THE COST OF CRIME
Prisons are not as expensive as crime, according to Prison Works, a website which supports the prison service.
Founding editor Alan Drew believes imprisonment ultimately reduces crime, and is a practical solution.
“Prison is extremely expensive,” Mr Drew said. “But one must also factor in the cost of crime, which is frequently ignored.”
According to the most recent economic report from the Home Office in 2005, the estimated cost of crime against individuals and households (based on prices in 2003/2004) is £32.2bn.
This is compared to the £3.4bn that it costs to keep criminals in prison.
“So if one takes a purely economic perspective, prisons are not as expensive as crime,” he added.
However, the National Audit Office (NAO), Whitehall’s spending watchdog, revealed that re-offending of short term offenders costs the government £10bn a year.
Head of the NAO, Amyas Morse, said: “Achieving the National Offender Management Service's (NOMS) goal of reducing re-offending by short term sentenced prisoners is challenging both because there are so many prisoners and because of the few weeks they have in custody. However it is reasonable to expect progress towards that goal.”
The report is welcomed by organisations who support probation and community based punishments. Sophie Willett from the Howard Reform League believes rehabilitative punishments are a more cost-effective way of dealing with criminals.
“Community programmes have a lower re-offending rate and operate at a fraction of the cost of prison sentences,” she said.
Issuing community penalities instead of custodial sentences will cut costs, says the National Audit Office (NAO).
According to reports, more help could be given to rehabilitate short term offenders and reduce re-offending, which could save money.Over 60,000 prisoners serve sentences of under a year, which costs NOMS around £300m.*
On average, these prisoners have 16 previous convictions each and a high level of homelessness, unemployment and drug and alcohol problems.
Half of them are not involved in work or rehabilitation courses and spend most of their time in a cell, the report states.
Although prisons offer a wide range of courses, due to overcrowding, constraints of physical space and long waiting lists, prisons often do not meet the needs of prisoners, with the exception of drug services.
Figures show that 60% of such prisoners re-offend within a year of release, at an estimated cost of between £7bn and £10bn a year.
NAO are calling on NOMS to spend more money on rehabilitating these short term prisoners in order to reduce re-offending.
The Ministry of Justice are currently developing plans to improve the rehabilitation of prisoners who serve less than 12 months in jail; however no details have been released yet.
*Figures from NAO report.