Wednesday 15 December 2010

Innocent till proven guilty

It costs £41 000 to keep a prisoner in prison for a year. Just imagine if that person was in prison for theft, the chances are that we would be paying more to keep the thief in prison than the amount that was stolen, and this is just the cost of prison. Add on to that the cost of the policing and the judicial system and you soon realise that the real losers are us. There must be so many other costs associated with prisoner rehabilitation and that should be a major goal for prisons otherwise we are paying out a lot of money on prisoners who will come back if they don't mend their ways. What could you do for them with all that money?

It doesn't matter whether you limit the number of prisoners by one or a hundred, for one day or for a whole year. The principle is the same. In the case of Julian Assange he is in prison without trial pending an appeal from Swedish prosecutors and the slight problem of finding £240 000 in cash. What do they think is going to happen to Mr Assange? He is hardly likely to disappear as he has a significant role to fulfil. I don't know if he is guilty, not guilty or innocent but I like the idea of innocent till proven guilty. It has a nice ring to it and will save us a lot of money too.

Change the world

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