i dont believe it ??

[anneasquith]

i have just heard via tv, it costs over £41,000 per year to keep a prisioner in prison for 1 year, why ?

[sandyRoe]

On a conviction for an offence which merited at least 1 year in prison the accused should be given a state pension of 30K a year. This would be 25% less than it would be to keep them in jail and would cut the crime rate dramatically.

[waterboatman]

be a good deterrent, wouldn't it!

[waterboatman]

I meant hanging!

[wildwood]

sandyRoe, are you serious? You'd have them knocking old people over the head just so that they can get in excess of one year sentence.

[jake-the-peg]

The UK prison budget is about 2 billion and there are about 95,000 prisoners.

I make this about £21,000 a year.

I suspect journalists are inflating the figure by adding in any other costs that they can think of like court costs, legal aid etc which are not really appropriate.

Still who cares when the point is to get everybody worked up and nobody's checking your figures?

Which TV source was this by the way?

[anneasquith]

stv news. re barlinnie prison glasgow.

[jake-the-peg]

Hmmm - I don't tend to trust statistics I hear off of the media they are bu66ers for upping the numbers to make a big sensationalist story.

Here's the Hansard report from Parliament, about a page or so down the official figure was about 23 thousand a year in '08-'09

http://www.publicatio.../text/101220w0007.htm

See what I mean about journalists?

[jomifl]

I don't know how much prison officers are paid, but 15 years ago I had a colleague who was paid £30,000 p.a., his sister was a prison officer and she got so much more than him that he was jealous of her. especially as he had a doctorate in marine biology and she was relatively unqualified.

[Scylax]

The cost per inmate cannot be easily calculated,, Dividing the prison upkeep cost by the number of inmates is just too simplistic.
If a prison costs say, £1m. per year, and there is only 1 inmate, then that's the cost per head. Add another prisoner, and the cost is halved. Ergo, all prisons should be crammed . The more the merrier. The more the cheaper.
Put another way, if an inmate is discharged, the prison doesn't immediately save £1000 per week.....does it ?