There's one particular news piece I missed though, and it serves as an interesting glimpse not only into the past, but also into the life of convicts held at Her Majesty's pleasure in UK prisons. Hidden away on the BBC News site is this rather intriguing report from April 2006, which documents the efforts of a prisoner at Scotland's Perth Prison to claim damages of £350 from the Scottish Executive (the authority responsible for prisons) for damage to his Dreamcast console.
The case was eventually thrown out by Perth Sheriff Court, but not before the complainant accused prison officers of purposely breaking his Dreamcast. The article doesn't say how the console was broken (and the Scottish Courts website has no record of the hearing), but I'm going to guess that to make it totally inoperable they probably used it as a football. If it'd been a Gamecube, they could've driven a monster truck over it and it would still have worked; but then, a Gamecube can also double up as a deadly weapon when swung at another human so probably not the best console to allow into a prison. Anyway, here's the full article:
