Build more prisons or release criminals early?
Every prison cell in Britain will be full by next week (via fark)
But at least they don’t have any of those terrible guns to worry about. Bawahahaha
They have the correct attitude and solution for the safety and protection of the lawbiding citizens. Well planned and executed. This is just what is needed to solve the minor criminal problem in the UK.
The problem that they never seem to deal with is that these prisoners are, in the overwhelming majority, on their third-fourth-fifth or fiftyfith conviction.
They have done all the fines, and largely not paid, they have done the work in the community orders, and basically trying to get them to work is not effective, they have recieved police warnings, they have come to prison and done any amount of offending behaviour courses, education and the like, and they still keep coming back.
Right now there is an even more massive push to propel these individuals into training, but its a complete waste of time.
They will all come back again.
80% of offenders under age 21 are reconvicted within 2 years, around 65% of those above 21 are back within 2 years.
You also must remember that of those who did not come back, they mostly got involved in one-off incidents, such as a fight in a pub or whatever.
The habitual offenders will almost certainly be back.
We should stop trying to rehabilitate them, it is incredibly expensive, and simply keep them locked up until they are too old to commit serious crime.
Prisons designed to confine instead of train would cost a fraction of the money to operate, and they could be far more densely populated, since you would not need space for things like classrooms, workshops and the like.
Can they ship the excess to Australia? Oh, wait…
Cite?
As reported on BBC Radio 4 on 2 September 2005, the recidivism rates for released prisoners in the United States of America is 60% compared with 50% in the United Kingdom.
So half of people never get reconvicted.
Only half of them. See above. Maybe the effect of prison is more useful than you think. Maybe with more training and education it might be more so.
Cite?
As reported on BBC Radio 4 on 2 September 2005, … The report attributed the lower recidivism rate in the UK to a focus on rehabilitation and education of prisoners compared with the US focus on punishment, deterrence and keeping potentially dangerous individuals away from society.
What would the jail population be if all recidivists were incarcerated until they are too old?
How much would that cost?
Cites please.
Cites please.
Except that prisons without hope would be more dangerous and staff would either lose control or require US levels of security to maintain order.
Errr - isn’t this **exactly ** the same problem that you folks have got in the US? As fast as new prisons are built, they become massively overcrowded and new ones are needed?
This is pretty old news, but I seem to recall that this situation has held for some time - namely that the UK has the highest incarceration rate in Western Europe, while the US rate is multiple times higher than that of the UK.
I’m wondering…
how many of the ones who don’t return OD or die in a car crash or a fight within a short time of release?
I’ve never seen a statistic listing that.
IIRC I think casdave actually does this for a living (ie prison administration in the UK) so I’d tend to put a lot of weight behind his “facts on the ground” perspective even beyond the claims of various studies.
Casdave does work in the prison service. However, people who work close to a problem often do not see the whole picture.
As a simple ‘for instance’, he states in his post:
“The problem that they never seem to deal with is that these prisoners are, in the overwhelming majority, on their third-fourth-fifth or fiftyfith conviction.”
yet the statistics show that 50% of people imprisoned do not return.
His perspective is skewed on this matter because he keeps on seeing the same people over and over and does not comprehend the equal number of any cohort who never return.
So he forms the false perspective that all prisoners are recidivists and that any ‘rehabilitation’ effort is wasted.
His proposal that there should be virtual life sentences for individuals would result in massive numbers of prisoners and many more prisons. About 1400 young persons (aged 15-20) are jailed each month. Half of these will likely be on their second or subsequent offence. This implies a steady growth of prison population of about 8400 per year in the early years of the casdave life sentence scheme. This would of course decline in future years as most of the available young offender population is soaked up by the system. After about five years, the increase would be likely to tail off to ‘only’ about 4000 per year of new prisoners. Additionally however, in the early years there would also be the need for the imprisonment of people in the 20-50 age group. About 8000 such people are received each month into prison, and again half of these are likely to be re-offenders- another 4000 new lifers a month- nearly 50,000 a year in the first year, gradually tailing off until maybe only 10 000 new lifers are created each year (the one thing we do know is that prison rarely acts as a deterrent.)
It would require the building of over 50% of current prisons every year for several years as prison population increased to about 250 000 people after about five years. This is about the percentage that the US locks up- and then the population would continue increasing by about 15 000 prsioners a month indefinitely until these lifers started reaching their later years when they would be released.
So casdave’s scheme would require at least three to four times expenditure in the first five years with 50 000 new prison places provided each year for those years.
Maybe it’s not so wise to put so much weight on ‘his “facts on the ground” perspective’
Of course his scheme would result in the need for many more prison officers as well as prisons. Maybe job creation is part of the ethic of prison officers.
The whole scheme is a complete non-starter.
Now, on the other hand, if prisons were emptied of the non-dangerous mentally ill (about 30% of the population) and the socially inadequate as well as the non-violent offenders and those with drug problems, all to be treated in non-prison oriented largely non-custodial settings, and for our current prisons to be largely dedicated to the confinement until their 35th birthday of all newly convicted anti-social and violent habitual offenders (research shows that many in this group tend to stop offending in their thirties) along with people needing longer or whole life sentences, then you might have a system that would work and require less money spent on detention and more on effective community treatment. Only, the public would not accept it as it likes to lock people up as the main punishment.
