Prison Works

One way or another the UK prison population has been much in the news lately.

The Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, and his acolytes continue to propagate the myth that the UK imprisons a disproportionate number of people compared to our European neighbours, but he/they neglect to give the full story when comparing statistics between prison populations in the UK, France and elsewhere. The true comparison of prisoner numbers is not when compared to the country's population as a whole, but to the number of people convicted of a crime.
According to The British Crime Survey, there were 9.6 million crimes in the UK in 2009/10 or just under 155 per 1,000 people, while according to The University of Liverpool, for France the total number of crimes was just under 3.8 million, or a little over 62 per 1,000 people!
The EC gives figures for violent crime, in the UK of 2034 per 100,000 of population and for France just 504! So in the UK we commit two and a half times more crimes than in France and over four times as much violent crime, the sort that usually results in imprisonment!
Given the much-quoted figure for prison populations of 85,000 for the UK and 59,655 for France; comparatively, in France 1.46% of crime results in imprisonment while in the UK the figure is only 0.86%. Proportionate to crime, a better comparison than population as constantly trumpeted by Ken Clark, France jails nearly twice as many of its criminals as does the UK. Their prison population is less than ours simply because they commit less crime, not that we imprison a disproportionate number of criminals.
Figures for Germany reflect no better on the current myth; according to the United Nations, Germany has a crime rate of 79 per 1,000 of population (155 for the UK) and where 1.1% of crime results in imprisonment (0.86% for the UK).

The efforts of Ken Clark and his cohorts should be directed not to reducing the prison population by removing the powers of courts to imprison but to reducing UK crime to a rate comparative to our neighbours. I doubt the loss of 500 police officers in West Yorkshire alone will do much to achieve that aim.