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Britain

A Return To "Transport To Botany Bay"?

2007-02-01

A PLANE-load of prisoners from British jails could be headed Down Under more than 200 years after Britain first sent boats full of convicts to Australia. With the UK on the brink of a jail overcrowding crisis, Prime Minister Tony Blair has vowed "all options" are open to solve the problem - including sending hundreds of expat prisoners home to serve their sentences.

Australia's High Commissioner to the UK Richard Alston made light of the the prospect of convicts again landing on Aussie soil at a recent function. However the crisis is no laughing matter for Home Secretary John Reid. Cells are so full he last week wrote a letter to judges urging them to lock away only the most violent and dangerous criminals. The plea brought Mr Reid under immediate fire but he says he has no choice but to propose an array of radical solutions to the cell shortages.

Suggestions include the "nuclear option" of releasing some prisoners early; sending 11,000 foreign nationals to finish their sentences at home; and creating a waiting list for jail spaces. Other emergency proposals include renting prison ships to house criminals offshore and converting an RAF camp to house prisoners.

The maximum capacity of British jails is 80,716. The number of inmates topped 80,000 for the first time in November. The rapidly bulging prison population has been blamed on the 2003 Justice Act, which was expected to see serious criminals locked up for longer and fewer jailed for minor crimes.

Posted by:Anonymoose

They might prefer putting them on the USS Botany Bay and getting rid of the problem for a few centuries.

Sorry, the real world had Bill Gates instead of Henry Starling. No crashed 29th century timeships to augment our technology.

Posted by: Korora 2007-02-01 20:14

#6 We can't allow your refugees to come to our ice-station populated by our refugees which were caused by your Germans training our insurgents to cleanse our population which was previously their population which police force we trained to destroy your refugees. Wait, is that it? Indeed. Cetainly. Here's the bill.

/Basil

Posted by: Shipman 2007-02-01 16:53

#5 Ice Station Zebra, folks, we got plenty of room at Ice Station Zebra.

Posted by: Steve White 2007-02-01 13:30

#4 Nahuru, it's already built.

Posted by: Shipman 2007-02-01 11:34

#3 Khan!

Posted by: Excalibur 2007-02-01 11:19

#2 Maybe not so unreasonable after all.

In fact, I have just the place for them.

Johnston Atoll, specifically Johnston Island, in the Pacific, is an isolated island that is owned as an "unincorporated territory" by the United States, though we have considered selling it. It is about one-third of the way from Hawaii to the Marshall Islands.

It is about one square mile in size, having been enlarged through dredging.

It is in the area of both atomic testing, and was the major US chemical weapons storage facility in the pacific, abandoned in 1975. At its peak, it had over a thousand US service personnel living there.

All structures have been removed, but it could be rebuilt as a prison (probably by the US), before transferred for sale to England.

The incentive for the US to do this would be the assumption that England, and maybe one or two other European countries, could transport their "worst of the worst" terrorists there.

Think of it as "Europe's Gitmo".

As we are such a generous people, I imagine that we might even engage in a little more environmentally sensitive island enlargement, building some artificial reefs so that the island would continue to increase in area. Must plan for the future and all that.

Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-02-01 10:14

#1 They might prefer putting them on the USS Botany Bay and getting rid of the problem for a few centuries.

Posted by: Eric Jablow 2007-02-01 10:06

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