January is a month when many of us set new years resolutions (although most of those set on New Years day morning are usually forgotten by now) and when lots of official data for the year before is published. It is the month when we discover if our materialism has grown at the same pace as last year and if our balance of trade with other nations was positive or negative. We find out if Bankers like Stephen Hester are to be rewarded for their hard work and those whose lives depend in part on benefit payments due to their ill-health are to be further helped or face greater challenges.

A statistic that is just about to emerge and I hope will be highlighted is that related to our prison population (http://bit.ly/zJNm3M). If only we could have 137 times as much debate regarding our prison population compared to the discussion about RBS’s largesse towards Mr Hester. The cost to the public purse of  3,117 additional prisoners at the end of 2011 when compared to the end of 2010 is over £137 Million (which does not include the cost of police and court time and resources utilised in prosecuting them) and the bonus for Mr Hester is famously a chancellors whisker short of £1M. These 3,117 people who have been forcibly prevented from being economically active are a 4% increase on the 83,055 already in prison at the end of 2010. I am not suggesting that we should not have prisons and that there should be no prisoners. In my role as Street Pastor I heard a story this week about a man who appears to turn violent towards anyone around him, if he has something to drink. He lives in a world where alcohol is freely available and he has no desire to give up drinking. It appears that for his sake let alone the lives of those who are innocently living in the same community, that some form of enforced segregation away from supplies of alcohol is necessary. However his story is not reflective of a large number of those who ended this year ‘at her majesty’s pleasure’

I do resent that Mr Hester who has a basic of over £1M can have a working life that is valued so disproportionately when compared to the millions of people who live on the minimum wage. However focusing so much discussion on this sum and this individual seems to be perverse when we have spent so much more on locking up individuals, many of whom are almost certainly not a danger to anyone else. In a year when our GDP is barely breaking into the positive part of graph, we cannot see a 4% rise in our prison population as being in any way sustainable on either a financial or human level.