On prisons

The Guardian ran stories last week about how the government want to get the cost per prisoner per year down by a third, from around £21,000 to around £14,000. It seems that one way to achieve savings of this sort is to build very large prisons (thought by those with an interest in prisoners as people, rather than as an expense, to be a bad thing) with their economies of scale and to staff them with very cheap staff, that is to say young people with not much training and less experience, a scenario with a good fit to the offerings of the private prison operators.

The Guardian stories included reminders about the high incarceration rate favoured by anglos and hispanics, which can't simply be the anglo partiality for booze and drugs as the Finns, at the bottom of the prison league table, also do quite well on the bottle. But maybe a low incarceration rate does go with a good education system, which is also a feature of Finnish life. And maybe taking drugs out of the criminal justice system would be a better way to cut the costs of prisons, leaving us with good prisons for smaller numbers rather than bad prisons for larger numbers.

There is also the mental health angle, illustrated with a chart from a NYRB article (October 24, 2013) about sexual abuse in US prisons, a topic first noticed on March 27th, 2010, in the other place. I think that the chart - on which there is no explanation of where the various rates shown come from - overstates the correlation between the demise of our mental hospitals (the story on which is much the same in the US as in the UK) and the growth of the prison population. Nevertheless, my understanding is that a lot of the people in our prisons do have special needs, apart from those for drugs. Special needs which it might have been cheaper to meet when they were children, rather than when they have become offenders. (The BH view, as a former teacher of small children, is that some children seemed to be marked out for a life of crime from very young and that there was precious little, as a busy teacher, that one could do about it).

It also occurred to me reading about all this that privatisation is, along with defined benefit pensions, another good way of transferring costs from the old to the young: rather than take the capital costs of building new prisons out of current tax revenue, we get the private sector to take them out of future tax revenue, a burden which falls disproportionately on those who are young now. A wheeze out of which the private operators make a good living and which ends up costing the taxpayer a lot more than it might have done otherwise - as one thing the private sector is really good at is squeezing money out of the public sector, the inhabitants of which tend not to play as rough as their private sector colleagues. A soft touch.