Prison, and other things that don't work.
12th Mar 2009 19:14:05
There's not much to say about the case in question that hasn't been covered by the papers. Lord Ahmed was driving, in the dark, at night, texting on his mobile phone. Having sent and received 5 text messages, he crashed two to three minutes later into the back of a car which had crashed into the central reservation, killing a man. Ironically Lady Hallett, who is the fifth woman judge to be appointed to the Court of Appeal, (guess who browses Wikipedia while writing blog posts?) has said:
- Lady Hallett
Perhaps she's talking about a different message.
Correctly, one points out that Lord Ahmed was not texting or calling at the moment of the crash. To some degree, it's certain that he was made a scapegoat. But there were also two other people in the car, his mother and wife. I wonder, can they not read? Can they not send text messages?
Of course, this whole thing isn't really about Lord Ahmed. He's just an easy figure for the press to grab onto, to fixate on. The real problem is that of prison overcrowding. You can't imprison people if there aren't any prison spaces, that's just basic physics. And New Labour's solution was to release prisoners. Epic. We all remembered the news in early 2007 when prisoners had to be housed in police cells, in a desperate attempt to find more space to put them.
Under Labour, the prison population rose from approx. 65,000 in 1999 to 81,000 in 2007, which was where it stopped, because we only have 81,000 (ish) prison spaces. About two thirds of prisoners reoffend within 2 years of being released.
We can't imprison people because we have no prison spaces. We have no prison spaces because we have too many prisoners. We have too many prisoners because our current Government have failed massively in drug treatment, education and rehab programs. When Labour came to power, the percentage of prisoners that reoffended within 2 years was 58%. Now it's 67%.
In short, prisons have very little deterrent effect (because they're so full so you can only lock someone up for a half hour before you have to let him out to put someone else in), and very little re-education and rehab success (and that's coming from official Government figures).
We need education. We need a drug rehabilitation program that works and keeps people off drugs. We need to help prisoners be better people. We need to give them the skills they need to get a job. We need to keep them from committing crimes. Doesn't that sound like a more productive use of our time?
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