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Comment by nickdothutton | Hacker News Reader

In the UK it costs the taxpayer about $60K per year per prisoner to keep them locked up, according to official figures. However if you take the overall annual budget for the prison service and divide by the number of prisoners I think the figure is closer to $100K. I’ve often wondered what the cost might be to house that population somewhere else, somewhere less expensive, like Turkey or Greece.

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Outsourcing prisons to cheaper authoritarian countries sounds like a bad idea.

My god, please don't give the US any ideas!

"the transportation of convicts to his Majesty's colonies and plantations in America ... is found to be attended with various inconveniences," - one of the ways the British parliament described the American war of independence, Marilyn C. Baseler, "Asylum for Mankind": America, 1607-1800, p.124-127 via Wikipedia.

too late. those seeking asylum are forced to 'remain in Mexico' and others flown back into dangerous places. Instances where people are forcibly deported somewhere they have never spent time as an adult, have no family, no money, etc.

I find the whole system disgusting.

The US Govt purposefully restricts opportunities to request asylum in the way in which our govt deems 'legal.' e.g. a few people at a time through sparse border crossings.

And then prosecute those who cross the border because it's the only way to state their claim.

Shameful.

The propaganda of 'invasion' and 'replacement' has really made this a politically toxic issue. A dangerous one at that.

I mean the UK gov wants to send people who came over in boats for France to Rwanda for “processing”. Not quite the same but not far off!

I just checked the official annual budget for all of the penal institutions in Turkey. The 2022 budget is 3.2 Billion Liras[1] ($180M) for about 300.000 inmates in total. Dividing, you get about $600 per inmate per year! (and honestly it doesn't even sound that absurd considering the low cost of living here)

[1]: https://www.sbb.gov.tr/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/2022_Yili_...

Incredible. Almost all of the money saved could be either returned to the taxpayer, or used to build houses for the poor on the 127 prison sites.

I’m pretty sure most British courts would consider it illegal to house prisoners in such conditions as are prevalent in most Turkish prisons.

And if reducing costs is your only goal. Well there are other options to get rid of criminals..

Or you could just them as free labor to build those house for the poor.

Turkey was an example, as was Greece, of a cheaper provider. The dividend would not be purely financial. It would be almost 130 large sites upon which to build housing for the poor. Conditions in UKs prisons have been internationally condemned. It would be an opportunity to improve conditions for the incarcerated, save money, and provide housing for the poor on reclaimed sites.

Turkish prisons are famous for abuses: https://stockholmcf.org/gross-human-rights-violations-contin...

Better example would be Norway or Netherlands: more expensive prisons, but least prisoners per capita: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2014/04/the_netherlands_has_ex...

The point of prison system should be rehabilitation not keeping prisoners down for life.

This is the sort of thinking that had the UK export criminals to Australia, no?

Not quite, Australia wasnt an independent country at the time. It only gained independence in 1901. The last prisoner was shipped to the penal colony around 1870. So there was no Australian state to sign any agreement with. UK was until very recently in the EU with Greece. Might even get the prisoners superior conditions, some of UKs jails are Victorian in construction and very overcrowded.

> Australia wasnt an independent country at the time

It had been occupied for 65000 years by people that might have argued otherwise though!

Unfortunately for those people, they hadn’t formed a state or anything approaching one, and were still busy fighting each other along tribal lines. I suppose the colonists could have tried a deal with the largest tribe at the time, who could have then imposed their agreement on the other tribes by force.

I think that was viewed as a move towards leniency at the time, because often the crimes would previously have carried the death penalty.

Or being put on a prison hulk with up to 30% yearly death rates.

Also at least in Britain the number of capital crimes increased almost exponentially in the late 17th and the 18th centuries. So I’m not sure that’s quite right.

In Sweden the officially reported number is about $110k/year/prisoner or about $300/day/prisoner. Your comment makes me think I should try to sanity-check that number.

(And no, we don't charge them the cost afterwards.)

I absolutely think we should buy these services from other EU countries where costs are lower. I don't get why the EU single market legislation shouldn't apply to this.

Here we have nearly 130 prisons, and could build tens of thousands of houses for the poor on that land. Some of them are in or near desirable cities now, where once the land was considered low grade/flood risk/etc.

I’m sure Turkey and Greece would love that.

Why would that occur to you?

UK prisons are overcrowded, in poor condition, expensive, and the land for those 127 prisons could be used to provide inexpensive housing for the poor here.

Oh yea, “we shouldn’t be keeping all those people in prisons” is obvious. “We should send them to worse places” is…not.

Maybe UK could find a whole island for that specific purpose.

Isn’t that what the UK did with Australia?

And America, before the tea started to hit the salt water.

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