Fact Sheet
Rethinking Crime
At the start of 2003 over 72,000 people were in prison in the UK, the highest rate of imprisonment in Western Europe - 139 people per 100,000 of the population. This is the highest prison population ever recorded. It is the equivalent of locking up the population of mid-Devon or a town the size of Barrow-in-Furness and it is still rising. The UK has built 26 new prisons in the last decade; 20 of them are already overcrowded. The government think the prison population may reach 110,000 by 2010.
The number of women in prison has tripled in the past decade. Between 1992 and 2002, the number of female prisoners rose from around 1,300 to more than 4,000. There are now more women in prison than at any time since 1901. An estimated 8,000 children are affected each year as a result of their mother’s imprisonment.
It costs over £40,000 to keep a person in prison for a year. This compares with only £3,000 for a probation order and £2,000 for community service.
58 per cent of adults discharged from prison are re-convicted within two years of release. Nearly three quarters of young offenders are reconvicted within two years.
In other words, the UK locks up large numbers of people at an extremely high cost.
Here are the rough costs:
Imprisonment
Sending one person to prison (one year) = £40,000
Sending one person to a young offenders’ institution (one year) = £42,000
Community Punishment
Community Rehabilitation Order (one year) = £3,000
Community Punishment Order (one year) = £2,000
Community Punishment and Rehabilitation (one year) = £4,000
Drug Treatment and Testing Order (one year) = £8,000
Intensive Supervision Support Programme (six months) = £6,000
The average annual unit cost of a prison place is more than 12 times as much as the cost of a probation or community service order. Community punishment deals with nearly four times as many people as prisons for only 40 per cent of the cost and there is little difference in the overall re-offending rates, although alternatives can be more effective.
What else could the money be spent on?
Sir David Ramsbotham, the former Chief Inspector of Prisons, argued that if you removed from prison children, the elderly, mentally ill people, asylum seekers and those imprisoned for lesser offences, such as shoplifting and personal drug use, the number of prisoners could be reduced by 20,000. Replacing this number of prison places with alternative sentences would save in the region of £690 million.
For that money one could buy either 276 new, completely furnished primary schools (at £2.5 million each), 86 new, completely furnished secondary schools (at £8 million each) or almost 3 new hospitals (at £250 million each).
Even a reduction in the prison population of 5 per cent, around 3,500 places, would save £120 million.
- Does prison offer the best value for money?
- Would it be better to spend less on prisons and more on treatment centres?
- If some of the prison budget was taken to invest in other community sentences, would they produce even better results?
What would you rather spend the money on?