There is a crisis in our prisons.
They are full.
Around 12% of our prison population are foreign criminals.
Many of them from the EU.
Deport them all now and free up around 10,000 spaces.
Crisis solved. Just one question remains.
What the hell are we paying our government for?
2 comments:
Actually, even allowing for the fact that approx 10,000 of the 80,000 prisoners are immigrants, this only partially explains the fact that the prison population (so I read in the papers today) has almost doubled since the mid 1990's.
Why has the prison population increased from 40K to 80K over the last (?) 10 to 15 years? The papers I read made no attempt to fully explain this alarming statistic. I can hardly believe that crime rates are falling but judges are sending a higher proportion of offenders to jail than they used to. It seems like there's something missing here, something we're not being told?
Great blog you have here, Stan, btw.
I hadn't realised that the prison population had doubled in such a short space of time, but I do know that we jail fewer people per 1000 crimes than virtually any equivalent western nation - so we're not actually jailing a higher proportion - it's actually lower. Melanie Phillips has a post on this ...
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=456
"In fact, despite the prison overcrowding crisis this country does not send disproportionate numbers to prison — quite the contrary. Despite the fact that we have one of the highest crime rates per head of population anywhere in the world, we imprison just 13 offenders for every 1,000 crimes committed – significantly below the EU average of 17.
We are jailing offenders at a third of the rate of imprisonment that existed 50 years ago, even though our crime rate has increased many times over. Might there not be some connection between these two facts?"
Thanks for the comments and the compliment Tom. Hopefully. I'll have my PC back soon and I'll be able to get back to proper blogging.
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