Has privatising prisons backfired on us taxpayers? - Yorkshire Post Letters

The Home Secretary has suggested, the way to tackle the prison crisis is to turn women prisoners out onto the streets, in order to accommodate more male prisoners in what were previously female prisons.

Is this just the latest in a long line of bad short term proposals, to come out of the Home Office?

Privatising prisons was a Home Office idea. They came up with that idea, to break the power of the prison officers union, during a pay dispute. Has this backfired on us the tax payers?

It now costs (on average) £47,000 a year to keep someone in prison.

Is the answer to escalating costs, per prison place, ‘take all prisons back into public ownership’? We have been cancelling unfair contract terms in consumer contracts, by statute, for five decades. Is cancelling - by statute - any unfair penalty clauses in the contracts for these private prisons - the way forward?

Will taking prisons back into public ownership, get the costs per prison place down? Should we build more publicly owned prisons instead of closing women's prisons?