Why don't our prisoners work?

Really Interested wrote: »

Most prisoners look at work in the prison as a good thing the highest job is kitchen work, but prisoners also do the laundry, cleaning and in some prisons farm work.

With out prison labour it would not be possible to feed each one for the budget of I believe €1.50 a day.

100% right about the kitchen work

Mark25 wrote: »

Some do lay around all the time but most don't. There is work if you can get a job and there are courses you can do.

But when people say make prisoners work - some do get to go outside to work mainly from open prisons like Shelton Abbey and from the Training Unit in Mountjoy - and then the papers have a story about people been out of prison and working people complain that they shouldn't be out of prison and working and should be kept locked up.

Even if everybody wanted to work there aren't enough jobs for everyone and you have to be in for a while to get a job. Plenty of prisoners are wing cleaners but the best jobs are in the gardens or in the kitchens which I did. But it took a while to get that job.

You only get a little bit more on your daily allowance if you are working so people don't do it for the money. I'd much prefer to be doing something useful in the kitchens instead of just spending my time in my cell smoking and watching TV or hanging about on the landings. I did a few courses as well to fil up the time as much as I could.

I had my problems going into prison but nothing like some of the others in there. I was working as a waiter before prison so not everybody there hasn't worked a day in their life like you said. I sometimes did 50 hours a week in my job.

There are workshops where people make things and learn skills but I didn't do that. What do you mean by digging? Even if they did do that people would be saying that it would be "dangerous" to have prisoners out working doing it.



You do know that up until recently there was still slopping out in some prisons here? They were refurbishing Mountjoy when I was there to do away with that.

Because of all the trouble going on in prisons there are plenty of prisoners in solitary confinement - locked in their cells 23 hours a day pretty much.



Yeah right. Just keep on dreaming.

Some people seem to believe everything they see in the papers and think that prisons are a holiday camp but they are nothing like that. I've been in Mountjoy, the Training Unit and Wheatfield so know what I am talking about. Yeah you have a TV in your cell but they deduct for the cost of that from your allowance. If they didn't have TVs in the cell there would be more trouble and people kicking off from being bored out of their minds. There is enough trouble in prison without making it worse. Even if you stay away from all that you can say the wrong thing to the wrong person and get into bother.

Most people in prison have other problems that is part of the reason why they are there and I think they could do more to deal with problems while you are there and not drinking/on drugs as much.

But when you get out nobody wants to give you a chance if they hear you've been in prison especially with jobs and people fall out with their missus and families. I was lucky that when I got out I could go home to my family and also signed up to go to college after a few months. I am back working part time too .

Good on you Mark. I'm never sure what the point of prison is. To separate people from the general population so they can't do harm? To exclude people from real life to punish them? Or to take them away to rehabilitate them. I think each person imprisoned requires different mixes of the above, but I could never conceivably come up with a suitable punishment for the likes of Ian Huntley or Anders Brevik, and many other home grown horrors. Death seems too easy an escape and life too lenient.

Anyway, it seems that you have been rehabilitated and that's great. Hopefully as long as you're straight, you'll have the respect of those around you.

Prisoners are locked up in their cells for 18 hours per day. The longest period they are not locked in is about 2 hours. They do work during this time. Either work or go to the prison school.
I'm so most would prefer to be unlocked for longer and work longer but we're would need to employ a lot more prison officers for this to happen

Having a gander at the official stats here, there were about 3200 people in prison in 2014.
It's probably gone up, but it's presumably still in the same ballpark.

Of those, by my reckoning, about 1500 are there for violent offences.
I saw another statistic floating around that it costs about €70k a year to keep someone in prison on average.
I'm not 100% certain how accurate that is, and what the variations are depending on the seriousness of the offence that caused the person to be imprisoned, but if we take it at face value, that's over €100m a year spent on imprisoning non-violent criminals.

Other than vengeance what benefit do we get from imprisoning people for fraud, theft or other non-violent crimes?

At worst, they'll steal more things, which will have a monetary value. Well so does imprisoning them.
Whether you're giving money to a thief or a government, it amounts to the same thing. You're out of pocket.

At best, they'll either behave themselves on their own after being caught or at least they will be able to be monitored (probation, ankle bracelets) and either prevented from committing more crime or caught fairly easily if they do.

