As Peter Foster (FT) points out:
'There needs to be a different debate on prisons, but in truth the familiar “lock ‘em up’ and throw away the key” narrative of recent weeks is one that is more palatable to the public & a class of contemporary politicians that no longer dares to make difficult arguments to the public'!
Other countries have managed to reform their prison systems, emphasising re-socialisation & rehabilitation...
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And so the UK now has one of the highest incarceration rates in W.Europe.
Of course a reformed system (as the experience of other countries shows) is more expensive per-prisoner, but because fewer are locked up & recidivism rates are lower, actually are cheaper systems to run.
Although there will always be criminals who need to be locked up, too often we use prison as retribution & do not seek to deal with the problems the crimes reveal....
In the end for many prison just doesn't work!
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@ChrisMayLA6
As somebody who used to work in probation (until I was made redundant in 2016 as part of the fallout from the tragic part-privatisation of the sector in 2014), I can say that there was a great culture of rehabilitation of offenders in England & Wales until the Tories tore it all up.
Our probation system was seen by the rest of the world as a model to be emulated and our overseas counterparts were just as upset and confused as we were when Chris “Failing” Grayling wielded the knife.
At the time, there wasn’t a single poor Probation Trust operating in England & Wales (all either rated good or outstanding), but apparently, the private sector would rush in and save us from ourselves. What a joke!
The private sector, as we all know are only interested in profit and to get profit you need to ensure people are given less money but expected to perform then perform better hitting ever more unrealistic targets.
Hopefully labour can be convinced to bring back what we once had, as we can't send people to jail without turning peoples lives around, or (even though I am not an expert) they just end up in the so called revolving door of the judicial system.
