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  • UK's Prisons Full

    Prison plan 'not risk to public'
    Emergency measures to reduce prison overcrowding will not expose the public to more dangerous criminals, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has promised.

    Home Secretary John Reid is expected to announce that some inmates will be moved from secure jails to open prisons and police cells.

    Lord Goldsmith said public safety would come first, and no prisoner would be moved without a proper risk assessment.

    Meanwhile, the Lord Chief Justice has urged more use of community sentences.

    'Proper checks'

    The number of people in prison has reached a record 79,843, and in theory there are just 125 more spaces available.


    Lord Goldsmith told BBC News: "If there were a significant risk of someone being a danger, they wouldn't be moved to an open prison."


    HAVE YOUR SAY
    The simple answer to this is to build more prisons
    Simon Cliff, Leeds


    He added that only "a very small proportion of the overall prison population" could be suitably punished without using custody.

    According to the Sunday Times, Fiona Radford, governor of Ford open prison in West Sussex, warned in August that if more inmates were transferred from secure prisons, there was a risk of more absconds and drug use.

    She reportedly said in a memo to staff that she had informed the Prison Service.

    A risk of more drug abuse and absconds had been "accepted as inevitable" by Mr Reid, the newspaper quotes the document as saying.

    But Home Office minister Gerry Sutcliffe said: "John Reid and I certainly wouldn't want to put the public at risk.

    "Any re-categorisation has got to be risk assessed and people have got to have not committed violent crimes or sexual crimes.

    "No violent offenders or sexual offenders should be moved from category C to category D."

    The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Maltravers, has urged more use of community sentences, saying prison overcrowding made it difficult to rehabilitate inmates.

    'Dangerous or inadequate?'

    He told the Observer: "The idea that alternatives to custody is being soft is wrong."

    The public must be educated to distinguish between the "brutal, dangerous offender and the inadequate who offends to get money for drugs".

    Lord Phillips made his comments to the newspaper after going undercover to serve part of a community order doing manual work.

    Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said more focus on drug rehabilitation and work-related training was needed in prisons.

    Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg warned that open prisons must not become "dumping grounds" for dangerous criminals.

    Norman Brennan, director of the Victims of Crime Trust, said the government had an "obsession with keeping dangerous and persistent criminals out of prison".
    Story from BBC NEWS:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...cs/6031697.stm
    This is a huge problem - and leads to an interesting debate. Should we use more non-custodial punishments or increase the number of prisons? I have a real issue with how short and soft sentences are already in the UK - where people can get away with tiny sentences for murder, rape already. Prison should be partly rehab - but it have also got to be a punishment and a way to get the worst scum off the streets.

  • #2
    Cant they keep them in temporary dorm like structures until more jails are built?

    My county's jail was built in 1959 and was ment to hold 460 prisoners, it currently holds about 2,000 thanks to dorm type additions and the county legislature is giving the Sheriff's Office a budget increase that will allow them to build a huge "supermax" county jail that can hold 4,000 prisoners while also reducing staffing levels (due to modernized tech like cameras, etc) which would enable them to transfer more deputies to the road patrol bureau.

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    • #3
      Australia requires more population and it has a historical link! ;)


      "Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

      I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

      HAKUNA MATATA

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