Pubdate: Sat, 19 Aug 2006 Source: Daily Telegraph (UK) Copyright: 2006 Telegraph Group Limited Contact: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/114 HOW DRUGS HARM US Time was, British prisons housed the criminal elements of the white working class. Immigrants were generally well behaved, and foreign criminals were simply deported. Now, however, one in seven prisoners is a foreign national and, as we report today, their numbers are growing at four times the rate of the British-born prison population. The steep rise in foreign prisoners is largely the consequence of Britons' apparently insatiable appetite for drugs. Forty per cent of foreign male prisoners and 80 per cent of females are serving sentences for drug offences, mainly trafficking. These men and women are mostly at the bottom of the criminal pecking order: hapless fools from rural backwaters, coerced or bribed or bamboozled into carrying narcotics on an airplane, often secreted inside their bodies. advertisement These pathetic "mules" suffer the penalty for the far greater crimes committed on the supply and demand side of the drug trade: the drug lords overseas, and the consumers here. Transporting drugs is a serious crime, deserving of stiff penalties. But in locking up the mules, we are simply punishing the messenger; and there are countless more messengers where they come from. To reverse the trend for more and more foreign national prisoners, four steps must be taken. First, there should be a redoubling of efforts to curtail drug use in Britain, through a clear-sighted determination to punish possession. Second, we must disrupt the production of drugs abroad. This will take concerted international effort and meaningful strategies to replace poppies and coca with legal cash crops. Third, we must revert to the policy of deporting to their countries of origin foreign prisoners convicted of minor offences. Most foreigners in British jails are from Commonwealth countries: let us invoke the relationship to negotiate deals whereby, for instance, Jamaicans convicted of crime in Britain serve their sentences in Jamaica. Finally, we need effective border security to ensure that those we admit to these shores add to, rather than steal from, our national wealth and health. Britain is an entrepot of world trade: let us make sure we deal in respectable goods and labour, not the products and purveyors of death. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek