David Davies, the Conservative MP for Monmouth, has argued for an expansion of the prison system in a post on the blog of the deplorably authoritarian Cornerstone Group. So he claims, prison helps society [sic.] by keeping known criminals off the street, with massive economic ramifications. It’s a rare frosty day in hell when any but the most intransigent statist agrees with the Cornerstone Group, but today is just such a day.

The Cornerstone Group represents just about everything that’s wrong with the Conservative Party. They’re Kinder, Küche, Kirche sort of authoritarians, keen on protecting the privileges of the elite, be they the Church of England or the aristocracy, while oppressing the rights of the masses, be they women or ethnic and religious minorities.

However, in advocating prison, they’re not the ones doing the oppressing. They’re the ones defending the oppressed: the victims of crime. By the back-of-an-envelope calculations performed by the Cornerstone Group on the government’s crime statistics, Davies believes that, by doubling the number of prison places in order to house ‘career criminals’ the country can cut the cost of crime in half. That is, for an outlay of £3bn a year, the country can recoup between £30bn and £45bn.

Unquestionably, one of the great problems of recent times has been the deliberate blurring of the lines between the innocent and the guilty: those whose rights are infringed, and those that infringe upon others rights. We’ve seen the innocent punished through ASBOs, the Terrorism Act, detention without trial, ID cards, trial without jury, and so on. At the same time, victimless crimes, that involve no infringement of others’ rights and are thusly not a matter of state concern, such as drug consumption, are outlawed by the Taliban tendency represented by the Cornerstone Group.

The other side is the one with which David Davies agrees: that the guilty get off without serious punishment, or even punishment at all. Most thieves and burglars escape custodial sentences altogether, while even murderers are released after a few years. If this can be fixed by £3bn, to protect the rights of the people so let down by the current system, it’s worth every penny.

Alternatively, of course, one can free up spaces by decriminalising those current activities that are illegal, but not immoral. Take just one area in particular. 12,567 individuals are held at Her Majesty’s pleasure in England and Wales for ‘drug offences’ [sic.], none of which offend the basic liberties of other people. That’s more than are held for robbery and fraud put together, and comes to 16% of the total prison population. Free these innocents, and the state can keep more murderers, rapists, and robbers incarcerated.

The key is to begin to discriminate between what is moral and what is immoral, and decide whether a given action harms the natural rights - to life, liberty, and property - of other individuals. If it doesn’t, it is completely inexcusable for the state to criminalise such an action, which is the mechanism by which it force its own morality upon other people. At the same time, it is the duty of the state to protect its citizens’ natural rights by preventing criminal abuse. If this quest is harmed by insufficient prison places, then that must be resolved, lest the state lose its raison d’être altogether.