Having had 5 laptops stolen in one hit - because I was updating staff that weekend and the guy got lucky - the cost of changing passwords, and the nagging feeling I may have missed something somewhere and I may get hit with another internet theft....

Then the feeling that the guy(s?) were in my house while my partner and I were sleeping. Na. People who do this need to be taken out of society.

For the speeding point, you can kill people at 30mph if something goes wrong with the car or you do something stupid.

- Driving below the speed of surrounding traffic is much more likely to cause an accident than driving at a "high" speed. The speed of traffic is essentially always above the speed limit. (Which might itself give you pause in characterizing it as "reckless, dangerous driving".)

- Reckless, dangerous driving is an independent offense, which can be (and is) charged separately from speeding.

As I understand it's substantially more than 40k GBP per year per prisoner. If the American system is costing less in the order of half what we're paying it must be absolutely horrendous.

Which is a side point to the absurdity of whole-life mandatory sentencing. It's incredibly expensive and pure vengeance; there's no way the cost to society in cash or emotional harm terms is minimised by spending MILLIONS of dollars depriving these people of their liberty for decades. So why does the Land Of The Free do it? Short, often community based sentences with strong rehabilitation would be orders of magnitude cheaper and have a very similar effect on the ultimate crime rate.

If we did this, I suspect we'd see a sharp rise in burglaries.

As to the figure itself, another commenter noted that the low end of prison costs seemed to be Lousisiana, in which operating a prison cost $13K / year. That would make the per-prisoner cost much, much lower than that.