Off-shoring Prisons

There are now approximately 80,000 inmates in UK prisons and about the same number of prison places. Certain prisons house more inmates than there are "certified places". Police cells and (scandalously) open prisons have been used to manage overflow. Despite the fact that the Home Office has seen this crisis point coming, no provision has been made in terms of extra prison places. The recent Keith Report was a damning indictment into failures in the prison service. 88 recommendations were made. A key root cause for these failures was identified as prison overcrowding.

Before moving on, let's remind ourselves of a few of the basic purposes of prison - punishment, deterrent and rehabilitation. Despite the right-wing rhetoric Labour ideologues at there core do not really believe in punishing or even deterring criminals because they believe their crimes are society's fault not the individual. Their heart is not in prison punishment so they can't bring themselves to take the necessary steps to make it work - the most fundamental omission being a failure to create more prison beds. Keen to ensure that the punishment is only a depriviation of liberty and no more, prisoners find themselves increasingly pampered with facilities from TVs to drugs to drugs treatment. I could be forgiven for thinking that a proxy for the success of a UK prison is how closely it resembles a hotel with prisoners as guests and warders as obsequious concierges. No wonder a prison place costs the taxpayer approximately £30k a year (that's about £80 a night to you and me).

Labour does believe in rehabilitation in even the most hopeless of cases, but due to the overcrowding they do not and can not succeed. Reoffending rates are at an all-time high. And then to rub salt in the wound Leftie bloggers such as Bob Piper ask whether prison works. Not under Labour it doesn't, is my reply. Given the latest raft or crime figures and sentencing rules it's not unreasonable to estimate that there will be close to 100,000 prisoners by the end of the decade.

I would like to propose to off-shore prisons for the following reasons.

1. Alleviation of short-term overcrowding
2. Significantly lower cost per head alllowing resources to be used elsewhere
3. Stronger deterrent effect
4. Less visits likely and less facilities provided so these institutions would be a stronger punishment than UK jails
5. By dispersing prisoners to places where they can not speak the language or understand the culture these institutions will not serve their desire to become better criminals.
6. Ability to imprison persistent offenders (Labour currently only imprisons very serious offenders or seriously persistent offenders) thus increasing deterrent in another way
7. Due to the overseas prisons being seen as a stronger punishment we can reduce sentencing time thus reducing the chances of prisoners becoming institutionalised
8. It is less likely that foreign criminals will be mistakenly released into the UK.
9. Victims of crime could have a say in where the criminals serve their sentence. Beautiful , if I do say so myself.
10. THE VOTING PUBLIC WILL LOVE IT

NB Remember that it remains Lib Dem policy to give prisoners the vote. At the same time they are also on the record as saying expats like me shouldn't be able to vote.