UK to Spend Millions Building a Jamaican Jail So It Can Deport Prisoners

The UK is to spend $38 million helping to build a jail in Jamaica that it can send foreign criminals to, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced today.

Beginning in 2020, more than 300 Jamaican prisoners in the UK will be returned to finish out their sentence in their home country, to be housed in a jail partially built with British aid money.

The British leader made the announcement while on an official visit to the Caribbean island — the first visit of a UK prime minister to Jamaica in 14 years — during which he is facing calls from the Jamaican government for billions of pounds in reparations for slavery dating back centuries. Countless thousands of slaves were taken from Africa on British ships to the Caribbean, many to work as forced labor on sugar plantations.

Speaking at a bilateral meeting on Wednesday, Jamaican leader Portia Simpson-Miller said: "I brought to the prime minister's attention the issue of reparations, indicating that Jamaica is involved in a process under the auspices of the Caribbean community to engage the UK on the matter, while we are aware of the obvious sensitivities involved."

Cameron did not address the reparations issue when he responded to Simpson-Miller's comment. But he did announce an agreement to build a new prison in Kingston to house Jamaicans sentenced to jail in Britain.

There are around 600 Jamaican prisoners in the UK, accounting for the third largest group of foreign national offenders after Poland and Ireland. Around 70 percent are in jail for drugs or violence-related crimes.

"We've agreed to work together to build a new prison here in Kingston, improving the ability of the Jamaican criminal justice system to deal with crime and also enabling the United Kingdom to return criminals to serve their sentence," said Cameron. "It is absolutely right that foreign criminals who break our laws are properly punished but this shouldn't be at the expense of the hardworking British taxpayer."

The agreement, which comes after almost a decade of negotiations between the UK and Jamaican governments, would save the British taxpayer millions of pounds, said Cameron. The average annual cost of a prison place in the UK is around $54,000.

Currently Jamaican prisoners cannot be repatriated because the poor state of jails on the island means inmates could potentially challenge the move on human rights grounds. The new jail will house around 1,500 inmates and will be 40 percent funded by British aid money.

But Frances Crook from the Howard League for Penal Reform told the BBC that without British support for the running of the new prison, it would "very quickly deteriorate," meaning the human rights issue would persist. The proposal was "the wrong use of foreign aid", she said, and would not solve the problem of overcrowding in British prisons.

Cameron is also going to announce $455 million in aid money to be spent on a Caribbean infrastructure fund, making Britain one of the largest bilateral aid donors to the region.

But his visit looks set to be overshadowed by the slavery reparations issue. The chairs of Jamaica's National Commission on Reparation and the Reparations Commission of Caricom — the Caribbean's regional political and economic body — have both called on Cameron to make amends for Britain's role in the slave trade, and Jamaican MP Mike Henry has called on his fellow parliamentarians to snub the British leader if he does not address the issue.

But the UK government has repeatedly made clear it does not believe reparations or apologies for slavery are the right approach.