Originally Posted by monday21
I’m not a Ken Clarke fan by any means but, he knows that the UK has one of the biggest prison populations (85,000) in the western world and that our prisons are full to capacity.
It costs £65,000 to imprison a person in this country once police, court costs and all the other steps are taken into account. After that it costs a further £40,000 for each year they spend incarcerated. If the growth in the prison population is not reversed then more prisons will have to be built, at a huge expense.
Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan were both convicted of inciting a riot on Facebook and jailed for 4 years each. If both served the full term the cost to the tax payer equates to loose change shy of half a million quid.
The country is bankrupt – it’s ok to keep calling for stiffer sentences, but would we accept a rise in taxes to pay for it?