So, with that being said, why don't we take all that money and invest it?

You can say people who commit crimes don't deserve it, but is it worth making society worse to make that point? Cutting our noses off to spite our faces? I'm sure we could get a lot more mileage out of education, monitoring and the like with the 70k a year than locking people in a box.

I think there's an awful lot to be said for drastically increasing the severity of punishments for crimes that merit it and most would be in favour, at least for violent crimes. We don't currently have the room in our prisons or the resources.
Again, I think we'd get more value in diverting some of that 70k a year away from the non-violent to support the kind of sentencing that keeps seriously dangerous people out of society permanently.

The world is starting to come around to a less-moronic approach to drugs. How about spending the money imprisoning people for drug-offences on healtcare treatments instead?

As far as employment goes, well it'd be easier to work out the economics of getting employment for criminals if you're not using it as a means to pay off their imprisonment.
Again, it'd probably be cheaper to get them career councelling or diverting them into various forms of education with the aim of getting them back into the workforce rather than first imprisoning them and getting them to make license plates to make it worth the hassle.

Looking at employment itself, and putting the general issue of the value of imprisoning all criminals to one side, there are forms of work that are worth doing and valuable to society, but maybe not valuable enough to warrant paying somone to do.
I'm sure there's enough litter to be collected, trees to be planted, bodies of water that need cleaning to be worth taking volunteers from the prison population in exchange for reducing their debt to society.
Busy work is no good and taking jobs off the rest of the population isn't much use either, but there's always work for strong backs.

Really Interested wrote: »

How much will the extra prison guards cost for the security?

Probably not as much as you think if you bring them in small groups to wide open spaces where you can easily watch over people. And the guards would need to be armed obviously

Samuel T. Cogley wrote: »

Gravelly wrote: »

My mistake, your sensitivity towards the profession made me assume you were one. I really don't think it's as badly paid as you seem to think it is, I know quite a few and not a single one of them is anything other than pretty well off.

I know a small number of JC on the criminal side. Let's put cards on the table here, they ham it up somewhat. However they are the once that manage to keep going, most (around 50%) don't. A good day for a friend of mine is €250 a day, a good day for another friend of mine is €800 a day. The former a barrister the latter a good sparky.

Once they get in a few years, again these are the ones that survive, the money is livable, but I don't know a single one that isn't, or didn't, work extra jobs.

Yes an SC running a murder or a rape case is going to be making a very good wage indeed, there isn't a huge amount of scope to change that not without the freakanomics you mentioned before.

If you really do know a sparky that's charging €800 a day you are being ridden bareback. You can get a couple of sparkies and a few apprentices for that money.

Gravelly wrote: »

Conflating a charge for several people and their associated equipment with the charge for a single person doesn't director anything for your point. I'd like to see real statistics for barrister pay. Not doubting your sincerity, but based on what you think sparkies earn, I'd like more than your gut feeling for what barristers earn.

It's not several people. It's a sparky's labour, insurance and VAT. Compared to a barrister getting DC level legal aid payments, his/her Library fee and associated costs.

It's different to a sparky doing a cash in hand, as turn off the fuse box I'm sure it'll be grand job, but then barristers can't work cash in hand.

pilly wrote: »

These 2 comments completely contradict each other.

Costs less to put them in a flat but they're responsible for 80% of burglaries? Is there no cost to these burglaries?

There's absolutely no contradiction there at all. If you remove the cost of heroin to the user, they've no need to commit crime. The cost of Dole+heroin+grotty flat is cheaper than the €76K a year it costs to lock them up, plus the massive cost of the burglaries they do before being caught and locked back up again.

You can treat drug addiction either inside or outside of prison, but you have to treat it. You're not gonna sweat it out of people.

Didn't Lucinda want to introduce a three strike rule?

Anyway I've dragged this OT enough. If you want proper information on pay - ask in Legal Discussions they'll give you a much better insight than I. You could even join the discussion on the SC that made almost €1m from the state last year (Not on the criminal side).

We should do everything wee can to reduce recidivism and crime in general. The simple plain fact is that's not harsher sentences or conditions. Work would be a fantastic way of teaching people new skills.