{"id":422,"date":"2007-03-31T13:18:23","date_gmt":"2007-03-31T12:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=422"},"modified":"2007-03-31T13:18:23","modified_gmt":"2007-03-31T12:18:23","slug":"how-many-should-we-imprison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=422","title":{"rendered":"How many should we imprison?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In my late 20s, I spent two years (1976-1978) working at the Home Office as Special Adviser to the then Home Secretary Merlyn Rees. I visited several prisons and officials always gave us a written brief beforehand. One of the figures in the brief was what was called the CNA (Certified Normal Accommodation) which was the figure for the number of prisoners for which the institution was designed. The actual prison population always exceeded the CNA.<br \/>\nThree decades later, the prison population in this country is much, much higher. Indeed this weekend the prison population in England &#038; Wales reached an all-time high of 80,316.  The UK as a whole is the most punitive country in Europe. We imprison 148 individuals for every 100,000 population. This is even higher than Spain (145) and the Netherlands (128) and much higher than Germany (95), France (85) or Denmark (77). On the other hand, the figures for Russia (611) and the USA (738) are hugely higher.<br \/>\nWe have to ask ourselves serious questions about whether prison works and whether it is value for money. In my view, we cannot simply keep imprisoning ever higher numbers and offering less and less rehabilitation. In the immediate term, we need a new early release progamme for less serious offenders. Then we need to look hard at the numbers of children, drug addicts and mentally ill that we imprison and consider whether alternative programes would not be both less costly and more effective.<br \/>\nThe &#8220;Guardian&#8221; discusses these issues today <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/prisons\/story\/0,,2047025,00.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my late 20s, I spent two years (1976-1978) working at the Home Office as Special Adviser to the then Home Secretary Merlyn Rees. I visited several prisons and officials always gave us a written brief beforehand. One of the figures in the brief was what was called the CNA (Certified Normal Accommodation) which was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}