Prison ships are not the way to rehabilitation revolution
01.02.2010
David Cameron’s mission to use prison ships to get himself out of the overcrowding/early release problems are ill thought-through and utterly counterproductive to his rehabilitation revolution vision.
What he appears to completely miss is that a large proportion of prisoners are low-level offenders on short-term sentences who should not be locked up in the first place. Cameron could quite sensibly use the prison ship money to arrange suitable punishment for these offenders in the community. Despite some scepticism for community sentences, they are in fact much for effective at reducing re-offending for this particular group of persistent but low-level, non-violent offenders. Only by diverting resources into community provision can we ever hope to stem the numbers flowing into our prison system and put pride into community sentences.
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In the media
- 01.03.10 | Community Care
Local approach to youth justice ‘could save millions of pounds’ - 01.03.10 | The Guardian
£140,000: What it costs to jail a young criminal for a year - 14.02.2010 | The Observer
Gordon Brown set to end early jail release scheme - 03.03.2010 | Metro UK
Put paid to young offending - 01.02.2010 | Times Online
Prison ships: return to an unsuccessful experiment