The prison industry
The infographic below shows what big business private prisons have become in the USA. As you can see, the number of private prisons has grown exponentially in the last 20 years.
by NowSourcing.
The infographic below shows what big business private prisons have become in the USA. As you can see, the number of private prisons has grown exponentially in the last 20 years.
Once Michael Gove publishes more details of the nine new prisons he intends to build and we know for sure that they will be PFI, we can start testing out the Chancellor’s claim that the prison estate will be £80 million a year cheaper to run.
As the English and Welsh probation service is currently being privatised via the Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation initiative, here is a quick reminder of just how much the criminal justice system is privatised in other parts of the world.
As you can see, Britain (this chart averages rates for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) imprisons substantially more people (147 per 100,000) than the OECD norm of 115. I have to confess to being surprised that New Zealand is such a punitive society.
Over recent years most US states have reduced the amount they use incarceration (driven in great part by economic concerns) and have found that crime rates have gone down. Indeed, as this infographic from the Pew Foundation shows, those states which have cut the use of imprisonment have seen their crime rates fall further than those that haven’t:
You can see from the table that 281 people were sent to prison for possessing a Class C drug (Anabolic steroids, benzodiazepines, GHB, GBL, piperazines (BZP), and khat) despite having no previous convictions and a further 212 who had just one previous – bear in mind that 30% of British men have a criminal conviction by the age of 30.