Criminals could fill potholes and clean bins under government plans
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqj7d1dwz1vo
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Criminals could fill potholes and clean bins under government plans
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqj7d1dwz1vo
Posted by [deleted]
29 Comments
“Private companies would also be able to employ those who are on community sentences.”
Immigration is bad because it drives down wages yet this is ok?
Why even hire people on minimum wage if the government will give them to you for free. Couple this with benefit cuts driving more people into crime, who are then forced to work for free.
Labour really leaning into those far right policies.
Get rid of council tax and central resource allocation and bring in local income tax like Japan. Then councils have loads of money and don’t have to beg the central government to stop slashing their funding. Reduce income tax by 10% and create a 10% local tax, so as far as taxpayers are concerned nothing changes.
This is one of the reasons local services are so good and well funded in Japan. The street I walked along to work in central Tokyo was spotless because they had council workers picking up every morsel of litter every morning.
They even have a system where you can choose to pay your local tax to any council in the country instead of the one you live in, such as the small countryside town you’re originally from. That helps spread money from rich big city councils with lots of high taxpayers to more rural ones. And in return for doing that that council will send you some of their local produce, for example you can choose a council in a region famous for mangoes or beer or beef and get monthly deliveries of those things to your house.
As usual, it’s talking about **unpaid work**.
There’s absolutely no excuse to not pay them a minimum wage to do it. A big contributor to reoffending is that criminals struggle to land and keep a job, not being able to afford to live. Couple that with the fact that these jobs are normally paid so they’ll be hiring less people and pocketing the change.
It’s all grandstanding, they want the optics from looking ‘hard on crime’ to try and net votes, even if in reality it’s not going to help the situation at all.
And people didn’t believe me when I said we will eventually adopt the US prisoner slaves model!
If private companies etc want to use them then they should have to give said prisoners employment after completing their sentence to be able to use prison labour. If they are good enough to use in prison they should be good enough to use out of prison so it’s not just companies exploiting prison labour while giving nothing back to save a few quid. No reason it shouldn’t be a requirement.
Though the prisoners should be getting paid to do the work really.
Labour needs to soon think about the challenge from their left wing flank, such as from the Reform party 😏
This is just an extension of the existing Community Order sentencing scheme:
[https://www.gov.uk/community-sentences](https://www.gov.uk/community-sentences)
nothing fundamentlly new.
Successive governments for many years have played around with “ideas” like this and in most case, nothing much seems to happen.
In the case of potholes, proper repair which is going to last needs equipment, materials and training. Just filling potholes with scalpings, as seems to be illustrated above, and thumping it down is going to last a few weeks at best or until the first HGV rumbles across it.
I have no problem with them being forced to payback to society. Work provided to the good behaviour prisoners, take time off your sentence and get earlier release. Pays to work.
We should fill the pot holes with criminals. Wow. Just wow!
Don’t know about anyone else but I’d rather not have a bunch of unqualified people repairing the roads I drive on.
If we’re going to make prisoners work then we need it to fulfil an industry/area where it won’t have a negative impact on the economy. Textile work would be a great area to employ prisoners as this is often done by immigrants with no right to work and would undercut illegal work.
Put their asses to work.
Unpaid, they have it better than many others that are not criminals. I’m sick of paying for them to get high and stab guards.
There needs to be a national conversation about what our criminal justice system is for. Is it to punish or rehabilitate or both?
If you want criminals to see that there is a better way to live than going back to crime (currently 60% of criminals reoffend within 2 years) then we need to copy the nordic model, which despite costing more per inmate due to rehabilitation, actually saves the state in the long run due to lower societal costs of policing ect….
In the uk we have a perverse private prison system where G4S and others are paid for each inmate, so why would they want less crime when each criminal that gets imprisoned means more income and profit?
if you want to punish people then just look at chain gangs and slave firefighters in california who battled wildfires for almost zero money. (and reoffending rates in the US are just as bad as ours.)
This tinkering around the edges will solve nothing. It needs to be a more holistic cross party approach successive governments will stick to and agree on. No one in government wants to grasp the nettle on this and be honest with the people, it’s all about optics and soundbites. all the while your (increasing) taxes are paying for it.
Not a bad idea. See it as a repayment for time spent wasting the judicial system
Hey they had the chance when they were in government
This is an excellent way to double prison capacity. Half of the prison population could be out at work during the day while the other half sleep in their beds, then after twelve hours they swap and the sleepers go out to work while the worker use the beds.
The human rights brigade will have a field day but this is 100% correct.
Using Thomas More’s Utopia as a guidebook.
Probably not a bad thing the way things have been going.
If prisons are over crowded then shoplifters etc should get mandatory 2 year community service sentences. Don the high viz and get litter picking, street cleaning etc
Got to keep those wages down, reduce immigration you need to find all those lovely low paying workers somewhere.
I’m slightly against prison labour. I think a better solution is people on benefits get put to work by the government. Pot holes, litter picking, grass mowing, etc. can all be done part time for minimum wage to earn their benefits.
Yes! Instead of imported slave labour let’s have a full-on criminal slave class to do our council work.
What happens to people already employed to do these jobs?
What happens to people already employed to do these jobs?
This is what I’ve been saying for years. Plenty of small social projects they could work on. Rebuild the communities they harm.
Manna from heaven for whichever private ‘service provider’ (eg serco) implements this. bill the client (tax payer) at the going rate for construction workers, pay the worker (prisoner) nothing. Trebles all round.
Good idea , criminals they would take more pride in their work than the idiots currently doing it. heard of a steamroller??
Fulham council just gave me penalty driving through their posh street which they call clean air area and is 500m from my house but across bridge from Wandsworth.
I was working for uber and driving locals from Fulham home but they live few hundreds meters from the clean posh street but still in Fulham so I’m not allowed to enter the street.
I live in this area more than 15 years.
F….g joke!
How people can take anymore this stupid new rules!
I wonder where all of this millions from penalties ends up?
I imagine they will do a very good job, taking real care and pride in their work.