UK planning to rent foreign prison spaces for most serious offenders
Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has announced plans to rent prison cells overseas to ease demand on the UK’s prison estate.
Agreements would mean that the most serious offenders in the UK could be moved to another country’s prison estate provided the facilities, regime and rehabilitation provided meet British standards.
This is similar to steps taken by Belgium and Norway, which have used foreign prison places in the Netherlands in the past decade.
The Justice Secretary confirmed the Government will enter “exploratory discussions” with potential partner countries in Europe to rent prison space abroad to ensure dangerous offenders can be locked up for longer.
The average prison sentence has increased by 57 per cent since 2010 and other sentencing changes have already been made to ensure the most serious offenders spend longer behind bars.
To meet this demand the Government has embarked on the biggest prison expansion programme in more than a century, including six new prisons, to create an additional 20,000 places.
Around 5,500 of these places have already been built and an additional 2,400 places have been created in the existing prison estate since September last year by doubling up on cell occupancy where it is safe to do so and delaying non-urgent maintenance work.
The Government says it will legislate as soon as parliamentary time allows to enable any future arrangements on using overseas prisons and will require that conditions are to the same standard as those in England and Wales.
Andrea Coomber, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “This is a national embarrassment and one that should come to symbolise the misguidance and misdirection characterising prisons policy in England and Wales for decades.
“Governments of both colours have tried to punish and imprison their way out of answering society’s hardest questions. In truth, the solutions to crime lie outside the criminal justice system – in housing, education, employment and healthcare – but too many politicians have chosen instead to waste finite resources and overcrowd prisons to breaking point.
“The Howard League has not been alone in raising the alarm. Voices from across the criminal justice system have become louder and louder, not least those of people living and working in prison. Now the political response to a prison system on its knees is not to ease pressure on that system, nor to invest in improvements at home, but instead to waste taxpayers’ money on renting prison cells abroad.”