Deportation not incarceration for the nation

Exposed for the charlatan he is, at home as well as abroad, one of the last acts performed by Tony “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” Blair is to hand thousands of criminals their “Get out of jail free” cards.

Having ignored warning after warning that the prisons were full to overflowing, he’s sportingly decided to clear the decks before Gordon Brown takes over.

But this latest scandal is not just a symptom of a lawless society running out of control nor is it a sign of Tony’s toughness.

It’s mainly because our jails are stuffed with foreigners who should be sent home.

It’s now so bad that some of them are stuck in prison even after their sentences have finished while the Government gets round to deporting them.

Some have even gone on hunger strike in protest.

Our overcrowding crisis is caused because the jails are full of Jamaican Yardies and Nigerian drug mules.

Lord Charlie Falconer and departing Home Secretary “Doctor” John Reid are far too busy helping their civil servants re-arrange the deckchairs on their newly-divided Titanic to worry about trivia like dealing with criminals.

Whatever happens, they don’t want more convicts. They think they’ve got too many already.

With the jails filled with over 80,000 prisoners, the Ministry of Justice is desperate to let them out.

This is backed by “experts” who don’t believe in imprisonment. For them, life means five years; two years is six months; six months is half an hour in the cells under the courtroom.

We’re already caution record numbers. Last year, 8,929 people were let off with a talking-to for offences ranging from burglary and arson to vandalism and sex with under-age girls.

Yet prison works. Civitas, the think tank, says the effect of jailing 20,000 criminals for a year is to prevent 2.8 million crimes.

While police officers boost their clear-up rates by nabbing kids who throw cream cakes at passing buses, gun crimes and crimes of violence have doubled in the past ten years.

Almost half a million more crimes were committed last year than in 1999 and only a quarter of them were ever solved.

When we do catch a criminal, what are we supposed to do with him? Jail is a deterrent, a punishment and a method of taking persistent offenders out of circulation for a while.

Why hasn’t the Government increased the number of places available to deal with the rise in crime?

About 12,000 more places would become available overnight for home-grown scumbags if only we deported, rather than jail, foreign nationals now in our prisons.

Most are here illegally. Why not simply ship them back where they came from?

That’s what we should have done with the two terrorists allegedly plotting to bring down an aircraft landing at Birmingham Airport.

Instead, the courts said deporting them to Lybia was a breach of their human rights even though the courts accepted they were “a real risk to the national security”. Now they are now out of jail completely.

Admittedly some of the foreigners in our jails will have reached these shores more or less legitimately. But even that is no reason why we should have to keep them in our prisons.

At £33,000 to £50,000 per person per year it’s twice as expensive to spend a year in jail as it is to endure three terms at Eton.

Of the 12,122 foreigners in our jails, 1,490 are from Jamaica and 1,070 from Nigeria. The prisons have no record of the nationality of 879 people – which means they can’t be deported even at the end of their sentences because nobody has bothered to find out where they’ve come from.

It is incomprehensible that we should have an overcrowding crisis and yet have so many prisoners we could get rid of without letting them back onto our streets.
Human rights are one of the many excuses used to keep them in our prisons wasting our money. Another is that if we sent them home, they’d only make their way back here again anyway.

There’s a simple answer to that, too – proper border controls. A task for our new, slimmed down, supposedly fit-for-purpose Home Office.

Scotland Yard admits: “It should come as no surprise if asylum seekers commit disproportionate amounts of crime. Most are young men from chaotic and violent countries, many of which have no respect for women’s rights.”

Civitas says: “We are importing teenagers brought up in countries with an anarchistic warlord culture in which carrying knives and guns is routine. We are asking for trouble if we don’t confront this issue.”

It looks as if we will. Speculation suggests a new Home Secretary could announce – on one of those bury-bad-news days – that the estimated half a million people living in this country illegally will be given an amnesty, allowing them to stay here and pay their taxes like everyone else.

Thus proving what we all suspect – after a decade of Tony Blair, crime really does pay.