I wonder if this was inspired by our Beloved & Respected Government's practice of charging discharged detainees for board, or if both were inspired by a similar example elsewhere, or it's just the kind of mentality some have? After all, it was a tradition in the English debtor's prisons & so forth.

www.sundayherald.com/40592
We locked you up in jail for 25 years and you were innocent all along? That’ll be £80,000 please

Blunkett charges miscarriage of justice victims ‘food and lodgings’
By Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor
WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?

An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.

On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets ...
One Example
ROBERT Brown was just a 19-year-old from Glasgow when he was jailed for life for murdering a woman called Annie Walsh in Manchester in 1977. He served 25 years before he was finally freed in 2002, when the courts ruled him innocent of the crime.

He is now facing a bill of around £80,000 for the living expenses he cost the state ...

There are many loggings of this aroudn the blogs, many with headings like "You have GOT to be joking!"
One comment from www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/005733.html
Beyond belief
Bill for the bullet. Christ.
Blunkett makes a very interesting case study for the statist whose mind is so warped that it leads him to come to ideas a six-year-old could recognize as horrible. There's some sick moral inversion that goes on in the brain of someone like that where the people exist as grist for the government mill rather than the government being a construct of the people. Any psychology students feel like writing their thesis on Blunkett? I think the world could benefit.
Posted by Andy Danger at March 16, 2004 05:36 AM

Here is a bit of a follow up about the appeal against the disallowance of this. Will have to follow to find out what decision comes down eventually.
www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,7369,1170170,00.html
Ruling appeal over B&B bill
Eric Allison, prisons correspondent
Tuesday March 16, 2004
The Guardian
The Home Office is to appeal today against a court ruling that victims of notorious miscarriages of justice should not have to pay the bed-and-breakfast bill for their time in jail ...
Michael Hickey staged two prison rooftop protests against his conviction. One, during a severe winter, lasted 87 days. His brother Vincent spent 44 days on hunger strike.
Vincent Hickey said yesterday: "I should have gone on hunger strike for longer than 44 days: then the bill would have been less."

On a more cheerful note:
York Atmospheric Chemistry Group Curry Website www.york.ac.uk/res/atmoschem/Curry.html
The only website* where York's Curry House's are expertly reviewed by trained scientists** and published in a respected scientific journal***.
* As far as I am aware
**All reviewers are trained to at least degree level in Chemistry
*** New Scientist, 20 March 2004, page 88
[I refuse to make jokes about the effect on the atmosphere of the results of curry-munching, etc.]

Bob Zangas' Journey In Iraq
militarypages.com/cfiles/siteone.asp?p=38&id=23
He was killed in a roadside attack after this entry.
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 3/23/2004 12:33:00 am