Maybe casdave can enlighten us on his views on how many of the people he sees in jail should not be there. Most studies show that the prison population can be divided into three roughly equal shares- the sad, the mad and the bad. Does he think that the sad and mad should be freed and that prison should concentrate on only the ‘bad’. Does he think that the Daily Mail and the British public would agree to that.
IMHO Prison is one of the greatest wastes of public money, not in that there should be no prison service, but that so much of its emphasis is on people who should not be there in the first place.
Before you start locking up offenders for life, as your post assumes **Pjen/b] you first assess who are those most likely to return, we are not considering locking up fine defaulters for life, nor first time offenders, nor second time offenders, unless the crime is serious, and the severity of the crime must also be considered, and what you end up with are the persistan offenders.
This rather puts a hole in your numbers.
Those figures of reoffending are rather distorted, because it includes all offenders and does not discriminate between the types of offence and liklehood of reconviction.
What is happening is that the total reoffending rate is ‘diluted’ by including those whose offences are less likely to be repeated, and have short turnaround times by dint of short prison terms, such as fine defaulters.
When you actually look at the types of crime and then correlate the liklehood of reconviction, the figures take on a very differant turn, robbery, theft, burglary, car theft all come out at over 80% return to prison, and remember these are only 2 year returns to prison, imagine just how much higher those figures would be is this were measured over a longer and more realistic figure, such as five years. This is what I would call an ‘overwhelming majority’.
When you take a look at the persistant offenders, the reoffending rate climbs even higher.
If you think about it, the clear up rate for crime in the UK is around 5%, and yet 85% of robbers, burglars and the like are back in jail within 2 years, so you just have to wonder about that reoffending rate. Don’t forget that actually we don’t imprison 95% of those found guilty of an offence in UK courts.
I know this is something of a right wing tract, but realistically, locking up persistant offenders would be economically viable.
http://www.civitas.org.uk/pubs/prisonValue.php
http://www.csra.org.uk/prisons_fact_and_fiction.htm
Part of addressing persistant offenders is the strikes rule, which has a number of types of offences that qualify toward the life sentence.
When a person is on life licence it means that any breach of their parole terms can and, more and more often, does lead to a return to prison without a reconviction, and these offenders are not included in the reoffending rates either, but they have still returned to prison.
Work out the costs to society, a druggie with a fairly mild habit of say £120 a day, will have to obtain that money either by selling drugs themselves and contributing even more to crime, or by committing crime.
That crime is largely proprety driven, its theft, and anyone knows that to get a return of £100 on stolen goods, you have to acquire at least £200, and anything up to £500.
That’s each day, every day 7/365, it does not take long for this to start getting up to significant sums, even 2 years of it will end up getting toward £750k.
This is for a mild habit.
On current home office estimates, the prison population will rise to around 110k by around 2010, from the present level of 85k.
I don’t think so. I excluded a generous 50% who are first time offenders.
My point is that life sentences are wasteful. Senteneces concluding at age 35 or so are likely to be just as efficient as habitual older offenders will be picked up by the system again, but these will be in a small minority. Most offending occurs before age 35.
Calling obviously for adequate drug rehabilitation programs outside of prison as well as inside.
And I predict that at some point people will come to realize that it is money poured down the drain (or into prison officers pockets) which would be better spent elsewhere.
Why does the UK need to be so different from the rest of Western Europe?
Well for a start we actually imprison a far smaller number of convicted offenders than most of Europe does.
I don’t think so:
England and Wales have the highest rate of imprisonment amongst all European countries, a new report has revealed.
The Howard League for Penal Reform, as part of their 140th anniversary, have published international imprisonment league tables which reveal:
“England and Wales imprison a higher percentage of their population than any other Western European country.
They have a rate of imprisonment 50% higher than comparable countries such as Germany, France and Italy, and almost double that of Scandinavian countries.
There are more children and young people in English and Welsh prisons than in any other Western European country
There are significantly more women in prison in England and Wales than in France, Germany or Italy, depsite the fact all these countries have a higher population.
Director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, Frances Crook, has asserted that these statistics provide a warning to England and Wales that we have to end the current ‘obsession with custody’ and look towards reserving prison for the most serious and dangerous criminals whilst increasingly opting for alternative measures such as community sentences.”
Pjen that wasn’t quite what casdave was saying.
The number of convicted offenders who are imprisoned is a totally different statistic to the one you are quoting about.
Probably just means UK has a much higher percentage of the population convicted of a crime. And that could be due to worse crime or better police neither is proven by the statistic.
I see the difference.
In the UK we certainly have the highest proportion of prisoners in Western Europe. This is, IMHO, caused by the retributive attitude that we share with the USA, although here it is not so extreme.
