The Great Escape

I make no apologies for continuing a Home Office theme today, after all I have an absolute wealth of material as you can see below. In this post I’m going to look at escaped prisoners. You would think that they wouldn’t want to escape since they could probably get £2.8 million just by attempting to commit suicide.

But no, some of them long for their freedom, 393 of them in fact. There is a report on the BBC saying that “393 prisoners have absconded since 1999” – notice they stress 1999? Over seven years isn’t a big deal is it? Well yes it is. They are losing one per week, yes ONE PER WEEK.

How can this be? The basic job of the prison service is to keep prisoners out of society. Not to give them aromatherapy classes, canoeing holidays and so forth, it is to keep these people locked up.

Schools don’t manage to lose one person a week, hospitals don’t lose a patient a week, and multi storey car parks aren’t reporting one car stolen per outlet per week. There is no excuse.
The very idea that we cannot get a fundamental change in the management scares the hell out of me. I’m not sure how many murderers are going to be free to kill me between now and then.