December 5, 2024 - 1:25pm
Thanks to a new National Audit Office report on jail capacity, we now know that prison is awful — but there’s also not enough of it. This paradox sits at the heart of the present overcrowding crisis.
The report highlights that the current prison expansion plans are insufficient to meet future demand, projecting a shortage of 12,400 prison places by the end of 2027. The Government’s commitment to provide 20,000 new prison places is significantly delayed and over budget, with completion now expected to take a decade.
Let’s not forget that the absurdly optimistic forecasting, brought to you by the Ministry of Justice and His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, has resulted in the emergency release of thousands of dangerous prisoners. These measures, themselves beset by mistakes, were started in the dying days of the last Conservative government and were a hospital pass to Keir Starmer’s incoming ministry in July. The political damage wrought by this will dissipate; the damage to voters who have been victims of crime will take much longer.
It is certainly true that the whole prison system has been neglected, and Conservative ministers have presided over criminally stupid austerity cuts that drove out experience on the prison service front line and brought in chaos. Promises to build new prisons and expand old ones were a convoluted mess, mired in spin and sophistry.
But ministers also rely on the one part of the prison service not light on manpower — the HQ boss class — to give them realistic information on how the jail population will develop and what needs to be done to keep pace with it. It now appears these projections were little more than guesswork. Allied to that, the “spades into ground” estimates on when new prisons could start expanding were so hopelessly optimistic that existing plans will now cost £4 billion more to deliver.
If we want a system that has the capacity to lock up and at least have a shot at changing people who pose a danger to society, we need accurate forecasts and competence. More than that, we need political courage. Removing foreign national offenders to their country of origin to serve their sentences could cut the prison population by up to 12%. Removing non-violent prisoners whose crimes relate to drug addiction and putting them in NHS secure detox could shave that figure further.
We have crudely repurposed male prisons to hold women whose offending is often driven by physical, sexual and psychological violence against them by males. We can punish many of them effectively elsewhere. Rather than release violent men into the community, they can be transferred to these places, which are already staffed to manage them. The Government has made much of its intervention to use executive authority to push through plans for a new “super-prison” in Lancashire, despite local objections. Yet two nearby state prisons are in a state of permanent crisis due to violence, drugs, disrepair and low staff morale. Increased capacity is no good without a well-managed staff to oversee it.
We can do other things that don’t involve continually releasing violent offenders piecemeal to a probation service equally on its knees. But to do this we need something that looks ever more unlikely: competent politicians operating in a drastically reformed administrative state.
Ian Acheson is a former prison governor and author of Screwed: Britain’s Prison Crisis and How To Escape it.
NotThatBigIan
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SubscribeWhat a miserable, unkind article. Has the writer given any thought to the person who was relieved of her suffering thanks to this procedure? What’s wrong with consumerism per se? Why should this development be monstrous? It is the alternative – of a slow, agonising and pointlessly painful death – that is monstrous.
Surely though staying alive has also been technologised and marketed to the highest bidder, often controlled by doctors who have no real sense of ‘quality of life’. Few people really die ‘naturally’ anymore.
Shades of Futurama…
So what. Its for individuals to decide and most people support physician assisted suicide. You may emote about that or also exagerrate that Canafa’s MAID is encouraging disabled people into suicide ( a lie) but this will happen in tne UK and you will need a coping strategy.
The Sarco pod is to death what elective caesarean is to birth.
I wonder how long it’s going to be before you can “help your family get by after you are gone” if you agree to a hunt as your modus operandi. Emphasis on die.
That pod would look great with a wooden door
maybe also some flapping arms and a Dalek-like voice shouting “Exterminate! Exterminate!”
It is vaguely reminiscent of a Reliant Robin.
More like a Sinclair C5.
A Utilitarian wet dream.
I think this is the rational end point of atheistic materialism. If life and existence aren’t suffused with meaning by a creator who put you here for a reason, to do something you must continue living to discover, then life becomes something to be enjoyed when it’s good and to be tossed away when it becomes painful or even inconvenient. This is why progressive politics in our era has increasingly turned into something like a death cult. Demands for “rights” increasingly have to do with the supposed freedom to kill or to die on demand. Pregnant with an unexpected child that it would inconvenience you to raise? Kill it. Doing anything you didn’t consent to or plan for would be immoral. Sick or depressed? Kill yourself. Why go on suffering for no reason? You were arbitrarily coughed up here without your input to struggle meaninglessly. Death, like life, has no moral dimension that would make either one distinguishable from the other. As a practical matter, death, in a universe with no God, is the end of experience and, therefore, pain so it’s seen more and more as the solution to every thorny existential problem.
