Sri Lanka prominent in foreign prisoner league table

(October, 30, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) The British government disclosed rapid rise in the number of foreign prisoners. There are currently 11,000 – amounting to a seventh of the overall population in England and Wales.

They are one of the main drivers of the overcrowding prison crisis that has pushed the total above 80,000.

The prison population is now made up of people from 164 different countries.

In the Commons on October 24th, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was seeking agreements with several overseas governments to take back their prisoners.

''We will do more by signing agreements with countries like Jamaica which have 1,400 foreign prisoners in British cells; Nigeria, which has more than 1,000 foreign prisoners in British cells; Vietnam and China — 400 and 300 prisoners in British cells," he said.

"We will sign agreements with these countries so we can return prisoners as expeditiously as possible."

However, similar agreements already exist with more than 100 countries and yet the number of foreign prisoners continues to rise.

A deal was reached last year whereby EU nationals could serve their sentences in their own countries but has yet to be implemented. This would remove about 2,000 from British jails, though 800 British criminals in jail elsewhere in the EU would be repatriated.

The annual cost of keeping 11,000 foreign inmates is nearly £350 million. Just removing the Jamaican prisoners would save £49 million a year.

The reasons behind the rise in foreign prisoners are the high levels of immigration in recent years and rising drug trafficking. Prison Service figures show that the vast majority, especially women, have committed drug offences.

If there were not so many foreign inmates, there would not be a population crisis in the prisons. In 1996, there were fewer than 5,000 overseas prisoners and the scale of the increase in foreign nationals has far outstripped the rise in British inmates.

Apart from the two foreign-only jails, there are two prisons – Verne, in Dorset, and Morton Hall, Lincs – where foreign nationals make up half of the population. In a further 16 jails, they make up a quarter of the total.

The Government was reviewing whether to create more prisons just for foreigners.

Main nationalities in our jails:

Jamaica 1,464, Nigeria 1,061,Irish Republic 653,Pakistan 419,Vietnam 406,Somalia 356,India 315,China 312,Poland 312,Iraq 264,Turkey 225,South Africa 210,Ghana 207 ,Iran 194, Zimbabwe 194 ,Algeria 193,Lithuania 191,Portugal 183 ,France 170 ,Sri Lanka 169 ,Bangladesh 167 ,Romania 150,Albania 148,Netherlands 132,Germany 129,Columbia 124,Russia 113,Congo 111 ,Italy 106,USA 103

Though Sri Lanka is in the lower part of the list, many of those held were involved in gang related violence, credit card fraud and various other serious crimes including murders. Sri Lankan criminality is part and parcel of the decades old civil war and the violence that is ravaging that country unabated. This island is now exporting a good number of criminals many already well groomed in violence; even terrorism. A nation that was once famous for tea has now fallen from that pedestal. The terrible price it is paying for racial discrimination seems beyond the understanding of the country's politicians.