Do Prisons Hold the Key to Reducing Carbon Emissions?

Prisons may not be the ideal place to live, but could aspects of prison life help to adapt and influence change, reducing CO2 emissions, and kickstarting a low carbon economy?

With our prisons at breaking point, and new "super-prisons" planned to make up the shortfall, one aspect of prison life that provides inspiration to the world of green is that communal living and working, can help reduce CO2 emissions, eliminating the need for commuting, providing an increased efficiency of energy use, and reducing the initial energy expenditure per capita in construction of the building.

The Prison Service's population as at 22nd February, was 82,068 in England and Wales, exceeding its own "operational capacity" by 96. However, they clocked up a carbon footprint of 97 923 tonnes last year, up 0.14% from 97 784 tonnes in 99/00, not bad considering the increase in prison numbers. Or an average annual emission per prisoner of 1.2t of CO2, or 3.27kg per day. Whilst this figure does not take all emissions into consideration, such as from the production of goods or food, the emissions per capita of the population is substanially lower than those of the national average.

Whilst it may be hard-pushed to find a situation where communal living and working could co-exist as a single entity opposed to the totally separate entities that they currently fulfill in our lives, but could some of the solutions of prison life be implemented into our own current lives, such as working from home. If each of the ten million office workers in the UK were able to work from home, the reduction based on the average commute of 8.5 miles, could potentially see 119m miles of commuting via car removed from UK roads, and reduce CO2 emissions by 7m tonnes annually. In addition to this, it would also save car commuting office workers 2.6 billion hours a year from travel.

"Drivers would rather sit in their cars twice as long than change jobs, move house or change their work base"
Edmund King, RAC Foundation

The blame for the rise of CO2 emissions over the past year were partly attributed to the increase in the number of prisoners having access to "solo showers", whilst this increase is significantly modest it certainly is not an issue for contention, unlike that of showers at 30 000ft.

Could you live with the people you work? Or is communal living destined to fail?