Thousands of prisoners to be released in September

The quickest of googles would show that UK prisons are allocated £2.70 per prisoner for daily prison meals, thats about £1,000 - it's a very small proportion of the overall cost and a quick google of images of typical UK prison food shows its pretty grim as it is.
Prisons are expensive not because of food, but because they involve lots of physical infrastructure and lots of staff. Cells are pretty small as it is, not luxurious at all, and its not just about cell space, a prisons capacity is also limited by it's surrounding infrastructure which is roughly set up for its designed capacity.
Two further points:
Firstly, as Gazpacho highlights, de-humanizing prisoners and/or treating them with deliberate brutality pretty much removes any rehabilitative effect - re-offending rates are likely to rise and crimes will increase. Plenty of data from the UK and elsewhere showing that a pure punishment approach to imprisonment trends toward this.
Secondly - If you found yourself in prison, would you personally be OK with being stacked 4 to a cell, barely any space to move, sleeping on a concrete floor, subject to daily violence due to overcrowding, eating only bread and water, with no opportunities to learn new skills to rebuild your life after release?
At this point you might reply with "I would never be sent to prison", which is easy to say but consider just as a starter:All ways in which almost any us *could* find ourselves in a prison cell, and if we were I do not think any of us would want to be in the conditions you've proposed above in your posts.

£2.70 a day is a ******* joke. That's way too much.
Prison should not be for rehab at the taxpayers expense. And I'm not worried about overcrowding. And I've already stated I'd stack them higher if they reoffend.
And if "if and buts were candy and nuts then we'd all have a merry Christmas." If we're doing hypothetical, why not commit every lifer to capital punishment and free 10k spaces immediately and then the would not re-offend. After all lifers are those that have committed to most henious of crimes and should never be let out. After all a £50 quid bit of rope and the tree I have in my garden would be cheaper than keeping them in prison.

If you want to remove the rehabilitative function from prisons entirely - then you'll need to be comfortable with a much higher re-offending rate and correspondingly higher levels of crime and higher levels of unemployment for ex-prisoners (creating higher welfare spending) - That's a political choice of course, but I would prefer the lower crime option.
The examples I gave are all types of situations that happen (or where something similar has happened) where "ordinary people" just like you or me might find ourselves in a prison cell.
Committing every person on a life sentence would not free up places - other developed nations with capital punishment find that a prisoner awaiting a death sentence costs much more than the cost if they were imprisoned for life - much higher trial costs & lengthy appeals processes and costs as a starter, and juries are less likely to convict where the death penalty is on the table (around 10% less likely in the US).
You might be more familiar with the wholesale costs of running large kitchens than me, but I'm struggling to see there's much scope if any to provide three meals a day for (mostly) adult males for less than £2.70?

3 meals a day can be reduice to 2. You can bulk buy bread for less than a quid.

Bread is *already* served in prisons and forms part of some meals, it's only a small part of a diet because it doesn't contain the wider nutrition that humans need as part of their diet.
Whether it's 2 or 3 meals you need to provide c2500 calories per day. To do that for £2.70 as it stands is challenging enough.

Jason, just say you’d take them out to the sheds and shoot them. Stop coddling them with 1500 calories a day. Enough of the nanny state and woke dietary requirements.

Bread is *already* served in prisons and forms part of some meals, it's only a small part of a diet because it doesn't contain the wider nutrition that humans need as part of their diet.
Whether it's 2 or 3 meals you need to provide c2500 calories per day. To do that for £2.70 as it stands is challenging enough.

As @Admit-One largely says, you're wasting your time, Jason quite openly thinks anyone that makes mistakes should die painfully, they aren't much for compassion.

Not anyone, just people like Letby who is one of our most prolific child murderers. Literally a waste of space we could be using for lesser criminals. We have approx 10% of our prisons (about 10k people on life sentences) of people who have committed the worst kind of crimes we could be using for prisoners commiting lesser crimes instead of releasing them before they have paid their due back to society.
It's as if you want drug dealers, domestic abuser, thieves to be roaming our streets. If you can't to the time, don't do the crime. At the moment, criminals are getting off with slaps on the wrist and I'm sick of it.

That's the thing, I feel like anything other than death or outright torture and internationally making rehabilitation impossible is a slap on the wrist in your eyes. You're v quick to write people off entirely.

Because we tried everything else and now our prisons are bursting at the seems. The current way to rehabilitate is not reducing the amount of prisoners we have. Maybe it's time to try something new.
There is only so many times you can 'time out' a naughty child before you should just give them a slap so to speak.

The quickest of googles would show that UK prisons are allocated £2.70 per prisoner for daily prison meals, thats about £1,000 - it's a very small proportion of the overall cost and a quick google of images of typical UK prison food shows its pretty grim as it is.

Prisons are expensive not because of food, but because they involve lots of physical infrastructure and lots of staff. Cells are pretty small as it is, not luxurious at all, and its not just about cell space, a prisons capacity is also limited by it's surrounding infrastructure which is roughly set up for its designed capacity.

Two further points:

Firstly, as Gazpacho highlights, de-humanizing prisoners and/or treating them with deliberate brutality pretty much removes any rehabilitative effect - re-offending rates are likely to rise and crimes will increase. Plenty of data from the UK and elsewhere showing that a pure punishment approach to imprisonment trends toward this.

Secondly - If you found yourself in prison, would you personally be OK with being stacked 4 to a cell, barely any space to move, sleeping on a concrete floor, subject to daily violence due to overcrowding, eating only bread and water, with no opportunities to learn new skills to rebuild your life after release?

At this point you might reply with "I would never be sent to prison", which is easy to say but consider just as a starter:


All ways in which almost any us *could* find ourselves in a prison cell, and if we were I do not think any of us would want to be in the conditions you've proposed above in your posts.

Relevant to this, a case where someone was incorrectly imprisoned for rape for 17 years and now the miscarriages of justice body shown to be unfit for purpose:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2q0gdd9v04o

I personally think that there needs to be a longer term plan and solution to force on rehabilitation when it comes to prisoners (where relevant) and more preventive action.
Hopefully this can happen but I’m not betting on it.