Our jails are full and this has taken our government by surprise, which is odd. Having created over 3,000 new criminal offences since 1997 you might have thought they'd have seen it coming.
Of course we're ambivalent about prisons in the UK. We know the system doesn't work but we don't mind crooks being subjected to it - after all, if people want to commit crimes then it's just tough if they then find themselves four to a cell with axe-murderers and cannibals 23 hours a day for five years.
It's obvious to me however that prisons are a colossal waste of resources. Locked up in there among the psychopaths are people who have become seriously rich and powerful, and they've got that way by being smart, devious and dangerous.
They have, for example, built up billion-dollar organisations smuggling drugs, trafficking migrants and running vice rings. Increasing numbers are there for their creative interpretation of company law while FDs of blue-chip companies.
There's obviously no point in having these folk sew mailbags, walk round prison yards, take sociology degrees, molest each other and seize hostages. We need to leverage their skills, so here's the offer:
Your accomplices have legged it with the gold bars, your wife's shacked up with your lawyer and you'll be in here for ten years even with good behaviour. You might as well join Wormwood Scrubs plc, keep your brain in shape, and earn some serious money.
Adopting the poacher-turned-landowner model we should be able to develop some world-class consultancies and outsourcing contractors. Prisons would start to compete with each other for talent, and we'd soon have Dartmoor and Holloway bidding for rail franchises, heritage sites and defence contracts. Their tender for a privatised Prison Service would be essential reading.
As management consultants they would have, for legitimate businesspeople, the same attraction that Niccolo Machiavelli would have for politicians had he not been dead for nearly 500 years.
Serious career-minded graduates would be committing crimes geared precisely to the length of sentence they felt they needed before joining Booz Allen or McKinsey on the outside. Some would stay inside deliberately, tactically clouting a warden or setting fire to a cell-block now and again to see an over-running assignment through, while the more practically-minded would be digging tunnels under the walls to get in.
This is clearly a brilliant idea. Why do I get the feeling that it is already happening?
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