Captive Market

No-one could justly accuse Chris Graybeing's Ministry for Profitable Incarceration of failing to think through the consequences of its actions. The coalition's assault on legal aid and its mugging of the lawyers will mean all the more merchandise for the correctively entrepreneurial; while the Graybeing doctrine that rehabilitation is a soft option means that the market in penitential warehousing is likely to remain sustainable for quite some time. Graybeing's favoured model is the gargantuan Oakwood, which is being run, loosely speaking, by G4S; it costs nearly a third less than a prison run by the hated public sector, possibly because G4S has dispensed with such inessentials as qualified staff and proper educational facilities. G4S has also managed to climb the league tables for incidents of self-harm at its facilities, leaving state-run prisons of comparable size far behind. Naturally, Graybeing wants more of the same; he plans to close the smaller jails which pamper prisoners with access to their families and contact with human warders, and replace them with outsized boxes monitored via closed-circuit television. It is hoped that such measures will save the taxpayer more than four hundred million pounds, which can be thrown at G4S and Serco to build yet bigger boxes when the merchandise obligingly continues to re-offend.