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Final-year students on Glasgow University's course in accounting and business ethics were given practical experience of crime not paying when they were put on remand and locked up in Barlinnie, Scotland's toughest prison. The course is the brainchild of lecturer Ken McPhail, who believes ethical issues should be a compulsory part of accountancy degrees.

'The Barlinnie visit will certainly act as a deterrent [to crime] now that the students have seen the reality,' he said, revealing that one prisoner the students saw was an accountant jailed for 18 months for fraud. 'I want to get ethics in accounting opened up as a public debate because it affects all areas of our lives, from determining how much money health departments get to the design of our cars'