Excellent summary.
1. The Olympics is not the biggest waste of money ever (in absolute terms) but in relative terms that 400% cost overrrun is pretty damning.
2. There is no point pretending that prison is for punishment or rehabilitation. It is a simple crime prevention measure, and as the article explains, the benefits far outweigh the costs.
3. That's all politicians do, is buy votes. Labour do this one way, the Tories will do it another way. Sad but true.
Why does it cost £26,000 to keep someone in a concrete room?
That's a BOM post I'd like to see. Even counting for prison officers (who have the highest number of stress related sick days in the CS) that figure is farcical.
Bring back flogging for repeat offenders, remove the gyms, social workers and fancy food. Look them to the walls for ten hours a day, give them books to read. The rest of the time shove the swine in chain gangs and make them clean the rest of the country up or do hard labour.
Better still make them feed themselves from an allotment. Firstly they'd learn to co-operte or starve, secondly they'd get some semblance of value for hard work.
Alternatively make the prisoners build the olympic nonsense. That'd shred labour costs.
There is insufficient prison capacity to lock up all the "bad guys". In December 2007 HMG announced that it would be building a further 10,500 prison places at an estimated cost of £3.2 billion. I make that around £219k per additional prison place.
http://www.justice.gov.uk/public...licy-
update.pdf (see p5 of the document; p6 of the pdf)
However, as you demonstrate in your piece on the 2012 Olympics, building costs tend to rise significantly so the actual cost may well be much higher.
Furthermore, research by Prof Hedderman appears to show that expanding prison capacity increases reconviction rates.
http://www.independent.co.uk/new...nds-
872411.html
I'd like to see a crit of the Home Office methodolgy. The ST graphic seems to me to work only if the recidivism rate is 100%.
But we all know that's not true. Young crims are growing up around us and old ones often go straight in the end - i.e. they grow up and get a job.
The striking figure is the £65,000 on prosecution. Nearly £40,000 on detection, court, social reports, etc.? At that price they all seem like criminal masterminds requiring the forensic skills of Perry Mason to get them bang to rights.
Looking from the perspective of labour govt, where crims are clients, it's natural to take a business attitude, i.e. spend as little as possible on the client. Hence the police give up on low level neighbourhood crime and the courts are encouraged to use any alternative to short sentences.
Put me down as a wishy washy libtard if you like, but I have a twinge of sympathy for these yobs. Most of the prison population comes from broken homes, rubbish schools, etc.
And that's where your point 3 really nails the problem. Who causes, who subsidises, who benefits from all the broken homes etc?. Why, (at least) 189 labour MPs. The presence of a huge benefit-proletariat in a third or so of constituencies makes a rump of labour MPs virtually bomb proof.
Looking at the £39,000 cost of putting a yob behind bars (surely ridiculous?) it's interesting to compare with your previous post, about private policing costs.
Presumably private police do not have to do all the arse-numbing paper shuffling necessary to get the prosecution case in order, nor hang around at court waiting for the crim to not show up...
So this might explain part of the difference in cost between private (£3-50) and public (£9) police costs.
Shirley Porter must be feeling quite hard done by.
See http://www.extrem-billiger.de/?p=50
It's in German, so, here is the translation per picture:
"Die Forderungen des Geiselnehmers und die darauf folgende Verhandlung"
The demands of the kidnapper and the subsequent negotiations
-----
„Ich habe 3 Forderungen oder der Junge stirbt!“
I have 3 demands or the boy dies!
-----
"Die Lage wird von nebenan überprüft"
The situation is investigated next door.
-----
"Der Vermittler erscheint auf dem
Bild"
The negotiator appears in the picture.
-----
"Die Verhandlungen beginnen"
The negotiation begins.
------
"Verhandlungen abgeschlossen"
Negotiations complete.
-------
"Das alles kostet ca. 35 Cent. Hierzulande hätten wir die Straßen für 48 Stunden abgeriegelt, hätten 12 Stunden lang verhandelt und dann 5 Millionen ausgegeben, damit er eine faire Verhandlung bekommt und ihm dann “lebenslänglich” 15 Jahre lang Kost und Logis umsonst zukommen lassen.
