Are you sure you want to know? The new Home Secretary, John Reid, has been on the job for barely two weeks, and there are already suggestions that he is being crushed by his department’s incompetence. The former Home Secretary Charles Clarke was fired after revelations that thousands of foreign criminals were improperly permitted to remain in the UK after their release. Now it has emerged that hundreds of violent criminals assigned to open prisons have vamoosed. Records released for one such prison reveal that an average of almost two convicts have gone AWOL every week for the past three years.
Prison Service figures show that offenders have been escaping from Leyhill Open Prison, Glos [Gloucestershire], at the rate of almost two a week for three years.
It is one of 13 open prisons in England. The Home Office last night refused to give absconding rates for the others, but did not suggest they would be any less serious.
Robbery and burglary offenders were the main absconders. But 22 murderers and seven rapists have fled Leyhill since 1999.
David Laws, a local Liberal Democrat MP, requested the figures after being informed by area police that they have to devote considerable resources to crimes committed by Leyhill escapees.
More bad news had surfaced from the Home Office earlier this weekend. The Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) has misclassified some 1500 innocent persons as criminals over the past two years, and almost 3000 since the CRB was established in 2002.
Opposition politicians seized on the disclosure that CRB errors led to ordinary people - from court ushers to students - being wrongly identified as pornographers, thieves and violent robbers.
Some people had been turned down for jobs or university places while others had to be fingerprinted at police stations to prove they were not criminals.
The Home Office described the errors as "regrettable" but refused to apologise.
The classification errors represent 0.03 percent of the nine million record checks carried out by the CRB. A minuscule proportion indeed—but that’s small comfort to those whose applications for jobs or loans were rejected due to erroneous CRB information.
The Home Office’s excuse for the errors is made less compelling by the news that it was warned of faults a year ago.
Ministers were told a year ago that innocent lives were being ruined by errors in criminal records checks that labelled people as paedophiles and sex offenders.
. . .
The Times has learnt that an independent government- appointed watchdog called last year for improved procedures, including fingerprint checks, to avoid such blunders.
Can anything else go wrong? Need you ask?
There was further embarrassment when it was confirmed that an immigration official had been suspended over allegations that he offered to help a teenage asylum seeker with her application in return for sex.
It was also disclosed that 232 foreign nationals arrested in counter terrorism operations were allowed to stay as asylum seekers - including 18 who applied for refugee status only after their arrest.
. . .
The Home Office also revealed that the Immigration and Nationality Directorate spent £21 million on "consultancy support" in 2005-06.
The figure was disclosed after the IND, with the help of a firm of consultants, produced a bizarre report containing cartoons, graffiti and meaningless squiggles.
That last complaint is overly critical, I think. In my experience, government consultants usually churn out bizarre and meaningless reports. Cartoons would be an improvement over some that I’ve seen (although I admit graffiti would be a new one for me).
One almost feels sorry for Mr Reid.
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One of Canada’s premier editorial cartoonists draws under the name Aislin. His real name is Terry Mosher (Aislin is the name of his eldest daughter), and he has drawn for Montreal newspapers since the late 1960s.
