It costs almost four times as much to keep a prisoner at Westgate as to educate a child, Opposition MP Patricia Gordon-Pamplin claimed in Parliament this week.

The Shadow Works and Engineering Minister said a way of deploying resources more effectively at the "front end" needed to be found to reduce the jail population.

Mrs. Gordon-Pamplin cited the $79,000 annual cost of incarcerating a prisoner during a debate on the Budget in the House of Assembly. The Department of Corrections was allocated $29.4 million in this year's Budget.

The Budget gives an estimated figure of $16,717 a year for educating a student in the public school system.

But the Opposition works it out by taking the Department of Education's $128 million allocation and dividing it by the 5,744 students in the system, claiming the real cost is more than $22,000 a year.

Mrs. Gordon-Pamplin also spoke on Monday about the recent public claims of a former Westgate inmate that the prison is rife with drugs.

She said if it was true that contraband could be thrown over the perimeter walls then the jail's security system needed to be reviewed.

Government backbencher Neletha Butterfield had spoken earlier on Corrections, telling the House that the Public Safety Minister had stretched the budget to allow him to do a little bit more.

"We have to keep trying to help each individual," she said. Ms Butterfield said the prison system was a "community within a community".

"Everything we have, they have to have, except freedom," she added. "A community within a community is going to be expensive. We have to do it right."

Mrs. Gordon-Pamplin also discussed policing, telling her colleagues that she recently returned from a trip abroad to find three apartments in her home had been burgled.

"It was just wrecked," she said. She said that the Governor and Police Commissioner could only work with the resources they were given and that if they didn't get adequate manpower and appropriate technology then the battle against crime would be lost.

She said slashing the Police budget by more than $2 million was going to do little to reassure the public that they were safe.

The Shadow Minister cited concerns with the new Hamilton Police and court building, questioning whether Bermudians were being "excluded from the mix" when it came to certain work on the building project.

She said last year Government promised to cap total spending on the project at $75 million, but this year the total authorised funds were given as $78 million.

Mrs. Gordon-Pamplin said it was originally estimated that just over $6 million would be spent on the building in 2008/9, but that had now been revised to a little more than $15 million — an increase of about 150 percent.

The estimate for 2009/10 is given as $15 million. The Opposition MP said: "If we start getting estimates 150 percent incorrect we are going to start talking about serious money."