this won’t help a great deal if there aren’t any jobs to go to when people get out of prison. With millions unemployed …yadda… .yadda… yadda….

You clearly missed the OBR’s forecast this morning that unemployment will be falling every year of this Parliament.

This article seems to be full of left wing contradictions on crime and punishment.

So, are you in favour of reducing the prison population or not?

the Tory false economy of slashing Labour’s job creation schemes and calling it a saving.

With each job costing 60 grand, it is a saving.

David,

You clearly believe that the Conservative position on prisons is not coherent, to the point you are concerned to point this out rather than set out something positive which might be better. So lets examine your points and see if this is really inconsistent.

1. You have an objection to privately-run prisons. But since government holds the purse strings and dictates conditions, for a debate about re-offending and numbers, this is a sideshow. Sure, there may be more (or less) re-offending from private prisons, but this needs to be proven to be relevant. This is an ideological difference from the Conservatives on your part; in terms of Conservative policy (which favours private involvement in state activities) I don’t see any contradiction.

2. The governments own figures expect unemployment to fall, so I guess this point assumes something different in saying it is a problem. But yes, getting a job after prison can be difficult, and hard economic times don’t help. How this, a situation which you may remember results from the policies of a Labour government, reveals contradictions in Conservative policy, is beyond me. The Conservatives want better education in prison, which will make ex-convicts better prepared for a tough job market; surely this is actually consistent with the government’s policies?

3. I assume that by invoking social welfare you are rolling out the old link between crime and poverty. Well, the Conservatives believe the route out of poverty is education, not dependence on welfare, so I can’t see any inconsistency here. The welfare net will still be there for the unemployed, they will just have to be seeking jobs (in fact, the same as normal).

4. If cost-cutting is the exercise, is it not the role of government to get best value for money out of all its departments? I see nothing inconsistent with the policy here – indeed, it could be argued that an emphasis on education and not reoffending was universely the best policy for prisons.

Overall, the Conservative position on prisons seems consistent and coherent, even (especially?) considering the times and finances. Certainly, I do not get the impression that there is any particular solution you would advocate in preference, so this seems like an attempt to shoot at a target without understanding it first. From a left-wing perspective elements of the prison policy may appear wrong, but that is ideological differences, not Conservative incoherence.

Overall, the Conservative position on prisons seems consistent and coherent, even (especially?) considering the times and finances.

Put more people in prison when the country can afford it and let them out when we can’t?

That makes no sense at all.

@1 Flowerpower — I have read the OBR predictions but I’ve also been reading the FT detailing a private sector struggling to hire people. Job destruction on the part of the State is straightforward – we know we’re losing 1.3m jobs, roughly speaking – what we don’t know (beyond the growth figures that were revised downwards only this month) are how many jobs we’re likely to gain. I’m not convinced by the OBR.

Whatever the case, even if we do predict the growth of employment year on year, and the decline in unemployment, this does not take into account geographically where the growth is happening and amongst what sectors of the economy – or whether or not those sectors are likely to be open to ex-convicts.

@2 Martin Coxall — I didn’t notice any contradictions. Please feel free to highlight them. I am in favour of fewer custodial sentences and a reduction in prison population. I thought that part at least was pretty clear. The purpose of the article was to point to countervailing pressures within the Tory Party and policy.

@3 LizzieG — DWP documentation suggests the Future Jobs Fund, which is to be culled by the Tories, was worth about £1bn at most and was aimed at producing 150,000 jobs. That’s a cost of ~£6,667 per job. Average cost of jobseekers for a year for a similar number, of under 25s, at the lower rate, is about £404.4m per year, and the fund was meant to run for the life of this parliament – that was Labour’s proposal. Now assuming that both Labour and the Tories have budgeted that as the private sector picks up, the strain on benefits will decrease (and we haven’t counted housing benefit or anything like that), even if fewer people are claiming benefits because some of the 150,000 can find other jobs, it wouldn’t take long for the cost to outweigh the saving.

I noted at the time of the budget that the Tories were planning on taking £290 million from the FJF – so scale all the numbers down accordingly. And this is just one fund, the one targeted specifically at young people. There are other funds, however, such as the Young Person’s Guarantee which is similarly applicable and geared towards funding apprenticeships, other types of training and so on, from which the Tories have taken £450m. Plus, none of my costs have factored in the other costs of unemployment and reduced opportunities for training which are met socially – e.g. crime and policing.

@4 Watchman, this is one article. Sometimes I write about alternatives, sometimes I critique that which is, or at least which is proposed.