Ist daher auch kein Wunder, dass die Chinesen alles billiger herstellen können!"
This all cost 35 cents. In this country, we would have closed the streets for 48 hours, negotiated for 12 hours, spent 5 million on a fair trial, and then supplied food and shelter for the 15 year 'life' tariff.
No wonder the Chinese can produce goods so cheaply!
Heidschnucke for Home Secretary 
Why does it cost £26,000 to keep someone in a concrete room?
Get real - it is an estimate and deliberately inflated. Look at it as an apartment costing £500/week or £70/day per person.
Well if you think thats burning your money look at whats being burnt on the climate with no result
www.twawki.wordpress.com
At the risk of being branded repetitive or worse: where are the jobs for these people on benefits to do?
They are unlikely to be as motivated as the migrant workers, so veg picking and processing businesses will not want them. And the retail trade clearly also prefers the migrant workers.
The problem with prison is it's not a deterrent. Compared to life on a sink estate its quite reasonable.
Until the quality of life outside prison is significantly better than life in prison, then there won't be a reduction in the volume of offenders or offences.
The Olympics fiasco won't hurt the Conservatives at all after the next election. Everyone has seen the cost rocketting under Labour thanks to their incompetence, and this could hurt Labour well after they lose power.
"Get real - it is an estimate and deliberately inflated. Look at it as an apartment costing £500/week or £70/day per person."
OK, so why does it cost £500 a week to keep someone in a concrete room? Why does it cost £200 a month to keep someone in a concrete room?
Staffing, OK. Maybe some training/rehab people, so another salary. Food, maybe £100 a month - heck it's supposed to be unpleasant, not the damned Dorchester. These are not luxury flats. They are centres of punishment, or have we all forgotten that?
The unemployment problem is representative of a collective failure by successive British governments, of both hues, to find an alternative source of mass-employment to replace the manufacturing and heavy industries which were shut down in the 70s and 80s.
The gleaming service-based industries which were supposed to rise up to replace boring old manufacturing have failed to provide a sufficient quantity of jobs; they are often not suited to particular ‘problem’ groups of unemployed (particularly young men); and are increasingly being exported abroad like shipbuilding and steel manufacturing were before them.
Excluding public sector employers there simply aren’t enough jobs in areas like Walton, Merthyr and South Shields to make a sizable dent in the unemployment figures. The Government therefore has three choices;
1. Use the proceeds of economic growth in the over-heating South East economy to mask economic stagnation in the rest of the UK by expanding public sector employment and pumping money into welfare.
2. Cut welfare, stop immigration and hope that this leads to a flood of low-skilled migrants from other regions of the UK into London and the South East.
3. Introduce a combination of taxation-related carrots and sticks to ‘encourage’ companies to move out of London and the South East.
Option two would be political suicide for any party who attempted to enact it. Option three would require the kind of long-term strategic planning and commitment which our political class are notoriously hopeless at and so our Government will always take the path of least resistance; Option one.
On Tuesday 12 May I had a post on 2012 Olympic Security Costs which suggested that these "hidden" costs could well exceed the costs of the Games. It could be a close call.
Do the welfare dependency tables show Labour is soft or the Tories don't connect with the poor?
What we CAN say is that "over 3,000" fraud investigators can't hope to police 5.8m working age claimants effectively. And too often sentences passed on those who do get caught are minimal.
So the policy is ineffective. They know that. That's why they spend our money on advertisements saying how effective the policy is.
The costs of the Olympics are still visible, even when some are shuffled off elsewhere. They are rising, even though there are some planners trying to control them. The costs of "combatting" climate are considered irrelevent or "worth paying". But nobody has a clue as to their real cost. A bit of budget-setting is in order.
Please tell me what is 100% in "votes for welfare" chart? Does 100% mean all population? all adults aged 16 up? all population in "employment age" - 16-65? I just would like to have clearer picture.
I follow your blog for months - respect. As a 42year old Pole living in Uk (Airstrip One, sorry )for nearly 5 years, this country makes me feel younger. Feeling like in my teenage years in communist Poland.
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