Sentencing (Green Paper)

Yes, but my contention is that there are some unpleasant people out there who will commit crime unless they are prevented from doing so by being put in prison. When half the crimes committed in this country are being committed by 10% of the offenders, those 10% of offenders do not need to be out there doing good works on the street; they need to be behind bars so that they cannot reoffend. The concluding part of my remarks is that although I recognise the good intentions of the Ministry of Justice in trying to reduce reoffending—I do not doubt the Ministry's efforts in that regard—the obvious thing to do to reduce prison numbers is sort out the 11,500 foreign national prisoners in our jails. The number of such prisoners doubled under the previous Government. I have raised this issue time and time again on the Floor of the House and frankly we are not getting very far. One of the countries that has a high number of its nationals as prisoners in our country is Nigeria. When I last looked at the figures, I saw that there were something like 752 Nigerian nationals in prison in our country. Effectively, we are paying £30 million a year for incarcerating those individuals. The Nigerian National Assembly has been looking at this issue since 2007. Why are we not hauling in the Nigerian ambassador or speaking to the Nigerian President to get this arrangement sorted out, because sending 752 Nigerians back to Nigeria would go a long way to freeing up the 3,000 prison places that my hon. Friend the Minister wants to find?