The reluctance to build prisons is ideological, not financial.
“You can’t incarcerate your way out of crime” proponents and all that nonsense.
Actually, not in the UK's case. It was entirely financial. Their problems stem back to the Cameron government, when they implemented austerity, and required a 25% cut to the entire home office budget, including the part that paid for prisons. Older prisons were shut down to save money. Some new ones were built, too, but not enough to increase capacity. At the same time, they changed sentencing laws (made them harsher), which resulted in the average sentence length increasing. So more people were going to prison for longer periods of time, but they weren't increasing capacity.
BoJo tried to do a little, but it wasn't nearly enough, and it got bogged down by bureaucracy (largely due to local planning committees slowing things down because no one wanted the prisons near them). Now, the government is racing to build prisons as fast as possible, and declaring them whatever the UK version of an emergency is to prevent the local governments from meddling.
All that is true but there is an ideological component.
2. Government and Policy ConsensusThis skepticism has reached the highest levels of U.K. policymaking. A government-appointed sentencing review led by former Conservative Justice Secretary David Gauke concluded that building more prisons is prohibitively expensive and ineffective at reducing crime. Current Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood similarly stated that "building alone is not enough" to solve the systemic crisis, favoring policy interventions like the Sentencing Act—which expands suspended sentences and curtails short custodial terms—to reduce the inbound demand on the estate.
No, there really isn't, unless you want to point to the Conservatives' ideological reasons for supporting harsher sentencing.
Whatever various politicians feel about the prison system in theory, in practice what happened was the Conservative government allowed prison capacity to fall far below what was needed, and now the Labour government is rushing to undo this. And none of this had to do with any ideological views of prison itself. It only had to do with budgets.
Come off it Goat. You have successive British versions of the AG coming out and saying mass incarceration isn’t the answer. Across conservative and labour governments. You’re just not correct on this one. Deal with it.
Come off it Goat. You have successive British versions of the AG coming out and saying mass incarceration isn’t the answer. Across conservative and labour governments. You’re just not correct on this one. Deal with it.
LOL, you already admitted I was right..."but..."
You really have no clue what you're talking about. As usual. Begone.
Come off it Goat. You have successive British versions of the AG coming out and saying mass incarceration isn’t the answer. Across conservative and labour governments. You’re just not correct on this one. Deal with it.
LOL, you already admitted I was right..."but..."
You really have no clue what you're talking about. As usual. Begone.
What you fail to understand, is that budgets are a reflection of priorities. Claiming the lack of prison capacity is a “budget problem” is the same as saying the U.K. doesn’t prioritize imprisoning offenders.
On some things, yes. On this, he has an interesting and not necessarily wrong point of view. I think liberals are extremely and myopically ignorant on all sorts of issues. Good luck getting liberals to fathom how they're "racist" or misguided in the way he describes.I presume you disagree with him?
What you fail to understand, is that budgets are a reflection of priorities. Claiming the lack of prison capacity is a “budget problem” is the same as saying the U.K. doesn’t prioritize imprisoning offenders.
Not if it means spending a bunch of money.
What you fail to understand, is that budgets are a reflection of priorities. Claiming the lack of prison capacity is a “budget problem” is the same as saying the U.K. doesn’t prioritize imprisoning offenders.
Not if it means spending a bunch of money.
The U.K. is a very wealthy country. 6.2 million full time workers in the U.K. would actually make more not working and being on welfare. That’s about 1/4 full time employees. Thats a dang generous welfare system.
The idea they can’t afford some walls and some cells is absurd on its face.
Their priorities are fucked.
What you fail to understand, is that budgets are a reflection of priorities. Claiming the lack of prison capacity is a “budget problem” is the same as saying the U.K. doesn’t prioritize imprisoning offenders.
Not if it means spending a bunch of money.
The U.K. is a very wealthy country. 6.2 million full time workers in the U.K. would actually make more not working and being on welfare. That’s about 1/4 full time employees. Thats a dang generous welfare system.
The idea they can’t afford some walls and some cells is absurd on its face.
Their priorities are fucked.
So it's financial priorities, not ideological. See, that wasn't so hard.
What you fail to understand, is that budgets are a reflection of priorities. Claiming the lack of prison capacity is a “budget problem” is the same as saying the U.K. doesn’t prioritize imprisoning offenders.
Not if it means spending a bunch of money.
The U.K. is a very wealthy country. 6.2 million full time workers in the U.K. would actually make more not working and being on welfare. That’s about 1/4 full time employees. Thats a dang generous welfare system.
The idea they can’t afford some walls and some cells is absurd on its face.
Their priorities are fucked.
So it's financial priorities, not ideological. See, that wasn't so hard.
He hasn't even wrapped his head around the basics. The key element is that the conservatives closed the prisons and the liberals are rushing to build more, and all of that just flew in one ear and out the other.
What you fail to understand, is that budgets are a reflection of priorities. Claiming the lack of prison capacity is a “budget problem” is the same as saying the U.K. doesn’t prioritize imprisoning offenders.
Not if it means spending a bunch of money.
The U.K. is a very wealthy country. 6.2 million full time workers in the U.K. would actually make more not working and being on welfare. That’s about 1/4 full time employees. Thats a dang generous welfare system.
The idea they can’t afford some walls and some cells is absurd on its face.
Their priorities are fucked.
So it's financial priorities, not ideological. See, that wasn't so hard.
He hasn't even wrapped his head around the basics. The key element is that the conservatives closed the prisons and the liberals are rushing to build more, and all of that just flew in one ear and out the other.
Jesus you two are dense. Here’s the rub. I don’t care if they were Tories or Labour. You seem to think that somehow matters. They’re all commies to me and relative to American politics.
Mark, financial priorities reflect ideological priorities.
If they cared about public safety the prisons would be built. But they’d rather helicopter out welfare dollars.
@jdb no, but what they need needed to be done ten years ago. It takes time to build prisons and staff them. In the meantime, they are stuck with the crap choice of letting people out early or suspending new convicts' sentences until a cell opens up.
death is always an option