Viktor Frankl, in his Man’s Search for Meaning, describes his experience as a trained psychologist put into the Nazi death camps. He saved the lives of many men who, their families dead and their lives unbearable, were on the verge of suicide. He writes that the men would say they were going to end it all because they no longer had anything to expect from life. Frankl would tell them, maybe that’s true, but life may yet have something to expect from you. By placing the man in service to life rather than life in the service of the man, he convinced many men to go on living in unimaginably bleak circumstances. Many survived. I think Frankl’s philosophy – called Logotherapy – is the only way back to sanity in a culture wrecked by radical selfishness and a nihilistic obsession with individualism.
“….by a creator who put you here for a reason….”. It sounds like you approach this from a religious perspective. That is your right, but what about those of us (a majority where I live) who do not adhere to that religious view?
I’d suggest you adopt the religious view. I’ve tried it without the religious view for 25 years and it doesn’t work any other way.
I think that having offspring serves much the same purpose.
If you’re one to wonder about your purpose in life, that purpose is concrete and you are now emotionally attached as a protector/provider/mentor to some degree for the remainder of your life.
Seriously.
You’re wrong. It’s a culture war. Your way leads to death and civilizational collapse.
You’re right, unfortunately. Look where the moral slide we’re in right now has lead us. Why do we still have suicide hotlines? We can’t seem to agree anymore that killing yourself is a bad thing. How would someone talk someone else out of committing suicide if suicide is now packaged as the answer to all life’s insoluble problems? As far as I can tell, it was only the belief that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the Everlasting had set His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter that made trying to stop suicidal people from carrying out their plans comprehensible. If death really is the best answer to pain, suffering, depression, ennui, sickness, etc.then why shouldn’t we promote it to everybody who wants it?
You are probably right but most people are materialists and want a choice of when and how to die. If you want to change this you need to convince people which you will fail to do if you castigated them for subscribing to ” radical selfishness” and ” nihilism” which makes you sound as though you consider yourself to be better than them.
I don’t consider myself to be better than them; I consider the way of thinking I’ve come to after many years of trying to do things the same way as them to be better than theirs. Life doesn’t owe us anything, we owe life. If you go around bitterly complaining that life hasn’t given you what you want, and you’re an atheist, who are you complaining to? It’s senseless. How about forgetting about what you want and open yourself up to the possibility that life needs something else from you and you’d better listen for when it calls you? And whenever it calls you for whatever you need to do, you’d better be there. In other words, you don’t decide when the show’s over. You might be needed on stage after you want it to be done.
I wonder how wealthy you are or how much good luck from inheritance you have had.
I’m not wealthy, don’t come from money, and I haven’t inherited anything and don’t stand to, although I’m not sure what that has to do with what I said about adopting a worldview that promotes a sense of duty to life and a faith that life has a purpose for you as an antidote to nihilism, despair, and suicide.
Logotherapy…or the Logos? The Word Who became flesh and dwelled among us?
Jesus Christ is the only Way back to life in culture enamoured of death and selfishness, friend. He redeems cultures by saving souls from the eternal, spiritual death in Hell that is the just punishment for our sins against a holy God. On the cross, Jesus bore the Father’s wrath against human sinfulness so that anyone who trusts in the Name of Jesus could be pardoned of their sins. Jesus paid the debt of our sins; if we trust in Him, we receive His holiness, so that when we stand before the Father after we die, He won’t look on us and see our sins but see the perfect, beautiful holiness of His Son. If you repent to Jesus in prayer and ask to be forgiven of your sins, and trust that He’s a good God Who’s compassionate and kind, and more than able to do for you what you could never do for yourself (pay the debt of every evil thing you’ve ever thought, said or done), then you’ll be brought back into relationship with Him. Jesus laid His life down so that His enemies whose sins put Him on the cross could become His friends, through repentance and faith (trust) in Him. Jesus is the God of loving-kindness, and in Him we can overcome all things—even despair and death.
