Chris Grayling has announced that he expects an additional 13,000 prisoners may be required to squeeze into the groaning prison estate. The increase in prisoner numbers will be due to criminals released after very short sentences being recalled as a result of continuing criminal activity. Grayling hopes to employ a much expanded team of supervisors to help keep newly released prisoners on the straight and narrow, while allowing those returning to their old ways to be quickly identified and sent back to prison.
It would surely be more effective and efficient to actually expect those sentenced to terms in prison for violent and anti-social behaviour (in the widest sense) to actually serve those terms so that there was no need for an army of supervisors, or for additional expenditure on court and police time. In fact keeping criminals in prison would be cost effective to the tax-payer in a variety of ways. In the first place, well over 50% of all criminal activities which take place each year are perpetrated by criminals who already have 11 or more offences recorded against them. Yes, you read that correctly. More than half of all criminal activity is committed by those we already know are criminals.
We are allowing criminals out of prison who are very likely indeed to commit further offences. Some of these repeat offences include 3,300 serious sexual and violent assaults. 25,000 offences were committed by criminals already identified on the Prolific and Priority Offender Programme. The old adage that you do the crime and pay the time just isn’t working anymore because so many criminals are leaving prison and immediately committing further crimes, not once or twice but 11 or more times. 170,000 criminals cautioned, convicted or released from custody will go on to commit another crime in less than a year.
Keeping criminals in prison for longer works because certain classes of criminals are a very high risk to the rest of society. An offender who has already committed 11 or more offences has a 50% chance of committing even more in the next year. There is no need to convict criminals of crimes they might commit, but by the time a criminal has notched up 11 or more crimes there is a need for society to treat them other than as if they were as innocent of criminality as any law abiding person. On the contrary, while 90% of those who have committed only one crime will manage to go straight, the odds are stacked against a career criminal managing to do the same.
Chris Grayling may well want to appear tough on crime and criminals. But if he is serious then those who have committed large numbers of crimes need to be kept in prison for the full length of their sentences. Each year they are in prison they manifestly cannot be adding to their tally of crimes. This would bring about a reduction in crimes and the costs of crime, as well as a reduction in the cost of justice, since these career criminals will not be able to commit further crimes and will therefore not need to be prosecuted for them.
But there are other cost savings which could be made. There are about 80,000 criminals in prisons in England and Wales. Each of these, according to FOI figures, has a direct cost of £27,000 a year. This doesn’t include centralised and police costs. Most of it is the cost of prison staff salaries and the board and lodging of prisoners. It is not likely that this figure can be reduced by very much. But the prison population does represent a labour resource which should be used to help reduce the cost to tax-payers of providing the prison service.
There are two avenues for reducing costs. One is to require the prison service to be self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs such as vegetables, fruit, dairy and meat through the re-introduction of prison farms. Not only would this reduce the cost of providing food for prisoners from the open market, but it would provide a great many training opportunities for prisoners, and the opportunity to engage in useful activity rather than being confined for long periods in a cell.
The other means of reducing costs is to allow the building of industrial assembly complexes alongside and even within most prisons so that prisoners could be used as a labour force for manufacturing companies. It would be possible to develop some regulations so that a company could only use this labour force if it had been outsourcing manufacturing and assembly to another country for the last two years or so. This would prevent any business withdrawing employment from British employees. The prison labour could be offered at minimum wage rates to businesses, and could be compulsory for prisoners. Those who were considered too dangerous might be provided with alternative employment in their cells, and those who refused to work could be placed on a disciplinary regime with minimal food and no additional benefits.
Such a system could expect to generate the equivalent revenue, and therefore savings to tax-payers, of £10,000 a year, raising perhaps £800,000,000 a year. Not only would prisoners be profitably occupied during the day, but they would gain experience in employment. There are already prisons which do provide such employment, but it should be extended to the entire prison population as a matter of expectation and duty. Those who will not work should not receive benefits.
What will the Government do? We know that they will prefer to set up yet another bureaucracy with all its associated costs. But we know who the most prolific criminals are and can already treat them as career criminals likely to re-offend. And we have a captive workforce which should be set to working for the bed and board it enjoys. These are more difficult decisions and so Grayling will not take them. But in the present downturn it is time to make prisons pay.
The problem with all prisons is that the vast majority of those currently confined in them are the either weak, stupid, insane* or any permutation of the three (the far biggest percentage of those incarcerated being the latter, particularly since the sell-off of the lunatic asylums). Career criminals with a modicum of intelligence do not get caught, or if they do, they have adequate resources to avoid imprisonment by hiring shysters, bribing Old Bill or, as a last resort, bribing Judges (facilitated by other shysters) .
