Criminal Efficiency

The coalition's rehabilitation revolution, from the normal sub-Victorian inhumanity of confining prisoners in their cells twenty-three hours a day, to the petty sub-human vindictiveness of trying to prevent them reading, is of course designed to ensure as high a rate of re-offending as is compatible with corporate profits and ex-ministerial fiscal security. The privatisation of the probation service looks set to continue this brilliant trend, with Sodexo, the coalition's corporate henchman in six of the twenty-one offender recycling enterprises, making a healthy start on profit maximisation by sacking a third of its staff. A voluntary redundancy scheme has been torn up, which shows that Sodexo has the same respect for probation officers as the nice people at Serco and G4S have for the law; and the company plans to handle most of its workload through electronic sign-ons and call centres. It will all be jolly efficient, in the sense that there is very little profit in building titan prisons unless you can keep them full.