Foreign Criminals to Be Deported and Banned Instead of Jailed to Free Up Prison Spaces

Secretary of State for Justice Alex Chalk leaving Number 10 Downing Street, London, on June 13, 2023. (Aaron Chown/PA)

Lower-level foreign offenders will be expelled and banned from reentering the UK rather than jailed, in plans that will free up prison spaces, the justice secretary announced.

Drug dealers, shoplifters, and thieves will be handed “conditional cautions” instead of facing convictions in new plans announced by Justice Secretary Alex Chalk on Sunday. The measures would reduce the number of prisoners who have been charged and are in custody in Britain’s prison system.

Mr. Chalk told The Telegraph during a visit to HMP Liverpool, “There is a power that exists in certain lower-level cases, that in place of prosecution, the Home Office deports someone.”

He continued: “Now there are some cases where it’s absolutely right that you are going to want to go through the criminal justice process to ensure that that person is properly punished.

“But there will be other cases where actually it’s in the public interest to simply get them out of the country.”

The reforms, initially revealed by Mr. Chalk in October 2023, would also allow authorities to fast-track the removal of foreign criminals who are near the end of their prison sentences.

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Currently, authorities can deport foreign criminals up to a year before the end of their sentence, but ministers hope that deportations six months earlier could save taxpayers £70,000 per prisoner.

Prison Transfer With Albania, Poland, Romania

In May 2023, the government announced new arrangements on prisoner transfers with Albania, resulting in 200 Albanian prisoners being sent home to serve their sentences.

Mr. Chalk also revealed on Sunday that he had opened negotiations to make similar arrangements to deport dangerous prisoners from Poland and Romania to serve their sentences in their home countries.

According to prison population statistics to Dec. 31, 2023, there were 10,423 foreign nationals held in custody, representing 12 percent of the total prison population in England and Wales.

The most common foreign nationalities in prisons are Albanian (13 percent), Polish (9 percent), and Romanian (7 percent).

In July, former head of the National Crime Agency’s Drugs Threat and Intelligence department Tony Saggers told The Epoch Times that Albanian organised crime gangs dominate the UK’s cocaine supply networks.

The United Nations also warned last year that Albanian criminals are exerting “excessive” control of the UK’s drug trade, and are able to ship large consignments of illegal substances via ports in the southeast of England and using the Albanian diaspora to set up operations in cities across Europe.

Criminals Fighting Deportation

Mr. Chalk acknowledged that foreign criminals fight deportation, often on human rights grounds, saying, “Some don’t want to leave a British prison or Britain because they will say that they’ve got a child here, or whatever it is.”

Last month, a Serbian national who had been jailed for running a cannabis farm won an appeal against his deportation “on human rights grounds,” because he said he had forgotten the language and would not be able to reintegrate.

The Home Office had sought to deport ethnic Albanian Clirim Kukaj, 30, who had come to the UK “clandestinely” in 2007 aged 13.

The court had heard that Kukaj had left school at the age of 8 as a result of persistent bullying, and had stopped engaging with the Serbian language.

Immigration tribunal judge Fiona Lindsley said in her ruling that “the decision that the claimant no longer speaks Serbian is sufficiently reasoned, particularly as we find that it was entirely rationally open to the first-tier tribunal given that the claimant clearly comes from an ethnically Albanian and Albanian-speaking family and had ceased engaging with the Serbian language at school from the age of eight years.”

Almost 12,000 Foreign Criminals Released Into the Community

Foreign nationals who service a prison sentence of 12 months or more face automatic deportation under UK law.

In October 2023, government figures revealed that 11,769 foreign national offenders had been released from jail and into the community, despite being subject to deportation orders.

This figure included over 3,700 who had still been in the UK for five years or more after their release from prison.