I suspect the rise in crime is more to do with more people being skint (crime always goes up during recessions). What this is about is more people getting away with it as there are less police to deal with it.

Revolving door anyway - the sooner they appear in court the sooner they get released as no prison spaces

Wish the gvmt would have the guts to say we need more prisons instead of pandering to the "don't lock them up" brigade. Obvious fact being people locked up can't do burglaries etc.

The England & Wales prison population is around 87,600 or about 156 per 100,000 of the general population. That's one of the highest in Western Europe. France's incarceration rate (per 100k of pop.) is 115 and Germany's is 83. How much higher does it need to get before we admit that simply banging people in gaol doesn't work?

Personally I wish the government would have the guts to say 'prisons aren't working' instead of pandering to the suburban "throw the key away" brigade.


Except it's not obvious.

1. No prison system can be 100% effective - ours definitely isn't
2. We can't lock burglars up for ever

Therefore we will always have recidivist criminals on our streets.

So rather than throwing 1 in 641 people in the clink, perhaps we'd be better off looking at crime prevention measures.

So rustybucket what are you saying?

People who commit crime should not be sent to prison? Surely that leads us on the road to anarchy and a complete breakdown of law & order?

Yeah rusty you fool. Can't you see that anything short of suspending them all by their testicles in dank rodent infested dungeons is tantamount to handing them guns and hand grenades and politely asking them to deflower our virgin daughters before tattooing gang slogans on their buttocks with a hot inky knitting needle!

In 2009 the average custodial sentence length (ACSL) was 13.7 months [1]. Merely increasing the prison population can never reduce crime in anything but the very short term - a mathematical consequence of criminals having to be released.

Secondly, the BCS crime rate and the total number of sentences (including non-custodial) have remained pretty much static since 1999. Despite myriad changes in sentencing guidelines and the ACSL in 2009 being
the crime rate doesn't respond to an increase in prison population. This agrees with other data from countries such as Germany and the US which seem to show that:

• although a decreased prison population tends to result in a short-term crime-rate increase, ...
• ...an increase in the prison population does not result in a decrease in the crime-rate

Thirdly, the crime-rate increase reportedly came about as a result of not having enough money to employ enough police officers. Where's the money for more prisons supposed to come from? It would be a lot cheaper (in Lancashire at least) to employ more police officers and prevent crime than spend money on more prisons and dealing with the consequences of crime.

More widely, we simply can't go on ignoring the problems we have by building more prisons and throwing people in there. There are serious causal problems that sticking people in the slammer can't and will never fix. For instance:

• 52% of male offenders and 71% of female offenders have no qualifications whatsoever
• 48% of prisoners have literacy skills at or below Level 1
• 65% have numeracy skills at or below Level 1
• More than one in three people in prison have a reading level below Level 1 and 75% for writing
  
  Level 1 is what is expected of an eleven year old.
  
  
• Studies suggest that 23% of people who go into prison have very low IQs of less than 70
• 49% of prisoners throughout the system have been excluded from school
• 67% of offenders (more than two thirds) were unemployed at the time of imprisonment

Big chunks of the crime problem are economic, social and educational. So instead of having the "guts" to destroy yet more potentially-useful lives, how about we admit that, for a big section of the population, the schools, environment, social pressures and job prospects are utter sh!te? They are sh!te because ever since the end of WWII, the vast majority of the UK government's policies have ignored the needs of anyone who isn't middle class. We - the middle classes - have repeatedly p!ssed on anything resembling a solution for no other reasons than the contents of our wallet, a swivel-eyed disgust of the poor and a priggish, Roundheaded fixation with retribution.

But retribution won't fix a damned thing.

==========================================================
[1] Excludes life and indeterminate sentences

So if we stop paying welfare money to idiots who sit and home and have endless children to get more benefits, they'll have less children as it won't be "worth it" and the average IQ of the population will rise, causing a lower percentage of the population to be in prison....

You're a bad man...

I prefer "Evil Genius".

Rusty, I have one question about the statistics you've presented

Do they show that uneducated, less smart people commit crime (because they have no other option) or does it show that uneducated, less smart people get caught committing crime because a) They're not smart enough not to get caught or b) they're too poor to afford a good lawyer and therefore avoid being sent to prison?

Jon

So this is “blue collar” crime we’re talking about. The kind of honest working class breaking and entering?

What about “white collar” crime - the frauds, the embezzlements, which also carry prison sentences? Is that on the rise, or are we to assume that Lancashire is a den of burglary and muggings?

To be honest, these aren't really the statistics one would need to be able to answer that question. To answer that, one would need to examine how exactly the causality works.

These figures are, in a sense, too late in the process. What we need is much more data about what parts of growing up and living Britain correlate with crime, rather than with custodial sentences. At the moment we have numbers that give us parts of the picture, but the data sets are so splintered and differently-collected that it's nigh on impossible to marry them up. However, if one were to consider all the familial, educational, socio-economic, environmental, political and justice issues, it would have to be a collossally-expensive, long-term, systematic, apolitical study. The data collection alone would take several lifetimes and the analysis of the resulting vaults of data would tax even Hari Seldon.

What we can say from the above numbers is that, somehow, a combination of factors (such as quality of education, academic achievement etc.) somehow renders a person much more likely to end up in prison. We can say that those who are unemployed or leave school as functional illiterates are somehow much more likely to get a custodial sentence. We can say that one correlates quite strongly with the other.

Unfortunately, the problem is with that word 'somehow'; the details of how the many relationships work are not very clear. And nobody wants to make the necessary alterations or pay to do the work that would provide the answers or solve the problem.

So what we get instead is a problem that never gets better whilst alternating bouts of Guardian-istas and Telegraph-ers concoct pseudo-statistical drivel in order to drive their own particular political agenda.

i have read this thread with interest and ask if prison isn't working what is the alternative
(i have my own ideas on punishment, none of them very pleasant) ...