No Money Left? Keep Locking Them Up Anyway!
Posted: January 14th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Politics, human rights | Tags: criminalisation, Home Office, jail, Justice select committee, New Labour, prison | 2 Comments »We have a budget deficit of about £178 billion, but New Labour can still find the money to keep locking people up:
The £4.24bn bill for the government’s prison building programme is unsustainable and the cash would be better spent on rehabilitation and prevention so as to cut crime, says a Commons select committee report on justice published tomorrow.
The MPs say the prison building scheme is at present a “costly mistake” that will take jail capacity in England and Wales to 96,000 by 2014, making it the prison capital of western Europe.
The report, Cutting Crime: the Case for Justice Reinvestment, is based on a two-year inquiry by a cross-party group of MPs. It discloses that the £4.24bn cost of creating 10,000 extra prisoner places by 2014, from 86,000, has “more or less been guaranteed by the Treasury” regardless of the coming squeeze on public spending.
The MPs claim the government “is wedded to a prison-building agenda” despite overwhelming evidence showing jail is not the most effective way of reducing reoffending for many people. At the same time the justice ministry is being asked to make £1.3bn of cost savings.
“This forecast represents an incarceration rate of 169 per 100,000 in England and Wales, the highest proportion in western Europe,” says the report. It estimates that the annual cost of keeping someone in jail has reached £40,000 a year per prisoner.
So the government’s authoritarian agenda doesn’t look set to disappear any time soon. Ironic really that they were elected in the first place, considering a ‘lock em up’ policy was one of the many hated by the electorate of the previous Tory administration, and Simon Jenkins shows the scale of the explosion in criminalisation under New Labour:
Labour has created more than 3,000 new offences since 1997, of which 1,472 at the last count were imprisonable. You can go to jail in Britain for not having a licence for a church concert, smoking in a public place, selling a grey squirrel, trans-shipping unlicensed fish, or disobeying a health and safety inspector. In many cases a prison sentence is casually tacked on the end of a statute, like some macho cherry on a cake. Parliamentarians, judges, lawyers, prison officers all complain of overwork – but complain all the way to the bank.
When the justice select committee acknowledges that jail doesn’t work in reducing reoffending, it begs the question why the Home Office should remain so resolute about chucking so many people in jail, particularly when they can’t afford it. New Labour really no longer gives a toss about being tough on the causes of crime. The reason why is clear: cowardice. The Daily HateMail’s response to the report:
The prison population should be slashed by a third – putting 28,000 offenders back on the streets, according to a group of MPs.
The justice select committee says Britain will have 96,000 prisoners by 2014 – the highest incarceration rate in western Europe – but spending £4.2billion on building the extra 12,000 prison places needed is a ‘mistake’.
The committee wants the prison population to be stabilised at its current level of 84,000 – then slashed by a third.
It would leave 56,000 inmates in jail and put 28,000 criminals on the streets.
They’re terrified of being seen as soft on crime, or at least as being portrayed by the nastiest tabloid as being soft on crime, and 12 years later are as paranoid as ever. I mean why not just explain why it’s not a good idea, stand by the argument and prove it by example? The Right manage to do that with their ideology (even though they never succeed in proving it by example), so why can’t the Left, when they actually could demonstrate the truth of their argument? Why continue to try to outflank the Right by being rightist?
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Instead on constantly increasing prison space in a desperate but never ending bid to stop overcrowding why doesnt Labour just decriminalise some of the 3000 new offences that have been created. In the 13 Years that we have been unfortunate enough to have Labour in power, they have created a new law every 36 hours on average! This is more than any other previous government.
How about the government uses some of this money in a bid to improve rehabilitation and education schemes in prison, giving prisoners a better chance of being employed when they are released. I would particularly like to see a focus on rehabilitation for young offenders. Having worked with them both in and out of prison i know how important this is.
Through rehabilitating offenders, not only will local communities improve from both lower crime figures and more trained workers but policing costs will be lowered.
finally i would like to point out that the government could save money through cutting money for prison meals. Per head in january 2008 each meal for a prisoner cost anything between 62p and £1.68 (daily express). This is compared with around 50p for those in hospital and as little as 40p for school children. Through lowering the cost of meals in prisons, the government would be able to save £100,000′s a year if not more!
Hey. Good to see you here. Good memory – I must remember that lol
I agree with everything you’ve said, leaving out the prison meals. I have some more reading to do on the prisons building programme, particularly the move towards PFIs in running prisons, which I suspect plays a part here. Mandelson denies any corporate involvement in his sudden about face with the Digital Economy Bill, but New Labour has from the start been about total corporate appeasement – Iraq, ID cards, schools, transport you name it. I’m not suggesting the thousands of new offences have been brought about to justify an expansion in private prison arrangements, I’m sure much of it is down to laziness and an eagerness for quick fix solutions, but it certainly must be a partial outcome of the intrusion of marketisation into yet another public service.
Why not improve rehabilitation? I wish I knew.