Britain’s prison policy a failure: Deputy British PM
Britain’s growing prison population has emerged as a major national concern and an election campaign issue, with British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg planning to slam the government’s prison policy as a “failure.”
In a Monday speech outlining his Liberal Democrat Party’s justice policy, Clegg will censure the rising prison population in England and Wales as “a sign of failure,” focusing particularly on the doubling of Britain’s female prison population since the 1990’s, The Guardian reports.
“The number of women in prison has doubled since the mid-90s, leaving thousands of children separated from their mothers every year,” Clegg will emphasize in his prepared remarks.
“Half of those women have suffered domestic abuse and one in three has suffered sexual abuse. Half suffer from anxiety or depression and a quarter have reported symptoms of psychosis. Nearly half of all women prisoners, and one in five men, have tried to kill themselves at some point in their lives.”
The senior British official will further point to the country’s current prison population of more than 85,000, compared to fewer than 49,000 inmates in British prisons in 1994, saying that the additional 36,000 inmates in jails do not necessarily indicate that there are more dangerous people in the country than the past.
“That is not proof that prison is ‘working.’ It’s a litany of despair,” Clegg will argue. “‘Prison works’ is a slogan, not a solution. It is not working when it routinely turns first time offenders into hardened criminals.”
He will also underline that vulnerable women, people with major mental health issues, and drug abusers are “all crammed like sardines into crowded prisons.”
The British politician will further reveal that nearly half of the UK’s prisoners have no formal qualifications, a quarter were taken into care as children and two thirds have tried class A drugs.
According to November 2014 figures, the population of female prisoners in the UK is 3,956 while the male inmate population stands at 81,905.
Britain reportedly has one of the highest rates of incarceration in Western Europe.
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