not like it.

The most compelling story of crime and punishment I have ever read was that of Mancunian Mark Leech, editor of The Prisons Handbook, and now a leading expert on our prisons. His 1993 autobiography A Product Of The System tells how he was abused in the care system and left so angry and brutalised that he became a violent young man, an armed robber and one of the most renowned trouble-makers in the prison population.

What changed Leech utterly was a spell at Grendon Underwood in Buckinghamshire, a unique therapeutic prison facility for the rehabilitation of violent recidivists, where staff and inmates were on first-name terms and group therapy was used to give prisoners an understanding of what was at the root of their offending.

We have wondered whether rioters lack a moral compass, any sense of right and wrong. If true, perhaps they do not even understand the concept of punishment.

The unpalatable truth may be that what those rioters need to mend their ways is not another spell in a prison which to them is merely an academy of crime, but a stretch of sympathetic, soul-searching porridge such as that Leech enjoyed.

Yes, it really may be time to hug a hoodie.

Nothing sophisticated about playboy bunnies

The possibility that Manchester 235 casino should be re-launched as a Playboy Club has provoked fury among feminists.

But why should people be so offended by the coy delights of bunny-tailed croupiers and waitresses when there are women tottering down Deansgate in more revealing outfits than these, and a crop of “gentlemen's” clubs where lap dancers will cavort stark naked inches from your face for a tenner a time?

There are social politics involved. The lap dancer has something she knows is worth hard cash, and a bargain is struck. It's a grubby exchange but essentially honest and understood for what it is.

The Playboy bunny, however, pretends that the last 40 years of sex equality has never happened, and conspires in a fantasy of society, where women exist to titilate and to flatter menfolk. It's the service sector equivalent of the notion of the “surrendered wife”

Even more annoying is the hypocritical assertion that this ridiculous Playboy ideal is what passes for sophistication.

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