Whose bright idea was this?!

Convicted prisoners sort through people's mail

[Debbie_King]

One of the company spokesmen said on the radio: "They were given the mail to sort. They were not supposed to open it".

They're prisoners - the reason they're there is because they do things they're not supposed to!

AN experiment in which criminals in a prison were employed to recycle junk mail has been abandoned after a convicted burglar found a member of the public's bank details in an envelope.

Inmates at Durham Prison have been employed to sort mail-shot letters marked return to sender prior to the paper being recycled.

Last week, however, the prison and contractors decided to go ahead with a trial in which prisoners were asked to open the envelopes and tear out the address windows, which cannot be recycled.

In doing so, one of the prisoners opened a letter that included the account details of a Nat West customer.

<mod note> Seems that the link to the story keeps changing so I quoted the story instead.</mod note>

[edited by: pmac at 7:12 pm (utc) on April 8, 2005]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]

[Mardi_Gras]

Actually, the inmate doesn't seem to have done anything wrong - the prison was expanding the program to recycle mail. When he discovered the contents of what he had opened (a bank statement) he notified the people supervising the project.

So while the entire prorgram may not be a good idea, it seems the prisoner acted honorably...

[edited by: pmac at 4:43 pm (utc) on April 8, 2005]