Public to be sold shares in new prisons

[spindrifter]

Alan Travis, home affairs editor
Friday December 1, 2006
The Guardian

The public are to be offered the chance to purchase shares in new prisons under a "buy to let" scheme being considered by the Home Office, it emerged yesterday.

The idea has been floated in an attempt to overcome the refusal of the chancellor, Gordon Brown, to find the extra money needed for 8,000 new prison places at a time when the service is at breaking point.

Home Office finance directors, who are looking for alternative ways of funding the next wave of new prisons, hope that the public can be tempted to invest in a new-style property company that would build jails and then rent them out to private prison operators. This would provide a steady guaranteed dividend from the "rental income".

One incentive for small investors is that the government's punitive penal policy has seen prison numbers rise relentlessly over the past 10 years and would appear to guarantee a steady stream of rental income with no apparent shortage of prison "tenants".

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,1961501,00.html

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The shareholders should be banned from serving on juries.

[Mythsaje]

1. Oh, yippee...

That's a wonderful idea. :sarcasm:

Just about the only way I can see to get past the NIMBY attitude some people have. "Not in my back yard, unless it makes me money..." Sure to excite the Republican set.

[Old and In the Way]

2. When there's a profit motive attached to running prisons, the incentive is to

find more prisoners.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

3. The upside is that it would be great to buy shares in a prison so that

a person as a shareholder could DEMAND that they were accountable and run in a humane fashion.

[mom cat]

4. Just like Merica!

:puke:

[toadaway]

5. How about shares in an elite unit that investigates corporate crimes and has

full authority to gain access to evidence & follow money trails wherever they lead, with the same immunity from prosecution that present day law enforcement has. The unit would include a special corporate crimes (by the company and/or its senior executives) court with full power to award damages to the shareholders (as maybe blue chip stockholders) and to the public treasury (city/state/federal).

[spindrifter]

6. Welcome toadaway! Great idea!

[HCE SuiGeneris]

7. Sign me up

and monitor the shit outta me. This perversion of self-government that we see today needs to be rectified.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

8. And welcome.. . nice to have you here

:hi: :dem: