The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Friday, June 06, 2008

Unsinkably Buoyant

The Ministry of Incarceration and Deportation is nothing if not optimistic. It expects the first of its Titanic jails to start steaming towards the iceberg by 2012, yet officials are still looking for a site and the designs are still being worked on. Let's hope we haven't deported all the Poles when the time comes to break ground.

The plan, if you'll excuse the euphemism, is for the prison to hold 2500 inmates "through planned overcrowding", since there will only be 2100 places. This will certainly help the overcrowding crisis. The design, once finished, "will incorporate biometric scanning, bar coding and electronic door locking systems into the fabric of the building"; in fact, the whole scheme sounds rather like a New New Labour dream home for the non-executive classes.

The ministry also claims that the Titanic generation of prisons is designed to last a hundred years "so the annual capital cost a place over its lifespan will be significantly less than the current cost of adding a houseblock to an existing jail". In standard English, this means that the chap at the Ministry who can do Microsoft Excel fed in the cost of adding a houseblock to an existing jail, added the annual cost of keeping 2500 inmates, and then knocked off the last two zeroes. The idea that any government could plan for conditions a hundred years into the future is ridiculous enough; New New Labour asks us to believe that it has some sort of social vision that reaches beyond its contractors' profits and the next issue of the Daily Mail. The Ministry of Incarceration and Deportation is nothing if not optimistic.

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