Kerr & Gray at odds on the cost of Labour's knife policy...

To recap, as I outlined in yesterday's post, Labour lost on the cost of mandatory jail terms, Iain Gray assured Bernard Ponsonby that Labour's policy to jail all those caught carrying knives in public would imprison fewer than 1,345 new prisoners, in the magnitude of "several hundred". On last night's BBC Newsnicht, Gordon Brewer asked Andy Kerr about the cost of the policy, arguing that it was "not only uncosted, but uncostable". I quote Mr Kerr's answer, verbatim. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer people to speak in complete sentences...

Andy Kerr: "3,000 cases, 1,000 go to jail, 2,000 of them don't. Six month sentence. 700 places currently available. Low Moss coming back on stream. Put in £20,000,000 contingency fund. Fully costed proposal and we'll deliver on it. That's what the facts tell us."

Where the devil did this 3,000 figure come from, you might well wonder? I can't fathom it either. Kerr seems to be suggesting, contra Gray, that the number of new prisoners jailed by Labour may amount to 2,000 rather than "several hundred, but less than 1,345" - the estimation insisted on by his leader.  Indeed, as Kerr noted in an earlier section of the interview (at 2:30) "At the moment of the 3000 cases of those carrying knives, 2000 of them don't get a prison sentence. We want that to change"*. That seems an exceedingly clear declaration of his position to me. To put this in context, take a look at the graph I've attached above. It shows changes in the average daily Scottish prison population since 1900. It shows, to my mind rather startlingly, that since the year 2000, in the lifetime of devolution, the Scottish prison population has already increased by around 2,000. According to the Scottish Government's latest prison population statistics (Prison Statistics in Scotland 2009-10), in 2009-10, Scotland's average daily number of prisoners numbered at 7,964. If Kerr seriously considers that Labour's knife policy may well add another 2,000 prisoners to that figure, we're talking about a 25% expansion in Scotland's prison population in a single swipe of the legislator's pen. 

Moreover, we have very good reasons to question whether the "contingency fund" of £20 million Labour will set aside to fulfil this policy will be remotely sufficient. As I demonstrated yesterday, the figure of £20 million (referred to by Kerr) and £21 million (accepted by Gray), is based on taking the Scottish Prison Service's estimated cost per year, per prisoner - halving it to reflect the six month mandatory minimum sentence - and multiplying it by 1,345. Extrapolations of this sort have clear problematic potential. However, if we apply the methodology used thus far, conscious of its inexactitudes and limitations, we find that Mr Kerr's calculations of the cost of Labour's proposals seems to be running at least £10,000,000 short of the funding which seems indicatively required.

In 2008-09, the Scottish Prison Service estimated that the cost of each prison place was £31,106. If simply halved, an estimate of the cost of an individual six month sentence is £15,553. I take Kerr to be implying, at the high end of their estimates, that Labour envisage 2,000 new prisoners might be locked up under their knife crime proposals. Multiplying up this SPS daily rate - this takes us to £31,106,000, a cost of at least £10,000,000 more than the contingency fund figures accepted by Gray and quoted by Kerr.

I'm at a loss to understand Labour's argument on this, even without entering into the robust questions of whether the mandatory imprisonment policy will do any remote good or enhance the social welfare. Fergus Ewing's Scottish Government figures have been available for over a year now. Having had all this time, it is decidedly, unconscionably queer that Labour's representatives seem so confused on the number of folk who might be jailed under this policy. Will Labour be jailing several hundred (Gray's position), or several thousand (Kerr's position, as best I could comprehend its string of staccato propositions)? Even if you believe that there will be a deterrent effect - a contestable argument - it seems to me entirely reasonable to suspect that such deterrence might take a good while to resonate in the community, and come to effect conduct. That has clear implications for the short-medium term cost of maintaining a very significantly increased prison population. If Labour expect jailing "several hundred" to cost in the region of £21 million, why is their contingency fund, envisaging an expanded population of several thousand, also pegged to a slim £20 million? Something surely must be amiss...

*A late addition to the post, in the interests of absolute clarity about what Mr Kerr said, and the status of the 2,000 cases he has in mind.