There are differing ways to respond to clear, up-to-date information about the state of our prisons and the state of people in them. One is to see relentlessly rising prison numbers, coupled with unacceptably high reconviction rates, as a storage problem and to respond by commissioning a £6billion warehouse building programme designed to increase prison capacity to over 100,000 places by 2014.

Another is to use what is known about the men, women and children in prison, and the offences for which they are being held, to ask fundamental questions about the purpose of imprisonment, and its social and economic outcomes, and to act to introduce proportionality into sentencing, invest in effective community penalties and to call on a range of government departments to shoulder their responsibilities for increasing well being and reducing offending.

Less than a year ago, incoming Secretary of State for Justice Jack Straw stated that he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, build his way out of the prisons crisis.  As prison numbers continued to climb, and the haste of badly drafted, headline-grabbing indeterminate public protection legislation was exposed, a consensus seemed to be emerging that a diet of tough laws, longer sentences and more prisons just wasn’t sustainable or sensible.

Sadly hopes that we would see a new, authoritative approach from the Ministry of Justice were dealt a savage blow by its response to two very different prisons reviews by Lord Carter and Baroness Corston.

Government’s acceptance of Lord Carter’s plans for super-sized, so-called ‘titan’ jails flies in the face of evidence and runs counter to its own social inclusion agenda. Giant institutions don’t work, whether they are schools, hospitals or prisons, here or overseas. Important safety concerns have been raised by the Prisons Inspectorate and the Prison Governor’s Association. There’s also the risk that these titans will engulf any sensible plans to reform the justice system, having first call on scarce resources and scarcer still ministerial attention. 

It is difficult to see how pouring billions of pounds of public money into giant warehouses, each holding up to 3,000 people, will give hard-pressed prison staff the chance to work intensively to reduce re-offending. On current form the end result is going to be armies of ex-offenders released homeless, jobless, out of touch with their families and ready to offend again.

Investment instead in treatment for addicts would lead to a measurable drop in offending. Much acquisitive crime, shoplifting and theft, is driven by drugs. Binge drinking fuels violence and public disorder offences. In a welcome move government has commissioned Lord Bradley’s review of the scope for diverting the mentally ill and people with learning disabilities from police stations and courts into much-needed health and social care. The fact is so many of the solutions to crime lie outside prison bars.

That’s the approach advocated by Baroness Corston when she was commissioned to report to ministers following the tragic deaths of six women in Styal prison. She could see little sense in locking up at huge cost, vulnerable women offenders who pose no risk to the public. Instead she called for the closure of women’s prisons over a ten year timescale while government established some small custodial units for dangerous offenders and a larger network of support and supervision centres. Based on existing successful community centres, these would provide access to services to help women deal with addictions, mental illness, rape and domestic violence trauma and debt as well as gaining skills and taking responsibility for their families.

The response to Baroness Corston’s promising review remains insubstantial. Minsters agree with her analysis of the problem and nearly all her recommendations. Indeed they’ve been saying as much since 2001.  But neither the money nor a new Women’s Commission has been secured to drive things forward. It’s difficult to understand this reluctance to match words with deeds. Years of inaction to help some of the most vulnerable people in our society is as unforgivable as it is inexplicable.

It would be a tragedy if politicians in governing and main opposition parties were so intent on proving their toughness on crime by promising to build more prisons that they failed urgently to grasp a humane and decent solution which would reduce women’s offending.  Implementing the Corston blueprint, for women and possibly other groups of vulnerable offenders, would lead penal policy in a different, more humane and effective direction well away from the dreary titan treadmill.