Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Great Liberal Myths Revisited - Migration and Crime

When I wrote this post in 2004, 10% of all UK prisoners were foreign nationals.

The figure is now 15%, according to the answers to Parliamentary questions obtained by the Telegraph.

Keeping foreign nationals in overcrowded British jails is costing the taxpayer more than £398 million a year, it has been claimed. Figures obtained by the Tories show that 15 per cent of the nearly 80,000-strong prison population are from outside the UK. The largest contingents among the 12,122 come from Jamaica and Nigeria, with 1,490 and 1,070 respectively. Another 879 inmates are classified as having "unrecorded" nationality - raising questions over why officials have been unable to establish their origin, and what will happen to them when released.

Shadow immigration minister Damian Green, who brought the details to light through Parliamentary questions, said the situation was "truly shocking". "It shows what happens when the Government loses control of our borders. We seem to attract criminals from all over the world, and the British taxpayer ends up paying for them," he insisted. "Many of these criminals come from friendly democratic countries where deportation could be arranged. If we could remove the Jamaican prisoners alone we would save £49 million a year. And why are there nearly 1,000 people who have gone through the criminal justice system and been jailed without the Government even finding out where they come from?"

Mr Green used the "snapshot" figures from the end of February to calculate costs based on Government estimates of £33,000 annual expenditure for each prison place. Some 164 nationalities are represented in British jails, according to the data.


I like this intervention by Juliet Lyon of the Prison Abolition Trust.

"Mr Green rightly points out the large number of foreign nationals in UK prisons, but fails to mention that the dearest wish of many is nothing more than to go home."

Well, yes. I imagine it's the dearest wish of most of the native villains too.

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

WHy are the Jamaicans here ? Because deportation to the Uk is an alternative to a prison sentence back in Kingston , unbelievably.

As they might say, check it out!

Anonymous said...

But its worse than the £398 million per year, thats only the cost of keeping them in the current prisons, not the cost of building the extra prisons that are now needed.
And the cost to the criminal justice system of having full prisons.

These libertarians don't count all the costs of their ideas.

Anonymous said...

Check this one Laban, Akon attacks a girl on stage. Reported at Hotair.com
Assault

Ross said...

The 'Prison Abolition Trust'?!

Is that for people who find the Howard League too right wing?

Anonymous said...

I think multicultural prisons are what makes Britain an interesting place. When I was young you had to pay school fees to meet exotica but now you can get a grant-maintained place at one of Britain's post-graduate institutions run by the Prisons Service to meet a cross-section of human diversity.

Walt Disney had to build EPCOT in Florida whereas we British live in Epcot

Anonymous said...

These libertarians don't count all the costs of their ideas.

Dave

Do you even know the difference between a liberal and a libertarian?

Do you know in which part of the left-right spectrum Libertarians reside?

Do you?

togo said...

Do you know in which part of the left-right spectrum Libertarians reside?

The "right-left spectrum" crap only makes sense if you're French. Maybe not even then.

Anonymous said...

Yes anon I know what libertarians are, rich guntoting liberal race deniers who think the market god can fix any problem.


Much of what they say is interesting and correct but a lot of it is highly simplistic rubbish dressed up in clever language to sound more thoughtout than it really is.
They will talk positively about cheap oil from the middle east for example without considering the repercussion's of filling the pockets of those Saudia Wahhabists with gold. This is totally different to days gone by where who you were dealing with was an important consideration.

They also think Islamic terrorism is the fault of the Western welfarestate that keeps people ghettoized, which may be a point but considering jihad has been around for 1400 years not much of a point.

Anonymous said...

Dave - thus proving you have absolutely no idea about libertarians. You are describing 'liberals'.

There is a world of difference.

Martin said...

Dave,

You're quite right, although you could have added 'oversexed' and 'stoned' to the list.

Libertarianism - a philosophy born in Austria and most admired in Britain and America; the countries that least need it.

Anonymous said...

Well it depends what you mean by liberal verity.

