Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice has questioned why the left-wing Labour Party government is releasing criminals back onto the streets early rather than deporting the thousands of foreign criminals clogging up space in British jails.
In a question posed in the House of Commons, Tice, who serves as Nigel Farage’s second-in-command questioned: “Why, when there are some 10,000 foreign criminals blocking up space in our jails, why aren’t they being removed and deported, simultaneously saving the British taxpayer billions of pounds every year and having the support of millions of British voters?”
This call was seconded by Mark Fairhurst, the national chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, who told TalkTV on Tuesday that while there are some difficulties surrounding deportations, such as the need to identify a foreign criminal’s country of origin and for those countries to actually accept returns of their nationals, there is “absolutely no reason why we couldn’t repatriate and create an additional 10,000 spaces.”
“Over the last couple of years, ridiculous as it sounds, we’ve been offering financial incentives for prisoners to go back to their country of origin,” Fairhurst said, noting that this has often happened with Albanian criminals, who still represent the largest foreign cohort in British prisons. The POA chairman pointed out that the UK does have a returns policy with Albania and therefore the government could easily start to remove more Albanian criminals from the country.
Fairhurst also argued that the £4 billion earmarked by the Labour government to invest in building more prisons could be better spent on modernising the current prison system, which he described as “crumbling”, as well as putting money into funding more mental health spaces as there are a “lot of people in prisons with acute mental health disorders because it’s the only place” to put them.
As of the end of March, there were 10,422 foreign criminals in jails in England and Wales, an increase from 10,148 at the same time last year. Foreign offenders make up around 12 per cent of the total prison population, costing the UK taxpayer £47,000 per head to feed, house, and rehabilitate, or around £500 million per year, according to The Telegraph.
Last year, the government only managed to deport less than 4,000 foreign criminals from the country. While this represented the highest figure in four years, criminal deportations still remained below pre-pandemic levels, with the UK previously averaging around 5,500 removals between 2010 and 2019.
Meanwhile, as of September of 2023, the government had released 11,800 foreign criminals back onto the streets of Britain instead of being deported, which represented nearly a 100 per cent increase over the previous five years. Comparatively, since 2010, less than one thousand foreign criminals have been removed to serve the remainder of their sentences in their home countries.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has claimed that foreign criminals “are being deported” but admitted that “nothing will change as far as the deportation of foreign national offenders is concerned.” Mahmood went on to blame the “inheritance” of overcrowded prisons left by the former Tory government for why the Labour government had to take the “additional measure” of releasing thousands of criminals back onto the streets of Britain.
Mahmood has previously claimed that the early release of criminals was necessary to prevent a “total breakdown of civil law and order”. On Tuesday, the government released an estimated 1,700 criminals back onto the streets early, with the expectation of releasing around 5,500 criminals who have served just 40 per cent of their sentences.
Those released early have reportedly included domestic abusers, drug dealers, thieves, and violent criminals. Those convicted of serious violent crimes, with sentences of more than four years, as well as terrorists and sex offenders are supposedly not eligible for early release.
While domestic abusers are technically not supposed to be released early, there have been warnings that domestic abusers who were convicted of other crimes could be set free. Adding insult to injury, reports have also claimed that because of the system being overwhelmed, many victims of domestic abuse have not been notified that their victimiser is set to be released.
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