On Thursday last week the British prison system was just 373 inmates short of being completely full. When it is full it’s forced, at great expense, to ask the police to keep inmates in their station cells.
It costs more than £20,000 a year to keep someone in prison in the UK - and several times that to hold them in a police cell. If the rewards of having fewer prisoners generally are clearly so enormous, why not do more to get foreign prisoners to serve their sentences in their countries of origin. There are now 9,000 foreign nationals in British prisons - 11% of the total.This normally wouldn’t matter much except that, according to Edward Leigh of the Public Accounts Committee quoted in the [Times]( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,2,00.html) “the prisons of England and Wales are close to bursting point.”

The day after he said this, three Romanians were jailed for an internet wire transfer scam which netted them £300,000 from thousands of gullible e-bay users. The judge recommended they be deported after serving their sentence. Why not ask the Romanians to imprison these people now? I’m sure an arrangement/formula could be arrived at which would be much cheaper than warehousing them here for three years. Failing that, bite the bullet and build those prisons.

Labels: When was the last service?

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