How to Arrest the Rising Prison Population...and its Costs

In no time at all (or maybe even right now) the prison population in the UK will be in excess of 100,000.

Bang Up a
Banker?

Is this a 'scandal', as some of the press would have us believe? It's expensive, yes, but it's not really a 'scandal'. Lots of policy wonks and thinktankery folk have many opinions on why there are so many banged up. The press and media cheerfully blame the government or, more specifically, the government's cuts which, of course, have forced the poor and disadvantaged into thieving, haven't they? Or they blame Ken Clarke for allowing rioters to be imprisoned for ten years for stealing a bottle of water when in fact the Justice Secretary should be locking up bankers for ruining everything but they claim that he hasn't the wit or the desire to invent a charge upon which they could be convicted, such as "Mortgaging Without Due Care and Attention" ...or something. So Dave & Co just dock their pay or remove their honours instead, as that should keep everyone happy for a bit.

We, the ordinary, unqualified people, know where the blame really lies, and it lies with illegal drugs.

Barbara Ellen's (normally) lovely column in the Observer (5th Feb) suggests that people like me, who grew up in the sixties and seventies, are in no position to comment on drug culture in 2012. She contends, with some excellent but slightly flawed journalism that our experimentation or even habitual use of dope back in the day does not provide us with any idea of what is going on right now with things like MDMA, the crack derivatives, powerful skunk or even the 'legal high' dopes. I agree with her. But, at the same time, she cannot possibly deny the link between these drugs and criminality, regardless of whether 2012 drugs are 'A' class apart from those of 1970.


Wicked Weed

So, scratch the surface or dig deeper into criminality here and abroad and there'll be a direct connection with illegal drugs in the majority of crimes committed. Drugs are not that expensive if used recreationally but the habitual, long-term daily use through addiction is a very costly business to the user. This is, largely, because they're illegal and therefore the risks run by suppliers are mitigated by pricing. It's a standard business model. The fact is that the risks being taken are those of arrest and potential loss of liberty and income and they are not that different from, say, the risks of loss of life or injury in deep sea diving to support the oil industry and those guys are handsomely rewarded for the services that they supply, only legally.

There are plenty of perpetrators of crimes that do their dastardly deeds just out of greed or having a dysfunctional moral compass rather than to get enough money to keep their habit going. But there are just as many and more who do and, once you're into that cycle of criminality it's almost inevitable that you'll be suckered into or forced into drug use and its likely outcomes by those that are looking for increased custom. By all accounts, if and when you're convicted of a crime and get banged up, the same porcesses apply inside prisons and it's quite difficult to avoid being sucked in to the drug culture.

So how do we break the chains?

I'm not a user of illegal drugs, so I come at this from an uninformed viewpoint on what that's like. However, the vast majority of the UK population doesn't use illegal drugs so it could be argued that the minority view isn't as important. It seems to me that the easiest way out of this cycle of drug-related criminality is to simply to legitimise the trade. In so doing, various things would happen...

First, but by no means the most important, the cachet of doing something wicked and naughty is immediately removed. This might discourage many recreational users and close down a proportion of the hitherto illegal market, albeit a small proportion seeing as getting an habitual high is more often than not the motivation rather than just being naughty.

Secondly, if the risk factors of illegality are removed from production, distribution and supply (both wholseale and retail), then the price will drop - it is, after all, a market, and consumers will be able to demand lower prices as neither they nor the suppliers will be risking their collective freedoms. Of course, a lot of suppliers will drop out of the market anyway, in search of something that carries greater risks and therefore greater rewards.

Third, and by far the most important by way of societal benefit, is the reduction in crime related to drugs. At the bottom end, where most of the crime is perpetrated, users will have to steal at a significantly reduced rate in order to support their cheaper habit.

You see, I really have no objection to people getting off their skulls and, ultimately, killing themselves through drug-taking. I smoke a little bit and drink alcohol. It's probably having a detrimental affect on my health. In counter-balance, my diet is exceptionally healthy, whereas there are others who ingest potentially fatal quantities of fat. Then there are those that think that fighting is an excellent pastime and others that exercise their right to extreme, risky and even life-threatening behaviour in 'sport'. Almost all of us take risks that, with the rare and privileged exceptions in the wealthy, can be a burden to the NHS and to the public purse in general when it comes to medical and social care after the fact of those risks causing harm to the risk-taker.


Should this behaviour be punished
through the prison system?

Should we judge behaviour on the basis of cost to society, then? If the currently illegal drugs continue to be criminalised, who is to say that the cost to the exchequer of that criminalisation (through the legal system and the outrageous price of keeping people in prisons with all their bloody 'rights') is any more properly spent than banging up smokers, drinkers or the morbidly obese, given that, eventually, they are going to cost the country a fortune.

Just taking those last three groups I mentioned (and they are by no means the exclusive three that have the potential to ruin the economy) would it be the right thing to do to criminalise fags, booze and fatty foods? No, it is not...at least no more than it is to criminalise skunk, crack cocaine or heroin on the basis of costs to our society. By that means, the likes of BAT, Diageo and Tesco would be in the same camp as the Colombian drug cartels as suppliers. Some might argue (maybe even those that sit out St Paul's Cathedral in the Occupy Tent City) that that might be a good thing.

Of course, none of this is going to happen. No government in the UK that wishes to retain its shaky mandate would dream of passing legislation that legalises these drugs. They just couldn't deal with the screaming headlines. They may as well attempt to legalise paedophilia.

As the prison system is costing so much money and its inmate population is more likely to rise than it is to fall, then the issue has to tackled from a cost perspective alone.

Prisoners all over the world - but especially in arguably more enlightened societies like our own - do have the protection of much of the global legislation on Human Rights. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that they have the 'right' to a TV (Plasma 50-inch or an ordinary one), a games console, comfy beds, conjugal activity, sports, newspapers, computers or the latest movies. They do have the 'right' to daily exercise, sensory stimuli, food, water, a reasonable element of privacy and not to have the shit kicked out of them or to be sexually abused by warders or other prisoners. Actually, they do have a right to a newspaper. There's a paper called "Inside Time", which is just for prisoners...like a trade journal, I suppose. The right to vote? The jury is well and truly out on that one...and may take some time to consider its verdict.

The Good Old Days...?

The cost to the justice system of dealing with criminal offences is massive in terms of policing and doing all the legal stuff, but concentrating solely on the incarceration, it costs about £150,000 to create every new individual prison space and an average of about £50,000 a year to keep each and every felon in the nick. This could quite easily (and legally) be ameliorated through changes to the regimes inside and the cessation of pandering to prison populations for fear of some breach of their human rights (that's the same human rights legislation that most of the UN is signed up to but doesn't bother with, by the way).

Prison serves two purposes. Protection of the public from naughty people, and punishment. The first purpose is quite obviously being served, although for not nearly long enough in many cases with parole working the way it does. But punishment? Don't think so. Tough but fair regimes in prison, along with occupational therapies to aid rehabilitation have to be the future. Clearly, sewing mail bags is a pointless occupation these days but what about breaking rocks? Or transferring some of the high street chains' Asian sweatshop production to the UK prisons? Several lobbyists have been suggesting that prsioners get a 'wage' for such occupation in the nick. No. Wrong. When governments are sponsoring the alleged 'slave labour' of people on benefit working in companies like Tesco, it would be unpalatable to then award the minimum wage to the literally captive audience of working prisoners.

And who knows...the prospect of doing 'hard time' might even act as a deterrent. But we need some government ministers with the balls (and not Balls as a government minister) to see this through. So it'll never happen. Shame.