Also, I’m not saying the Tory policy is incoherent, I’m saying the contradiction is between two elements of Tory policy and reality. This is why nowhere in the article will you find the words ‘inconsistent’ or ‘incoherent’.

Ken Clarke genuinely believes that the private sector will pick up and supply employment if government costs and regulations are cut, and unions reined in; in the run up to the election, he wrote several policy papers to that effect. Fair play to him. I disagree. I think we’re likely to see a heavier burden on workers in all sorts of ways, and, as previously mentioned, many millions more unemployed – which is important even if it lasts only a few years.

Quickly, as my reply here is getting overly long,

1: Clarke’s rhetoric implies that it is New Labour that have let things get to such a crisis point in prison services – but his proposals don’t go beyond exactly what New Labour suggested and tried to implement. Straw and the rest regularly went the route of trying to institute extra non-custodial ideas.

2: I don’t think the current situation does result from government policies. The contradiction is in urging prison education for jobs whilst cutting jobs.

3: The welfare link will not be there same as normal – yes, there will be jobseekers, but the budgetary measures have already heralded attempts to cut benefits and IDS is unrolling further measures upon which to make benefits contingent. This makes access more difficult – and while education might be the route out of poverty long-term, it’ll do ex-prisoners no good if in the wait for the private sector to pick up the slack in the jobs market, they’re sitting around all day. Not to mention that being on benefits still counts as being impoverished.

4: I’m all for education, and for the tactics which are proven to prevent re-offence. Who isn’t? Seriously. These are universally lauded things. I wasn’t attacking them. I was suggesting that there is a contradiction between waxing lyrical on education for a work environment as a means to cut re-offences, and cutting the number of jobs and subsidies to organisations likely to provide jobs while we’re still not quite sure how the global economic situation is going to turn out.

There’s also a contradiction between talking about cutting costs and cutting re-offence rates in an atmosphere where staff that work in and outside of prisons are already reporting unhealthy pressure, understaffing etc – things that contribute to adverse environments and declining support for prisoners. There’s a reason the head of the Prison Officers’ Association joined the Socialist Party, defecting from Labour.

Wow, a ‘liberal’ site arguing we should keep people locked up because it’s cheeper – and the same day you have an article proposing putting more children in care to save money. And I thought it was supposed to be the Tories who were willing to sacrifice humanity for a quick buck.

Maybe if you actually worked with ex-offenders you might see them as something more than items on a balance sheet. Keeping people behind bars because there’s no work got them is a disgusting idea. Why not just lock up the rest of the unemployed while you are at it?

Whatever the Tories’ motivation for locking fewer people up we should be celebrating.

Prison should be the option of last resort. It destroys lives. There are people for whom prison is the only option but for most people in there the effect is destructive, not rehabilitative.

Maybe if you actually worked with ex-offenders you might see them as something more than items on a balance sheet. Keeping people behind bars because there’s no work got them is a disgusting idea.

That man gets it!

“You clearly missed the OBR’s forecast this morning that unemployment will be falling every year of this Parliament.”

Which if true, only goes to show that things were not as bad as the tories claimed things where under Labour. Still, we now we know that Call me Dave is a liar as he said he had no intention to raise VAT during the election.

Call me Dave should be renamed call me a liar. And he is only been in office a couple of weeks and the lies keep on coming.

For so long the limited job hopes for prisoners has not only been a false economy, rightly pointed out by Mr Semple, but also a kind of noble lie; a known lie upheld by the government because it removes the perverse incentive to stay in prison. A prison population of people like Brooks from Shawshank Redemption is not something that the government wants, so a jobs fallacy is created.

But the point of the article, missed by others on the comments thread is, how will the government possibly remove the perverse incentive now that there is a massive job shortage again?

Shatterface:

“Wow, a ‘liberal’ site arguing we should keep people locked up because it’s cheeper” – if fewer prisoners were less consumed by the jobs lie, they might keep themselves locked up.

Sally @ 9

Which if true, only goes to show that things were not as bad as the Tories claimed things where under Labour.

I’m afraid it doesn’t show that at all. What the OBR figures do show is that public sector job losses would have been 150,000 greater under Labour’s plan and that the brightened employment prospects are a result of George Osborne’s excellent budget.

Secondly, for all this talk about prisons being places of education – a solid and welcome return of a very old liberal idea – this won’t help a great deal if there aren’t any jobs to go to when people get out of prison. With millions unemployed, and Tory plans to slash the State sector to ribbons proceeding apace – and private sector investment not yet prepared to pick up the slack – education won’t stop a slide to crime.

Should we not try education anyway?