Prisons are overcrowded; so the Government has come up with a novel way to deal with the shortage of prison accommodation. According to a report in today's Times, judges are to be forbidden from imposing prison sentences unless they have first checked there is enough room to accommodate the convicted offender.
Apparently, the government has decided our prisons only have holding capacity for a maximum of 80,000. So, rather than build more in face of a projected shortfall of 20,000 in less than five years time, judges are to be to be told they are not to give time to those they convict.
The government has certainly found a novel way for dealing with shortages of resources financed from the public purse, but why has it chosen to accept as much as current prison capacity? If concern with containing costs is to determine how many should be confined, why doesn’t government simply close down our prisons altogether and thereby save the tax-payer loads more money?
Come to think of it, this new government strategy for dealing with problems of shortages of resources can be easily extended into other sectors of public financing.
Hospital waiting lists could be reduced at the stroke of a ministerial pen instructing GP’s to make no more patient referrals unless a consultant and hospital bed were available.
Oh, of course, how stupid of me… I hadn’t realised: hospital services are there to cater for a medical need which would not be met by not providing treatment.
But then, by parity of reasoning, prisons exist because of a need to lock up offenders, a need the magnitude of which must logically be a function of some independent variable besides the number of prison places available.
Clearly, people cannot he imprisoned without there being prisons in which to house them. But the number of prison places is not a constant to which sentencing policy must be adjusted. It is a variable that can and should be adjusted to meet need.
‘But is there need to imprison rather than impose non-custodial sentences ?’ will be the reply that can be anticipated coming from those who favour the government’s line.
Whatever the answer to that vexed question is, it simply cannot be, ‘Well,that all depends on whether we have any prison places or how many we have.’
What the government is proposing is simply unacceptable. Whoever came up with the proposal should be immediately given a custodial sentence… assuming there is a place for them inside, that is.
Comments (1)
Why can't the prisoners simply wait in the corridor on trolleys until space becomes available?
It worked in the NHS.
Posted by EU-Serf | January 17, 2005 10:57 AM
Posted on January 17, 2005 10:57