Sir Alan Beith - "fine report" on huge new prison costs..

1.26.00pm GMT Sat 16th Jan 2010

Sir Alan Beith, chair of Commons Justice Committee.

This interesting article caught our eye - "Britain must call a truce on its criminal justice arms race - If imprisonment is the measure, Britain is twice as wicked as 30 years ago. We have become the Texas of Europe."

It's from Martin Kettle, writing in The Guardian, Friday, Jan 15th 2010 - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/14/criminal-justice-arms-race-prisons

His premise is - we have to stop this crazy, competitive spiral of locking people up. He endorses Lib Dem policy on prisons.

His article follows publication of the Commons Justice Committee's report on prisons. The committee was chaired by Lib Dem MP Alan Beith. This is what Kettle wrote.

"As penal thinking has spiralled out of sense, so have penal costs. According to the Commons justice committee's immensely significant report this week, the new building programme will cost between £3.2bn and £4.2bn, with running costs for the extra places estimated at £482m a year....

"The report also notes that the average capital build cost per new prison place tripled to £153,000 between 1998 and 2008. As the committee scathingly observes: "These huge sums of money have been committed without any obvious cost-benefit analysis of alternative options or any public consultation on the desirability of a prison building programme." It costs £40,000 a year to keep someone in prison. Is there no better use for such sums?"

Thios is Kettle's closing paragraph.

"Another way to break Britain of its imprisonment binge would be to vote for the party of the man who chaired the Commons inquiry, the Liberal Democrat Sir Alan Beith, who has done the nation no small service with this week's fine report. But the cold truth is that there are no voters in prisons, and no votes there either."