Charles Amos studied Political Theory at The University of Oxford and writes The Musing Individualist Substack.
The Government has announced it will release prisoners early by reducing down the minimum time those on fixed length sentences must serve from the midway point to forty percent.
This is aimed at stopping overcrowding; indeed, prison capacity has been at 99 per cent since the start of last year; the BBC estimates this measure will release some 5,000 prisoners into civil society over the next eighteen months.
Fortunately, those convicted of violent and sexual offences will be exempted from the measure, meaning, the public will only have to deal with robbers, burglars and thieves instead.
This is a disgrace. Shabana Mahmood, the new justice secretary, is right to claim the Conservatives derelicted their duty by not building enough prisons to house a growing need. Yet the same pressure which led the Conservatives to do that has now led Labour to do the same thing.
That pressure? The lack of resources available to the state – or rather, the fact it is politically awkward to cut anything else to fund prison construction or raise taxes to do it instead.
I suspect that ministers will eventually opt to raise taxes to deal with the problem of overcrowded prisons. But there is a much more cost-effective option, one that shifts the burden from the taxpayer to the wrongdoer: a scheme of indentured servitude for former prisoners.
Our prison system is crying out for cash, both for capital investment in new jails and revenue expenses such as staff and services. What is wrong with raising taxes to finance it?
Simple: just as it is wrong for a criminal to take away your property to his advantage, it is wrong too for the state to take your property to the advantage of the criminal.
How is putting a criminal in prison today to their advantage? Relative to the moral baseline of them having to work to pay back their debt to their victim, and to finance themselves their stay in prison to protect the public. (And this stay in prison is far from cheap with the average prisoner costing £48,409 to house for a year.)
As Murray Rothbard has written, the primary purpose of punishment should be restitution, i.e., making the victim whole again. Depriving the victim of robbery of yet more of his money via taxation to pay for bed and board for the robber who originally stole from him is not justice in the slightest, even if there are bars on the windows.
Ideally, prisons in this country would be productive places where inmates could properly pay off their debts to victims and to the prison itself. But anybody familiar with the system can tell you that we are a long way from making that a reality.
Instead, the Government should make ex-convicts repay the public purse once their out. It could operate on a similar system to student loans, with prisoners receiving upon release a debt that reflects the cost of their incarceration and any restitution to their victim or victims, with a certain number of years to pay it back.
For example, multiplying the average prison cost by the three years recommended by the sentencing council for burglary gives a figure of £145,227; adding the average value stolen to be repaid to the victim takes it to a total of £148,083.
Perhaps this hypothetical bill is too large, given many prisoners would rightly demand they be granted the opportunity to pay part of it off in prison. Nevertheless, granting prisoners are never going to be very productive there, justice demands they are slapped with some bill after leaving.
Were this scheme implemented, prisons would pay for themselves – and the awkward problem the justice secretary faces would no longer exist. If the scheme were implemented only for those prisoners Mahmood plans to release, and each was required to pay £5,000 annually, it would raise £25m.
There are two predictable objections to such a proposal: that some will simply refuse to pay the debt, and that it may increase crime, because former prisoners will steal stuff to pay the money back.
Both of these problems can be partially avoided. Those prisoners who fail to pay their debts, thus, committing a further crime of denying restitution to people could be forced to work. Failing that though a number of prisons could require hard labour: either some form of productive manual work or simply toil to make a spell inside less attractive than a productive life outside.
As for discouraging additional criminality, this could be done by having employers deduct payments directly from their wages, and only having these payments against the debt. (Something similar to this occurs with the construction industry today, which requires employers of contractors to pay their VAT to avoid tax evasion). Harsher punishment for reoffenders would perhaps be required too.
Financing more prisons should be dealt with the same way all prisons should be financed: by getting the prisoners themselves to pay for them. The injustice of forcing innocent people to pay for the housing of the guilty must end.
Given the simple version of the above proposal amounts to little more than a former-prisoner poll tax or student loan analogue, Labour could quickly press ahead with it and raise substantial funds to expand prisons. It would certainly be more popular than simply letting criminals out to commit yet more crime.