Just as Jesus was resurrected, one day those who trust in Him too shall rise, overcoming this wicked world to be reunited with our Saviour and King.
“In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1:4-5.
Romans 3:23-26
One pictures Sol Roth obediently submitting to his state-mandated death to the tunes of Vivaldi and scenes of daffodil fields. Next, we’ll all be eating people.
Soylent Green.
Perhaps the rise of death cultism – whether de-growth environmentalism or assisted suicide, or simply gender dysphoria and childlessness, is telling us something about our species. Maybe our collective species consciousness is not so distinct from the collective consciousness of the biome it occupies, and the imbalances we have created within that biome are leading to these kinds of reactions.
What if, instead of 8 billion humans on earth, we had only 100 million? Would we have fewer assisted suicides and boys pretending they were girls?
It’s an interesting idea, But maybe as a species we’ve peaked and now we’re just idiots who inherited everything.
When I hear that idea, I’m always reminded of Asimov’s Foundation series, in which he (prescient master that he was) first articulated the idea of a degenerate civilisation relying on technologies it had forgotten how to engineer and no longer really understood.
I take the opposite view. I consider us to be a very young species, which in evolutionary terms is pretty accurate. Whilst our sense of history may make us seem old (there are no precedents for that ‘sense’) we might well be undergoing the kind of ‘growing pains’ that are inevitable once we’ve divested ourselves of certain illusions: the most egregious of course, being that we were “created”.
That’s not to say we mightn’t just blow ourselves to smithereens; but if we can work our way through the “loss of illusion” stage then there’s nothing to suggest we couldn’t continue to evolve and look back on these centuries in the way a mature adult looks back on the follies of their teenage years.
Hm. In every society I’ve ever seen or even read about there are some leaders and some followers. To get to the ideal “Everybody is equal and happy” seems counterintuitive, simply because each person is genetically different. So first you have to be able to control the gene pool……..
My point about lack of historical precedent isn’t about what’s already happened, but our sense of whether we’re “old” or not as a species.
I’ve not referred to gene pools, happiness or equality.
I agree that most societies are split between “leaders” and “followers”. I’ve always regarded myself as a “leader” without any “followers”.
I would think a person who says the idea that life is created is an “egregious” illusion should at minimum know things like where life came from, how the universe came into existence, and the source and nature of consciousness before ruling out a creative intelligence. And, even if you knew the answers to these questions, you’d still have to look at the deplorable consequences brought about by the loss of the “illusions” you refer to at scale and question whether there isn’t some fact about consciousness, whatever that might be, that requires those “illusions” in order to survive.
Does it matter whether or not there is a “creative intelligence”? However you spin it, we have free will. That is the important thing.
Very true. Our great burden.
I’m having a heap of fun exercising my free will.
Yes, it does. If the universe came into existence without an exercise of will by an intelligent being for some purpose then there can be no “why” to anything; there’s only “is”. If everything only is, it makes no sense to make normative (ought) statements about anything. We can say that things are a certain way and if we ask “why?” and we work our way down the turtle stack of “how” answers, we will finally hit bedrock at an “is” and have to conclude the “why” question itself is incoherent. And if we die and our consciousnesses die with us and experience ends, there is no moral import to existence at all. There is no consequence to any of our actions beyond their immediate effect. Let’s say we have free will. Some of us will choose kindness, fairness, and charity and some of us will choose cruelty, dishonesty, and selfishness. Indeed, cruelty, dishonesty, and selfishness carry a distinct advantage if your primary interest is getting power. If preferring kindness, fairness, and charity to cruelty, dishonesty, and selfishness is just a matter of each person’s preference, what can it matter which one a person chooses? To say this doesn’t matter is to miss the fact that the highly selfish, destructive behavior we see from many people today is a direct result of the conclusion that there is no moral reality.
I appreciate that this idea of a “collective consciousness of the biome” for the human species all sounds a bit “woo-woo” but there is a good well researched example albeit in prokaryotes :
Bacteria have this system called quorum sensing that does all sorts of neat things in order to optimise the survival of a bacterial colony (including stopping cell division). One of the inputs to these systems is the availability of chemicals (food) the bacteria need to thrive.
I have a possibly misplaced faith that homo sapiens is demonstrating a similar process right now – although I think the limiter for us will be fresh, imbibable water not food.
Fascinating details. Thank you Elaine.