Saturday, January 27, 2007

Each prisoner costs £39,000 per year


Whilst reading this column in the Daily Mirror I found that it costs £750 per week to house a prisoner. That means it costs us £39,000 per year just to house one prisoner. I thought it only cost £18,000 per year. Seeing as we have 80,000 prisoners it means that we are spending over £3 billion on our prisoners and this will become more as we house more prisoners.

This makes me think that paying foreign countries to put our prisoners in their prisons is still a better option than we have now. It would probably cost us less than half and the poor countries would still be making a profit. Everyone wins. They get money and we save atleast £1 billion pounds per year that could be diverted to sectors like healthcare or policing.

Of course we wouldn’t send all our prisoners to foreign countries. There is no point in sending them if they are serving less than 6 months. We would actually have the resources to put those serving less than 6 months into rehabilitation programmes.

6 comments:

James Higham said...

Imagine that as our yearly income. Think I'd better become a crim.

alanorei said...

The full cost of crime exceeds £60,000,000,000 a year. See A Land Fit for Criminals by David Fraser.

The Treasury saves money by not banging criminals up. (It will help pay for TB-liar's retirement package, hacienda and spread in Texas, maybe?)

The gov't passes the cost on to the community.

It's all about delegation.

Fraser also takes issue with the alleged overcrowding of prisons and shows how even if new prisons needed to be built, virtually all crime could be eliminated by locking up the persistent offenders. He indicates this would cost about £10,000,000,000 a year, but you would obviously save on the huge cost above.

(Though I guess the available remuneration TB-liar and co. would be decreased, so the idea is a non-starter for now.)

Re: Blogfocus, HaHaHa! The Mad Blogger, alias YDKM, strikes again!

James Higham said...

Please have a look at the new DTB post.

dearieme said...

I've thought this for some time: feel free to use my name for it. "Indian Cell Centre"

youdontknowme said...

or we just call it outsourcing criminal punishment and we call the prisons outsourced prison camps or something along those lines

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