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Prisoners pay rise blocked.
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Gordon Brown has blocked the pay rise for prisoners.
The last pay rise was in 1990 ...it went up from £3.50 a week to £4.00 a week.
It was supposed to go up this month to £5.50 a week.
Penny pinching or what?
The last pay rise was in 1990 ...it went up from £3.50 a week to £4.00 a week.
It was supposed to go up this month to £5.50 a week.
Penny pinching or what?
0
Comments
You were in prison?
Do you want to at least try to rehabilitate some of them and hope they will learn new skills and the worth of working to earn a living once they are freed, or should we just keep them in their cells 24/7 until the day they are freed and go on to commit further crimes, being the only thing they've ever known?
Note, for some the best 'job' may be some kind of education or rehab.
Given a huge number of prisoners have learning difficulties, cant read or write properly and have no skills to use in the job market surely the best option would be to teach and train them. But that's bound to be termed soft by some and not allowed.
Rehabilitation isnt soft its good economic sense, we want prisoners who dont come back, the best way to do that is to give them the skills to actually get gainful employment.
:yes:
Imagine the headlines just before the local elections. Prisoners given payrise but police, teachers and other public sector workers can go fuck themselves. (Im sure the papers would phrase it better)
There is no way Gordon Brown and his advisor's are going to fall for this trap right before the local elections, daft as they are.
Nonetheless, it is a cynical ploy which will not work. Labour has shown in recent weeks, that it is now highly deserving of a long period on the opposition benches. The manufactured row within the Labour Party about the abolition of the 10p tax band demonstrates this. With any luck, Labour will be annihilated in tomorrow's elections, Ken Livingstone will be thrown into the River Thames, and Gordon Brown's political gravestone can start to be written. I, for one, cannot wait.
The papers were calling it a 38% pay rise, which is technically right but totally misleading.
Top of the list of things I'd like to see on You Tube.
I completely agree with this, but prison is supposed to be hard. I used to live in an area where people spent their lives going in and out of prison because they believed prison gave them a better life. It was easier than working, paining taxes and looking after their children.
I think rehabilitation is harder than punishment because when you're being rehabilitated you have to work hard and change rather than just accepting the punishment but rehabilitation is about more than learning to read and write.
why would anyone would begrudge someone £5.50 a week :rolleyes:
prisioners don't get non-essential ''luxury'' items - things like tobacco, etc - thats what the £5.50 is for.
You have to buy soap toothpaste baccy ...
Four quid a week!
The idea of the rise was so prisoners could actualy afford phone calls to stay in touch with their wives and children ...in the hope of helping to keep these families together.
Phone calls they pay well over the odds for.
Could be worse, they could be with Orange, with shit service and expensive calls.
If they wanted to stay with their families they shouldn't have commited the crime in the first place.
It is that simple, and yet its clearly no where near that simple.
People do not start life having been dealt the same cards as everyone else.
Orange rarely make me crap in a bucket.
yes but they do make me vomit into my mouth whenever i see another of their crappy adverts at the cinema
£5.50 is about the minimum wage outside of jail. £4 is what they are getting at the moment.
IF and it's a big if, the prisoner is working 40 hours a week, then the difference is £60 a week, thrown in with that wage they get free board and lodging. In effect they are still far better off on their living costs than joe bloggs on mimum wage on the outside.
Fair point. £5.50 a week seems somewhat more reasonable.
"Cards" are irrelevent. Nobody is born with everything they want. Some people try hard to achieve, some settle for second best, some don't try at all and some turn to crime. People make their own choices.
I think £4 a week is fine if they don't have to pay rent or bills, or buy food. There are many people who aren't criminals who don't have that left over when they've paid for what they need to survive.
They are 'given' ...four pounds a week for toiletries baccy and phone calls.
Which means the toughest and the meanest have an instant black market in all these things. Instant debt for some poor student who got into a fight whilst drunk and now has to survive in one of the toughest prison systems in the western world. He has to do a borrow for a phone call home ...have a couple of roll ups if he's a smoker.
If your lucky enough to get into a workshop ...you can earn around seven pounds a week but ...in the city jails theres never enough work so the majority are banged up 23 hrs a day.
Let me set this straight.
When i was in Havverig jail in cumbria ...i palled up with a doctor who was doing twelve months for writting himself presciptions for heroin ...he was in his sixties and had been an addict for over thirty years. He was a very pleasant and educated man. His crime ...to take heroin to relieve the stress of life. Ok it's against the law and the guy was found out ...but this was a man who had done nothing but good in this world. He happened to be working in the proffesion that has always had the highest rate of addiction problems.
Another guy was in for defending his girlfriend ...he punched some bastard in the nose ...the guy cracked his head against the kerb and died ...5 years for manslaughter ...couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Theres a huge ammount of prisoners who shouldn't be there ...the sad and pathetic as opposed to the wicked. There are people inside who failed to take their medication ...resulting in bad behaviour ...so much for care in the comunity.
Prison is not filled with scary people who need punishing ...the majority need some kind of help/education/medicine.
Any one of you people on these boards could end up in jail.
So ...how many hours are there in a week ...what does four pounds a week work out at in pay per hour?
Anyway, I have to look after my brother 24 hours a day and I don't get a penny for it and I didn't do anything wrong.
The governemnt waste a lot of money, but there are so many services in this country that are under funded and so many people are suffering because of it. People in prison are the lowest priority.
At the moment they are certainly towards the bottom of the list, but it really makes bad economic sense. Prison at the moment is basically a really expensive holding pen, the prisoner goes in and most of them end up going back.
Investing the money needed into proper rehabilitation will save us huge sums of money in the longer term.
I agree with the need for rehabilitation, and making sure that people really are a danger to others before they are sent to prison. I just don't believe that giving them £4 a week is rehabilitation. They need education and, in my opinion, instead of help with intergrating back into society they should never fully leave society to start with, unless they really are a danger. Prison isn't always the best way of dealing with criminals, and what's best for society should always come before what's best for them. In the case of rehabilitating criminals I think they have the same interests as the rest of society, but it's easier and cheaper for the government to give them £4 a weekso they can say they're doing something.
:eek2: