Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
UK Releases Prisoners Early, No More Room
Prime Minister Keir Starmer is taking some heat for his decision to release some convicted prisoners early because there is not enough room in the prisons in Britain. A spokesman for Number 10 Downing Street noted that the PM is as angry as the public about this. The problem is not unique to the UK. Many countries, including the US, have too many people in prison. Either there are too few prison or too many people sentenced to prison, or a combination of both. Any solution requires an examination of the entire criminal court and penal systems done without an ideological ax that would need grinding. That almost certainly will not happen.
The BBC reported, "The government is releasing 1,100 more prisoners early, as part of its emergency plan to ease overcrowding in jails in England and Wales.
"Offenders serving more than five years will be released on licence after spending 40% of their time behind bars, a scheme that excludes those convicted of serious violence, sex crimes and terrorism."
The spokesman said, ". . . there was no choice not to act. If we had not acted, we would have faced a complete paralysis of the system.
"Courts unable to send offenders to prison, police unable to make arrests and unchecked criminality on our streets, so the government clearly could not allow this to happen."
The UK prison population is growing by about 4,500 a year. This plan frees up 5,500 places. Unless the government wants to have to do this again soon (and politically, this is a loser), something needs to change.
They could build more prisons. The biggest in the UK is a rather new prison, HM Prison Berwyn outside Wrexham in Wales. It is a Class C prison, a medium-security installation. It houses 2,100 inmates, opened in the last decade and cost a quarter of a billion pounds. From ground breaking to opening took 28 months. Building 4 of these would probably take care of matters for the medium-term, but Sir Keir cannot wait till the middle of this Parliament to get the spaces.
The other option is to send fewer people to prison when they break the law. "We have to expand the use of punishment outside of prison," Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood told BBC Radio 4's Today program. “We have to have a long-term plan that gets us in a different position where prison has a place, and it works, keeps the public safe but also we do better at rehabilitating offenders as well."
Prison in a free society has three functions: punishment, protection and rehabilitation. First, people who break the law have to be punished, or the law is meaningless. One can argue about what the punishment should be, but without some negative consequence, the society trends toward lawlessness.
The second purpose, protection, is for the benefit of the law-abiding. They deserve to live without lawbreakers running roughshod over them. By removing the lawbreakers from society by incarceration achieves that, and any alternative to prison must protect as well as punish.
The third leg of this stool is rehabilitation, and this is usually ignored or done badly. Yet without rehabilitation, society is simply asking for a repeat of the problem. Indeed, many minor criminals spend time in jail only to come out more criminal, and better at it.
One genuinely hopes the minister is successful in finding alternatives to prison for those inmates who might be rehabilitated outside a prison. If that happens, Britain could lead the way in reshaping how criminal justice works. If not, Sir Keir will have to free more inmates to the chagrin of just about everyone.
© Copyright 2024 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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