No Money Left? Keep Locking Them Up Anyway!

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?