It is unlikely that things will ever change; it has always been so. Believe me, if the police started to concentrate on enforcing the law against the most successful villains (i.e. those politico-lawyers that frame the laws and and sit on the benches of adjudication, or those in commerce and banking who provide the inside information and wherewithal for politicians to make lots of moolah (thereafter granting their benefactors immunity against prosecution for the scams they perpetrate against the panoply of punters who are ‘not in the know’) then ways would be devised to disband the police and replace them with apparatchiks who ‘know their place’. In fact, isn’t that that has been increasingly happening for the last three decades or so?
So any ‘reform’ of prisons is meaningless. Just be thankful that the total of ‘criminals’ committing petty crime on a daily basis is still very small in comparison with the compliant sheeples who, by and large strive to live honest lives, look after their families and insure against the worst excesses of the small minority of their bent fellow citizens. As for those who provide such insurance: they are a particularly successful branch of villainy, it must be said.
The police used to be there to provide reassurance by their mere presence. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case – just the opposite, in fact. They now appear to be there to ensure that the Gramscian plan is implemented and anyone who raises their voice against it is vulnerable to a charge of ‘hate crime’.
And anyone who tries to tell the truth about the biggest threat of our era, the resurgence of Islamic jihad, (in cahoots with Comintern) is vilified by Leftist politicians and their media facilitators as a ‘right wing extremist’ at best or a vile fascist at worst. Simples.
* includes all those involved in the use and supply of illegal narcotics, amphetamines or hallucinogens – both mad and evil insofar as they are destructive of themselves, their families and society at large.
Frank P – Bravo!
An interesting article and I would never disagree with your suggestions that these places should be made to pay their way as much as possible.
However, of more import is the level of crime and the simple, inescapable fact that the justice system is not working. Whilst he’s a slimy little socialist pillock, nevertheless, Tony Robinson’s “Crime and Punishment” series (all episodes available on YouTube) was excellent and clearly highlighted that the purpose of the evolved criminal justice system was, effectively, three-fold – to punish the guilty, to recompense the aggrieved and to deter criminality.
We have now become so civilised that we have lost sight of these key points and are but a few steps away from a return to feudal system, where the aggrieved resolve their problems themselves, often with extreme violence, because the justice system is ineffective.
The problem is that we have lost all the strands that will deter criminality. Because only prison now exists to demonstrate society’s displeasure, there are far too many in that system who should not be. Without capital and corporal punishment, what other options are there? The evidence is clear, for those that care to trawl the internet, that, in every nation that has removed its death penalty, the murder rate has risen inexorably. Of course, liberals claim it is a measure of our humanity that we permit these miscreants to live, but surely condemning them to a lifetime behind bars is just a form of torture? How many would still be alive if murderers and terrorists were put to death? The numbers are incalculable because the deterrent effect, whilst demonstrable, is not quantifiable.
Similarly, at the other end of the scale, I ponder on the impact upon our society if those crimes classed as anti-social were addressed with the cane rather than an ASBO? The bulk of the feral classes ruining life in the UK are bullies and stripped of their little gang, rapidly lose all bravado.
Having lived in various Countries and seen their systems at fairly close hand, it is obvious the UK (and much of the West) has it wrong. In the Middle East, capital punishment is reasonably common and, whilst it can be argued that it is wrongly applied in places like Saudi and Iran, nevertheless, in places like Qatar and Dubai, it contributes to a very low murder rate. The same applies for corporal punishment. Caning is common and anti-social behaviour is minimal. Minor theft and drunkenness are almost unheard of and it is not just because of the Islam, the same attitudes apply in Singapore, with the same results. Of course, Africa gives us the example of what happens when the rule of law becomes completely impotent. Large swathes of that festering continent received law under various colonial powers but have now slipped back to the local resolution of dispute with tribal loyalties protecting the guilty and punishing the innocent and out-and-out savagery applied out of all proportion to the original offence.
I feel certain the UK prison population would not be such a burden if alternate, effective punishments were adopted, the impact being twofold, with many criminals dealt with rapidly and an even greater number deterred. Sadly, my newly-adopted home has made the same mistakes, but does seem to be waking up to the corporal punishment issue as schools in certain areas are becoming unmanageable pools of anarchy.
Let the bosses replace people like me with cheap prison labour, don’t want the working class to start feeling too secure in their jobs we might start asking for pay rises.