Brexit boss Nigel Farage followed up the announcement his Reform UK party has opened talks with El Salvador to offshore prison for migrant offenders with other robust policies to end the present practice of widespread early release over a shortage of prison places.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and spokesman Zia Yusuf rejected the government’s official position that crime is actually falling on Monday morning and vowed to implement a raft of new policies to keep criminals off the streets if elected to form a future British government. Offering a simple and long-effective idea — that criminals should spend time in prison, that rehabilitation is important but those resistant to it should stay in prison, and that serious criminals shouldn’t be released — the Reform leaders said Britain’s prison estate simply being too small is a major limiting factor at present.
This is the fault of the Conservative Party, Farage said, recalling that the former centre-right government had thrown the borders open to a massive increase in the national population but had built practically no new prisons at the same time. Labour inherited this problem, he said, but lacked the imagination or inclination to do anything concrete about it, opting instead to send fewer people to prison in the first place, and release early many of those that had already been put behind bars.
A Reform party spokesman said up to 5,000 “dangerous criminals” stand to be released early in the coming months, and 70,000 have already been released over the last two years of Labour rule. Shockingly notorious cop killers are soon due to be among those released.
This policy of pushing criminals back on the streets is a major factor in the country feeling less safe to the wider, law-abiding public and should stop, Farage said. He remarked:
…the biggest issue in our national lives that is reported on, spoken about, and debated around the least. It is the area of law and order.
We are in no doubt that Britain is lawless… we are living through a breakdown of society.
Part of the response contained in the “Keeping Criminals Behind Bars” policy is renting prison space abroad and holding foreigners found guilty of crimes there instead of in British prisons. As previously reported, Reform is commencing talks with El Salvador on renting prisons there and this could instantly free up some 10,000 spaces in the United Kingdom.
A Reform government would simultaneously move to rapidly expand the prison estate, creating pop-up, prefabricated prisons on military bases. Based conceptually on the enormous temporary ‘Nightingale hospitals’ built in Britain during the Covid era, with thousands of beds deployed in days in converted big-box stores, warehouses, and conference centres, the prisons could resemble wartime Prisoner-of-War camps and have been called ‘Nightingale Prisons’ by Reform.
Mr Farage said: “to house a foreign national offender in El Salvador will be half the cost of housing a foreign national offender in this country and will give us prison spaces”. Between renting space in South America and getting the British Army to help the rapid programme of temporary prison building, Reform said they could make 22,000 spaces available in prisons for criminals who shouldn’t be on the streets in 18 months.
Opening up this space will mean serious criminals who commit crimes such as “murder, manslaughter, rape, and serious violence” will serve full sentences rather than be given early release out of necessity, and those who are given short jail sentences are actually sent to prison, rather than excused it over lack of space. Zia Yusuf said “British people are literally being killed because there are not enough prison places” and vowed “killers rapists and violent thugs will never be released a day early”.
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