Make Crime Stop & Pay
How do we reduce crime with no increase in taxation? A great question with no obvious answer from our politicians. Imagine if there was an answer. A society with little crime where criminals actually pay for their own punishment so not a financial burden upon the law-abiding.
A friend of mine had a simple idea thirty years ago on how to reduce the cost of prisons to the taxpayer. Human dynamos. He wanted all prisons to be hooked up to the national electricity grid so prisoners could use peddle power to generate electricity. A quick calculation based on easily accessible electricity-generating bicycles could earn the taxpayer over a million pounds a year if the prison population were peddling 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but it got me thinking about it for several decades.
Many empires were built on the backs of forced labour. We have over 80,000 prisons sitting in jails costing us a fortune, not being punished, and definitely not being rehabilitated. Our prisons do not work – they are a 'time out' for naughty adults. A quarter of all prisoners will offend again – over half of those convicted of theft will re-offend. These stats are just for the criminals who get caught again upon release, many more will be committing crimes, but not getting caught.
I would like to see a three-tier punishment system. Corporeal punishment for a quick sharp shock within days of arrest. Capital punishment for individuals we know we will never release due to the danger they pose. And an incarceration programme that makes use of prisons and in-home detention.
All three strands come with a full cost recovery aim to compensate the taxpayer. It is estimated that crime in the UK costs £95 billion a year. To put this into perspective, this figure is just under 10% of the total amount of money the government spends each year. This includes £9 billion for our criminal justice system and £25 billion to fund the police. Crime impacts us in ways we never contemplate, the NHS spends £500 million on knife crime, and internal NHS fraud is estimated at over £1 billion every year. As a nation, we spend over £3 billion on crime prevention, some estimates have this figure at well over £20 billion.
Crime is not just a problem for victims and their quality of life, but also for our pockets.
What I am going to suggest cannot be done today, it will require new laws and exiting many international agreements. This in itself will require politicians with a backbone – the mystical unicorn of Westminster. We struggle to deport foreign criminals because our politicians are weak and pathetic.
Last year, the average time taken for a summons case to be dealt with at adult magistrates' courts, was 212 days. Nearly 7 months of waiting. For minor crimes to be punished effectively, especially for younger people, this process needs to be shrunk to days - single digits.
It should work like this. You are arrested for criminal damage and charged the same day. You are a first offender so offered a deal, accept the charge and the following corporeal punishment. You attend court the next day and a magistrate reviews the case and adjudicates your punishment. Punishment is carried out before you leave the court by a specialised court punishment officer. These sessions will be open to the public.
Reoffending will result in extra punishment; corporeal and financial. After limited chances, offenders are incarcerated.
Prison should be only used for dangerous criminals and those who do not follow the rules after several interventions. The focus should always be on the safety of the general public, not the rights of the criminal – society giveth, and society taketh away.
We spend £5.5 billion on prisons annually, which is approximately £68,000 per prisoner per year. It is so expensive that courts are under pressure not to send criminals to jail unless absolutely necessary. This is how we get the newspaper stories of a burglar with over 70 previous convictions getting another chance to change his ways. Career criminals rarely change, it is their culture - learned behaviour.
We need a new process that assesses the danger to the public posed by a criminal. If low, then we use in-home detention through the use of technology and supervision. They may still attend work but nothing else, not even funerals. If they break the rules of such an arrangement then proper jail awaits.
There are many benefits to such an option. It costs the taxpayer a lot less. It helps the criminal to keep their job and accommodation, it also helps family members to intervene and ensure a change in behaviour.
Some criminals will mess up the above option, others will be career criminals, and a handful will be a real danger to the public – off to jail this cohort goes. But not to the prison system we have today.
It will be a system where your behaviour is judged every day. You are rewarded for positive actions through a points system that can be exchanged for privileges, such as better food and family visits. A regime where following the rules offers benefits immediately. Pavlov's Dog.
Of course, some individuals will be so broken that they will never conform so must be moved to a prison that specialises in such behaviour.
All prisoners will be required to work full time 5 days a week. Each prisoner will be assessed on skills and assigned accordingly. This scheme will entail workshops in the prisons, supervised day release and other opportunities. We have a UK shortage of fruit pickers, cleaners, and food production operatives. If technology allows us to work from home using the internet, then why can't prisoners from jail? Prisoners will not earn money for such work, only points to be redeemed for privileges.
Why do we lock some people up forever and throw away the key? A life in prison with no chance of freedom is cruel and can be compared to torture. This is why we need a compassionate capital punishment system. We need to end the suffering of the individuals that society has deemed too dangerous ever to be released.
Ian Brady, the moors murderer, spent over half a century in jail until he died. This is estimated to have cost the taxpayer over £14 million. It would have been kinder and cheaper to have put him out of his misery and saved us all a fortune. I have already written an article on this topic called 'Death Penalty for the Modern World' – check it out.
Everything up to now has been about the changes to the system, not really how I would make criminals pay. Making prisoners work is one tiny part of this aim, but there is so much more we should do.
For minor offences, courts hand out fines as a punishment. These should be linked to the criminal's income, not a standard flat rate. For example, an unemployed man on Jobseekers Allowance is found guilty of being drunk & disorderly and ordered to pay £100. This fine equates to 130% of his weekly income on benefits. It is only fair that all fines for such an offence should be set at 130% of the offender's weekly wage. A banker on £60K pa, should pay £1500 as the punishment.
When found guilty in court, a criminal should be liable for a surcharge to cover the costs generated by breaking the law. These costs will be on a sliding scale. A murder costs more to investigate and prosecute than does shoplifting. We need to hold individuals accountable for the bill they give the taxpayer. Many criminals have money, they own houses and businesses – let us not simply think that all criminals are dysfunctional kids off a council estate. The government should add charges to the deeds of properties so when they are sold the taxpayer gets their money back. The state has many ways to get the money they are owed, we just need to let them do it to criminals.
Even with corporeal and capital punishment, the cost of these services should be incurred by the recipient. Prisoners on in-home detention should have a tax code that removes a chunk of their wages to cover costs. I admit that we will not be able to reclaim the cost of breaking the law with every criminal, some will have nothing and never have anything. But if they win the Lottery in the future, then we should be able to claw back the money at that point.
And finally, we need to hand out punishments that make a difference. If we lock up a small minority of dysfunctional men from late teens to early thirties this will see crime plummet. Removing them from society during their peak offending years means many crimes will never take place. We need a UK version of '3 strikes and you're out', meaning if you commit 3 crimes then you do 15 years.
The UK can have as many criminals as it is prepared to fund and tolerate. I say we stop. We are too soft and treat criminals as if they are victims of their own crimes. We removed personal responsibility while at the same time removing societal shame.
The public wants safe streets and not to worry about being burgled. The public always wants harsher punishment for criminals. The poorer you are in the UK, the more you want criminals punished for you are the victim of such individuals.
Like many issues in the UK, we need to start putting the needs of the general public first.
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