Keir Starmer hits out at prison system ‘mess’ caused by Tories
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/06/keir-starmer-tribal-politics-four-uk-nations
Posted by loonongrass
Keir Starmer hits out at prison system ‘mess’ caused by Tories
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/06/keir-starmer-tribal-politics-four-uk-nations
Posted by loonongrass
8 Comments
Good thing he has appointed the ceo of Timpsons as the minister of prisons via the Lords. I’m sure there’s no conflict of interest there.
Edit: lots of people asking why.
He publicly states a third of people in prison shouldn’t be there and will be working in a government that has to immediately deal with a prison service in crisis over population.
He owns a company that deals with clothing repairs, dry cleaning, security products, etc that with minor adjustments could pivot to specialist products that would stand to make billions.
I’m not saying it will happen, but given the track record of thieving fucks in government, I won’t hold my breath.
There’s no quick fix for this, we need more capacity but it’s going to take awhile to get more prisons up and running.
I was quite pleased to see James Timpson being made minister, the scheme for released prisoners at Timpsons and their prison academies is exactly what we need to be seeing more of.
Part of the solution is more prison capacity, that just hasn’t grown enough. A much more important part is reducing recidivism and trying to prevent people going down the path of needing prison in the first place. If we can get that right the long term savings would be significant.
We need larger capacity and stricter sentencing, total chaos at the moment with prolific offenders running wild due to the policy failure of soft sentencing
This is one of the lesser political issues in the election that needed to be discussed more.
Its all well and good politicians saying “Oh we’ll just build more prisons”, but that takes time and is still just a sticking plaster to the rising level of crime and incarcerations in the UK.
The new Labour Cabinet need to have an extensive and serious discussion on how to bring crime down drastically over the next five years.
We need to recruit more and better staff, give them better and more training, pay them better and have really good support in place for them in terms of managing the stress and emotional impact. You can build as many new prisons as you like but if you can’t staff them well they will remain violent, dirty places full of highly restricted inmates who get angrier rather then rehabilitated.
And we need to improve- vastly, radically improve- community criminal justice services. What the fuck people expect probation officers with stupidly large caseloads and minimal resources to do is beyond me.
The talk about preventing reoffending and intervening to prevent people turning to crime is promising. But it does also need to be acknowledged there are some absolute scumbags out there who get a tap on the wrist, and go out and commit more crimes.
I seem to recall an intervention program aimed at reducing gang violence which was astonishingly successful and was scrapped due to funding cuts instead of being replicated across the country. Even though this would have paid for itself many times over in the amount of resources murder cases take, even not considering the human element.
He said it was impossible to stop the current policy of releasing prisoners early because of the lack of capacity in jails.
Yes it is, just cram them in. When they are all playing sardines instead of Xbox prison might start being a deterrant.
Whilst the Conservatives have most of the responsibility for this mess, a lot of the problems were set in motion by Labour in 97-10 with their relentless drive for tougher sentences, their IPP sentencing, and continuing the relentless increase in prisoners.
It would be nice to have politicians brave enough to acknowledge that what’s about needed is about 25% fewer prisoners, freeing up resources for rehabilitation of those that are in there.
The current ‘stack em high sell em cheap’ approach of warehousing people in cells 23 hours a day just does not work to rehabilitate.