Kevin Baker sheds the light on more UK lunacy. Apparently if you are wrongfully convicted of a crime, they make you pony up for freeloading while you were in prison.

Paddy Hill was one of the Birmingham Six. He spent 16 years behind bars for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings by the IRA. Hill now lives on a farm with his wife and children near Beith in Scotland. He has been charged �50,000 for living expenses by the Home Office. [...]

O'Brien spent 10 years in jail wrongly convicted of killing a Cardiff newsagent. His baby daughter died while he was in prison and he was charged �37,500 by the Home Office for his time behind bars. [...]

Vincent Hickey, one of the Bridgewater Four who was wrongly convicted for killing a paperboy, was charged �60,000 for the 17 years he spent in jail. He said: "If I had known this I would have stayed on hunger-strike longer, that way I would have had a smaller bill." [...]

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.