Inside Health
Is it better to spend money on ‘mega-prisons’ or mental health, asks Harry Burns
What’s better? More prisons or more universities? A UK Government spokesman was quoted recently as saying “Boris wants to put rocket boosters under the prison-building programme. He’s talking about a new mega-prison, he wants to release cash.”
I wish I could say my heart sank, but it probably can’t sink any further given the news these days. Stories of ships seized in the Gulf, Kashmir a flashpoint between India and Pakistan, continuing riots in Hong Kong, and shootings of innocent people in Texas are utterly depressing. Happily, Mr Trump says there is no place for hate in America. Unfortunately, he shows no signs yet of wanting to alienate the National Rifle Association so we will see if he is correct!
So why is the news of more prisons depressing. If people are a danger to the public, surely they should be incarcerated? Yes, of course. But … would it not be much better to prevent them falling foul of the law in the first place?
In 1972, researchers in New Zealand began a study of the health and well-being of 1,000 babies born in Dunedin that year. Most of those people are still being studied 47 years later. They were able to identify risk factors for poor well-being in later life. Low family socioeconomic status, low parental education, time in a single-parent family, having multiple caregivers or residential changes, experiencing domestic violence, physical abuse and sexual abuse were all associated with higher risk of aggression, hyperactivity, conduct disorder, anxiety, antisocial behaviour, mental health problems and lower self-esteem. These children endured longer periods of youth unemployment and 20 per cent of the group studied accounted for 80 per cent of the criminal behaviour observed.
A similar study of adverse experiences in childhood in the US also showed a strong association between poor early childhood experiences and risk of violent behaviour as an adult. Closer to home, a study in the North of England discovered that adults experiencing serious levels of neglect were 14 times more likely than those children not experiencing abuse and neglect to have been a victim of violence, 15 times more likely to have committed a violent crime in the last year and 20 times more likely to go to prison during their lives. A study in Wales suggested 14 per cent of the population had a level of exposure to adverse experiences that would put them at risk.
US researchers calculated in that, the children born in one year in the US who went on to experience significant adversity would, over their lifetime, cost the US economy $124 billion. This figure includes costs of care in hospitals and prisons and lost taxes because they would never work. Taking population size into account, that might mean neglect and abuse faced by children in Scotland who were born this year would have a lifetime cost of £3.2bn. The same applies to children born next year, the year after and the year after… unless we do something about it.
So, Mr Johnson, which is better, spending some money now to ensure that poor families living in chaotic circumstances raise their children to be well-behaved, do well at school, avoid drugs, alcohol, violence and prison, get jobs and pay taxes or should we spend money on a mega-prison to deal with the consequences of your government’s policy failures in supporting families? Pro-rata, the lifetime cost of neglect or abuse of each year’s birth cohort in England is about £35bn. You wouldn’t save all of that, of course. Instead of building prisons, you would have to build more universities!