The Prison Service has announced that it will be forced to lock some prisoners in their own homes as the numbers of people convicted of crimes in the UK looks to rise in the coming year. The scheme will involve only those lower categories of criminals involved in embezzlement, fake loans, and other forms of corruption, and will build on successful trials that have been running successfully throughout Europe.

Yet the plans for the temporary accommodation have already led to predications that there will be a rise in the number of jail breaks, often involving elaborate schemes where prisoners dress up like spiritual gurus or dig tunnels from rose gardens. Actors and director, Lord Richard Attenborough, has been one of the first to criticise the plans, recollecting when similar schemes were put into operation in the war. ‘We use to escape all the time in the 1940s,’ he said. ‘We’d usually get a very broad Scot, usually called Gordon who couldn’t speak a word of German, and dress him up in a guard’s uniform and make him walk around while sentries asked him to light their cigarette. In the meantime, the rest of us — who could speak fluent German, of course — would sneak off dressed as a wooden vaulting horse. Somewhere along the line, somebody would go a bit crazy and make a dash for it and get shot and the rest of us would end up in solitary. Usually, though, one of us would finally escape and make it to the Swiss border where we’d make ourselves comfortable with some cheese and a buxom milk maid high up there in the Alps.’

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