Similarly this retributive attitude leads to a greater criminalization of behaviour in UK/US society that elesewhere is dealt with outside of the criminal justice and prison sytem. We criminalize more people than Western Europe but we imprison a smaller percentage of this criminalized population. In Western Europe they criminalize fewer people but imprison a greater proportion of them.
This is the system that I am arguing for- excluding a large number of people from both the criminal justice system and the prison system. Ensuring that the people who are forced into either really need to be there.
IMHO the problem is one of public attitude. If the main responses that you have to deviant behavior are crimilization and punishment, then you will end up with high numbers of criminals and high numbers of prisoners (US and UK) whereas if your main responses are diversion and rehabilitation with imprisonment as a last rsort, then you will have fewer criminalized individuals and a greater proportion of those criminalized in jail.
We have chosen the first course, Western Europe the latter. The reason we have so many criminals is because we have chosen as a society to deal with deviancy mainly through the criminal justice system.
How gbout they ( and we) let out the NON VIOLENT offenders…my golly do pot smokers/small time dealers REALLY belong in prison?
Come on, I am not a advocator of letting the tuely dangerous loose…but come on…is POT really a problem…give me a joint and i wanna kick back and chill out, not commit a crime (other than the aformentioned ingestion)
ymmv,
tsfr
I suppose he means that violent crime happens disproportionately between criminals, so that, thanks to guns, they tend to take themselves out.
I’m sure that’s true to some extent but for an American to mock the British over prison population is pretty rich.
Thanks for saying that so well. This is one of those things that a lot of people forget in every public policy debate that exists. Excellent, thought-provoking post, too - I’m impressed by your statistics.
Come on, this is funny!
I’m certainly in favour of locking up persistant offenders for a much longer period, I would say that around 40 years age would be a good start point.
What we have at the moment are the same ones doing the rounds, with perhaps 30-40% of relatively new offenders, by new I mean first second timers in prison, the reality is that hese for the most part will have a string of non-custodial sentences.
The prison population would not continue ever upward, there is a view that a growth curve will tend to continue, until something fairly dramatic disrupts it, but the truth is that the longer an increase runs, themore likely it is to begin to decline.
The problem is working out how many regualr offenders there are, and mopping them from the streets.
I’ve heard all the drugs rehab arguments, all the carrot and stick approach, the job training etc, and in the end, the reason that most give up on crime is simply age.
We started with home detention curfew(HDC) with the idea being that the person under supervision would be compelled to remain in their residence, but would at least be undergoing a controlled reintroduction into society.
The reality is that at best, HDC tagging is neutral it doesn’t affect reoffending rates much one way or the other, but it does cost lots to run.
Training for employment seems a great idea, but, studies have been carried out by the Personnell Institute from before WWI with a view to determining the provision that the UK should make for its future training needs.
Around 5% of the UK population is suitable for the type of trade training that prisons carry out, construction trades etc.
Prisoners come as the very bottom fraction of one percent of those who are not suitable, not surprising since they have such poor academic abilities, along with the personality disorders that 80% of prisoners also have.
Those disorders range from serious psychotic problems, right down to ADD.
To addresss the incarceration of non-violent offenders, well smoking pot is very unlikely to land you in prison, the reason addicts end up in jail is that their addiction is the driving force behind them needing resources for more drugs, and its the offences committed trying to obtain those resources that lands them inside.
It’s all very well running drug rehab in the community, and the truth is that most of those who kick their habit do it this way, but there is no chance that it would be acceptable for a persistant offender remaining free in society until they decide the time has come to make a real effort to give up.
The fact is, plenty of offenders like taking drugs and have little or no intention of giving up.
We do not lock individuals up lightly, nor do longer terms or 3 years and above get handed down lightly.
Judges make every effort to use community sentencing, but when you have a presistant offender, what else is there to do ?
Why bother releasing such a person until they are good and sick of prison ?
I have been working today with a bunch of them, and quoted the 80% return to jail figures to them, the answer for the most part I got was that they had never made 2 years and in one case it was less than 6 months.
This is very typical of the prisoners I work with, and since I work in a Category C prison, this is a fairly typical view of prisoners, since Cat C cons are the majority prison population by quite some way.
We’ve got plenty of* prisons.* * We just don’t have the funds to run them. The one in which my husband works is rated for 1500 capacity. They’re currently at a population of 2900 and more are on their way.
It’s not cheap to run a prison. IIRC, Hubby told me the yearly operating budget for his institution alone is $35 million. The costs remain relatively constant despite how many inmates are in the facility.**
Politicians love to proclaim that they’re “tough on crime” but they sure as hell don’t want to pay for it. Funding for police gets them headlines. Funding for prisons makes people grouse about TVs and recreational equipment. Few complain when prison budgets are slashed.
- In fact, there are a lot of vacant facilities. Not too long ago, construction was completed for a state-of-the-art facility not too far from where I live but the operating funds never materialized, so the place sits vacant in a lot of growing weeds.
** Excluding medical care, the daily cost to feed and clothe an inmate is only pennies. It’s the facility itself and the staff needed to run it that makes costs so high.