According to this article, prison sentences in British courts are being cut when there is a shortage of cells to go around. I can't even begin to imagine who thought this was a good idea or why.
Yes, most of the people getting shorter or no prison time are mostly non-violent offenders. However, this isn't about how dangerous people who should be in jail are. It's about lack of solutions to the prison problem.
(Image: Entrance to HMP Preston, one of many prisons in the UK suffering from severe overcrowding, according to a Home Office report.)I have a solution - build more prisons! But since that will never happen, I propose putting more people into a cell. When you break the law you give up some of your rights, in my opinion. The LAST thing that should ever happen is to cut sentence length, because it makes a joke out of our legal system.
And now for great crime non-solutions in action: Paedophile freed to save jail space
That just makes me sick. Our prisons have been overcrowded for 15 years; not enough new ones have been, or are being built. And it went largely unnoticed until one night in November 2006, when the prison population peaked, with literally a dozen or two spaces in the entire country still available to hold criminals, for something to be done. Only, it was the wrong thing.
This brings me to another piece of the jigsaw to get us out of the economic downturn: social projects, like in the US' 1930s New Deal. This country needs infastructure: whether it be public transport expansion, the improvement of older cities' Victorian-age sewers, or more prisons. It will be financed by government borrowing (unfortunately) but it will create jobs and keep the contractless builders in business, until the market for them returns.
(Image: Should the New Deal be repeated? Maybe not exactly as it was, with all the Communist undertones, but something needs to be done to get the economy going again...)(See here for cartoons about prison overcrowding.)
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