The cost of a place at Cookham Wood, a young offender institution (YOI) in Rochester, Kent, for older teenagers, costs the taxpayer £275,000 per year.
By contrast, a place at Eton College, the UK’s best known public school and biggest for boarders, costs £46,000 a year. It employs 750 staff to teach and care for 1,350 boys: a ratio of one member of staff to every two pupils.
Cookham Wood employs fewer people with 450 staff – including 44 managers – but they are responsible for only 77 boys aged 15 to 18, a ratio of six staff to every teenager. It makes it the most expensive prison or YOI in England and Wales, according to the research by Inside Time, the non-profit prisoners’ paper.
6 staff to one inmate? At that level you could have someone with each individual prisoner 24/7/365. Yes, including weekend and annual holidays and working on only 8 hour shifts.
Government spends wisely, does it?
What are they all doing?
Collecting nice salaries and pension entitlements of course. Is there any other point to State employment?
What Jim said. And….44 managers?!?
Chain the little bastards to a radiator and feed them bread and water till they understand that being an offender (young or otherwise) is not to their benefit and should be something they definitely will not be doing again.
Nice of you to make sure they’re warm Addolff.
What are they all doing?
As Julia notices, the clue’s in 44 managers.
It is wonderful isn’t it. How the public sector continues to outperform one’s wildest expectations. The should be OBE’s for it. And usually are
“What are they all doing?”
Watching them in the shower.
I don’t know what the staff are doing but during covid the kids were not doing any sports or vocational training, being banged up in the cells 23 hours a day.
They sent Harry to the wrong one.
I thought this conundrum had been solved when .gov figured 2 people in a crap hotel for ten days should cost £2500.
I’m fed up with .gov spending tax money on things I don’t want, I’m doing a Timmy and shipping out to a small gov country.
‘Nice of you to make sure they are warm’
nobody said anything about the radiator being at a comfortable temperature, or even turned on at all
“ Chain the little bastards to a radiator and feed them bread and water till they understand that being an offender (young or otherwise) is not to their benefit and should be something they definitely will not be doing again.”
My grandfather used to say that when he was young none of friends who’d had the birch ever went back and hearing their stories kept him on the straight and narrow.
Big difference between being completely fucking broke and a “small gov country” (Portugal?)
Compared to the UK, perhaps, but only relatively.
(What are they all doing? Tim asked)
They are making sure that no-one is getting maimed, killed or jailed (on both sides).
Those kids are very dangerous to take care of, and they are also a danger to each other and, mostly themselves. Kids is a bit of a misnomer here, they are at the age at which throughout history young men used to be considered warriors.
There is a huge pile of rules, regulations and reports to be dealt with, and so, there is a lot of staff, with quite a bit of redundant workers because not having enough hands on deck is not an option here. Some of those kids require 4 grown men to deal with them and even then, it’s dangerous for everyone involved.
The rules also try to be reasonable and kind, since the idea is to reform (not that it appears to work too well for many, but there is a good argument to make that even saving a few is worthwhile). You could have it cheaper but you’d have to accept institutional brutality as the price and run the place like a gulag, only to produce even angrier and more dangerous people at release time.
Besides that, what about the sanity of the people who work there? They don’t want to have to clobber the kids, or end up crippled/dead from a mishap, and that is before we consider what working in such a place does for their mental health and emotional well-being.
So, I think that the institutions we are talking about are actually one of the better run government shops and where an actual effort is made to live up to the concept of being a civilised society that has no death penalty or corporal punishment and no gulag type jails.