Most of them believe in zero border control and that people should be allowed to go where-ever when-ever, which I would agree with in some cases such as Britain having open border with Ireland, but Somalia erm NO.
This zero border control comes from the liberal belief in a human 'blank slate'.

In a lot of ways they are two sides of the same coin, liberalise the profits while socialising the costs, which is what happens with illegal immigration in America.

Anonymous said...

To Dave - See, you're stuck on stupid.

You need to try to figure out what you know and what you don't know. What you don't know is the easiest to define, because that is almost everything.

Dave, sit down and stop breathing through your mouth and follow these words about liberals, your own words, with your forefinger: "Most of them believe in zero border control and that people should be allowed to go where-ever when-ever, which I would agree with in some cases such as Britain having open border with Ireland, but Somalia erm NO.
This zero border control comes from the liberal belief in a human 'blank slate'."

You're fatal defect is, you seem unable to distinguish between two vastly different political philosophies.

Please take a moment: Liberal is one word.

Libertarian is a different word.

See, that is what is so great about the English language. Lots of words.

The ideologues you, and most of us, object to are known today - the word having been co-opted and territorialised - as "liberals". People like Jimmy Carter, for example. Bill Clinton. John Kerry. Tony Blair. Tessa Jowell. Patricia Hewitt. Jack Straw. Harriet Harman. Al Bloviator. Etc. These people are all thought fascists and one worlders. They have chosen to pervert the word "liberal" in their cause.

Libertarians, which definition you seem to get all confused in your little head, are people like Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Hayeck, Ayn Rand, Sean Gabb.

See, Libertarians are the OPPOSITE of what you are whining about.

I suggest you take some time out from running off at the mouth to read. It pays off.

Anonymous said...

In a lot of ways they are two sides of the same coin, liberalise the profits while socialising the costs

Milton Friedman, Hayek, A Rand,

Libertarianism - a philosophy born in Austria

I think you should do some reading Verity.....Hayek and Friedman were definitely followers of The Austrian School


As for Russian-born Ayn Rand you should not associate her with what she did not accept herself

Ayn Rand

AR: All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies, except that they’re anarchists instead of collectivists. But of course, anarchists are collectivists. Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet they want to combine capitalism and anarchism. That is worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. They sling slogans and try to ride on two bandwagons. They want to be hippies, but don’t want to preach collectivism, because those jobs are already taken. But anarchism is a logical outgrowth of the anti-intellectual side of collectivism. I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect. The anarchist is the scum of the intellectual world of the left, which has given them up. So the right picks up another leftist discard. That’s the Libertarian movement.

Anonymous said...

Dean Russell 1955

Many of us call ourselves "liberals," And it is true that the word "liberal" once described persons who respected the individual and feared the use of mass compulsions. But the leftists have now corrupted that once-proud term to identify themselves and their program of more government ownership of property and more controls over persons. As a result, those of us who believe in freedom must explain that when we call ourselves liberals, we mean liberals in the uncorrupted classical sense. At best, this is awkward, subject to misunderstanding. Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trademark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word "libertarian."

Anonymous said...

Libertarianism would work, maybe, if everybody was comfortably @ IQ 120 and of the same ethnic baxckground.

Ultimately though they are another species of liberal, pretending that such considerations are not real.

Where is their idealism faced with those who exhibit in-group favouritism? Its great for a group like that. Society acting like a mass of autonomous units, while they get, at some level, to act like a group. In time things will be running nicely for the in-group. The cloud of autonomous indivduals otoh will keep finding, despite their protestations, that somehow some people are not playing by the rules. Not always buying the cheapest or employing the best.

Anonymous said...

I was trying to help Dave understand that the people he despises are not libertarians but 'liberals' (soi-disant). I don't buy into the entire libertarian ethos - and I don't know that one can be a little bit libertarian ... for precisely the reasons you state, Voyager. (I can't remember who wrote what because I was never that deeply into it in a formal sense.) I am a melding of libertarianism and conservatism. (See? Already I'm compromising.)

I don't know if you're familiar with it, but if not, I highly recommend samizdata.com whose owner, Perry de Havilland, is a sworn libertarian - and also a very good writer. He attracts other good writers.