A THOUGHT FOR TODAY - OPEN THE PRISON GATES AND LET THE PRISONERS OUT?!

The United Kingdom is currently having problems with both her prison population and with the men and women, the staff, on whom she depends to ensure that her prisons are run properly.

Properly, of course, includes making sure that both the inmates and the staff are protected and not exposed to harm of any sort. The prison staff are currently arguing that there is too much violence in the prisons, and that both the staff and the inmates are being exposed to unacceptable levels of actual or potential violence.

The staff are arguing that the staff running the prisons are not sufficient to ensure their and the inmates' safety. The prison population of the United Kingdom is a massive 85,000 and rising, as the current and previous governments adopted a punitive and victorian approach of, 'convicted them and lock them up.' 

In order to ensure that that policy is implemented, governments over the past several decades, passed the relevant pieces of legislation to to give the judiciary the statutory powers to pursue a 'tough on crime', convict and lock them up approach. No more than about a decade ago, Britain was giving serious consideration to adopting America's infamous 'three strokes and you are in for life' approach to crime and punishment. 

Crime, you might want to remember, can also be a politically constructed concept, just as how the laws which are used to punish crime, often emanate from the policies of governments.

As might have been expected by a prudent person, it was not long before the United Kingdom's old and overcrowded prisons were crammed with even more incarcerated inmates, but without the necessary increase in staff complement to even attempt to provide the prison population with a decent service. 

But then, governments only appear to be interested in the conditions of their prison population. More likely they really do not give a damn, because they they, the prisoners, are perceived as condemned humans, if that, as they have many of their rights and all of their freedom removed from them.

However, upon being compelled by the unacceptableness of the situation, governments were forced to offer some remedy; however temporary and ineffective. You see, it is a standard approach for governments to increase the responsibilities and duties of those who work in the public sector, without providing the relevant establishments with the additional staff and resources they need. This is how governments attempt to achieve 'efficiency' or increased 'productivity.'

In the case of trying to address the chronic overcrowding in the prison population, the government resorted to contracting private operators to not only staff prisons, but to build and staff them.


To be continued.