Columnist Polly Toynbee argues strongly for the former in today's Guardian. She says: '....the public’s appetite for locking people up seems insatiable. Nothing is ever enough. The more politicians implement tougher sentences, the greater the public taste for even stiffer penalties. Fact-free, tabloid-stoked impulses for vengeance merge with politicians’ desire to out-tough each other on crime...
What’s needed isn’t bigger prisons with more places in them, but fewer prisons with properly paid and trained staff, and good rehabilitation programmes. The PAC warns of an “expected surge in demand across the criminal justice system from the recruitment of 20,000 new police officers”. That perfectly matches the 20,000 more prison places that have been promised. More police officers with targets to hit means more arrests and more young men jailed; Richard Garside of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies estimates the average cost of locking up a prisoner is £40,000 a year.
HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, is typical. I visited a couple of years ago – it was chosen for me presumably as one of the less awful ones. Its impressive governor was struggling to keep the prison afloat then, but its recent chief inspector’s report paints an even more dismal picture than the one I saw. The prison has been rated poor on safety, poor on purposeful activity, not sufficiently good on rehabilitation and release plans, nor on “respect”. It has an inadequate daily regime (prisoners are allowed only two hours a day out of their cells, and even that is only on weekdays).' https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/02/prisons-money-sentences-public-services
My own experience of visiting two prisons in the UK has left an indelible impression. One was old and the other new, but both were profoundly alienating. It goes without saying that there were locked doors and rules everywhere, but walking past 50 men pressed up against a wire fence - effectively a cage - whistling and leering at my female guide was shocking and depressing at several levels. The seclusion cell in the modern prison was if anything worse. It was completely bare save a drain with a grill in the middle of the room.
There are arguments for prisons but the evidence seems to be that they do little to stop reoffending and less to rehabilitate.
Toynbee ends her piece:
'Ignorance is the blight of democracy, inexcusable when simple information on everything is only a click away on any smartphone. But far more unforgivable are the politicians who keep stoking that “tougher and tougher” appetite instead of explaining the facts. That results in overflowing and squalid jails with criminals who are destined to come back time and again. It’s an absurd waste of money that should be redirected to the threadbare services for early years, children’s mental health and everyone’s education.'
Put to a popular vote it is likely that the public would demand more prisons, but what is this a solution to?
All thoughts welcome....... do you agree with the proposal below?