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Welsh Affairs

I thank the hon. Gentleman. Following on from that, we must consider what happens to people who are going into the justice system and into prison. I do not believe that the figures bandied around are particularly accurate. The average figure for keeping someone in prison is much lower than people realise, because the figures generally used take into account the high cost of category A prisons. Nobody should put that into the cost considerations because, as far as I am aware, nobody—not even Liberal Democrats—thinks that people in category A prisons should be out and about on the loose. The actual cost of putting someone in prison is probably about £25,000 to £30,000 a year. One must remember that the vast majority of those entering the system are already on full benefits—they are rarely those working in nine-to-five jobs and paying taxes—so whether we like it or not, the net cost to the taxpayer is considerably less. The Government should remember their own 2000 figure that crime costs £60 billion a year, yet we spend only £2 billion imprisoning people. Again on their figures—those of the Carter report in 2003—half that £60 billion cost is down to 100,000 people, of whom only 15,000 are in prison at any given time. Based on the Government's own figures, if the prison population were to be doubled, the extra cost to the taxpayer would be about £2 billion and the saving would be about £30 billion. Clearly, I would not want people to be thrown into a Dickensian hell-hole—if any exists in the Prison Service; I have not seen any—but I would like more schemes of the sort that are used in Usk prison, in my constituency, that enable people to obtain vocational skills, which they can use when the leave prison. It is simply not possible to provide such skills in the space of a few months, because often the first thing that needs to be done is to address anger management problems, or alcohol and drug problems. People can then be taken into some form of educational process; it is not something that can be done in a matter of weeks or months, because it takes a year or two. I want a humane prison system that keeps people in for longer but treats them in a humane fashion and sends them out with the ability to live a law-abiding life.