Weight of evidence, local public resistance and lack of cash may have put paid to government’s grandiose plans to build five gigantic jails, but the obsession with increasing prison capacity remains, and is apparently shared by Justice Ministers, their Tory shadows and private contractors alike.

In the face of swingeing public service cuts and a forthcoming election, prison building continues ant-like, relentlessly filling every space and crevice within the existing estate. Accommodation blocks are being thrown up across the country without, in most instances, accompanying provision for constructive activity. Massive development on the Belmarsh site in South East London will result in three prisons holding in Belmarsh 900, Belmarsh West 900 and the separate HMP Isis 624 respectively.

New prisons are still on the stocks. Each of these 'mini-titans' is scheduled to hold 1,500 men. The building programme will take the rate of imprisonment in England and Wales to 178 per 100,000 of the general population. This far exceeds incarceration rates of all our Western neighbours, including Germany at 88 and France 96 per 100,000 of their populations, and pushes us ahead of many Eastern European nations.

When Labour swept to power in May 1997 the prison population stood at a troubling 60,131. This already exceeded former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf’s, estimated ‘unavoidable minimum’ of 45,000 people. Today prison numbers top 83,000, including now almost 2,000 people, trapped beyond tariff by Kafkaesque indeterminate public protection sentences. Shaming levels of imprisonment was not an expected outcome from a government committed to social inclusion.

So where are the levers for reform? Strengthening sentencing guidelines could lead to greater proportionality and consistency in sentencing. The forthcoming Justice Select Committee report on justice re-investment will show how limited funds can be deployed across departments to better effect.

Government–commissioned reviews by Baroness Corston and Lord Bradley warn that widespread use of imprisonment widens, rather than narrows, health and social inequalities. Their recommendations, if properly implemented, would reduce offending and improve public health. £15.6million, to develop the Corston model of women’s centres is a good start.  Work on local solutions to crime is backed by new PSA targets. And Bradley should deliver assessments, reduce remand and divert people who are mentally ill and those with learning disabilities away from criminal justice into the health and social care they need.

Two recent Prison Reform Trust reports show how taking a commonsense, public health approach would pay off. In the first, No One Knows: Prisoners’ Voices, over 170 prisoners give harrowing accounts of what it is like to go from police stations to courts to prison in a fog of anxiety and well-founded fear of bullying, not understanding or half-understanding what is happening to you. An estimated 7% of people in prison have an IQ of less than 70 and 20-30% have learning difficulties and disabilities that interfere with their ability to cope with the criminal justice system.

The second report, Too Little Too Late draws on evidence from 57 independent monitoring boards. It reveals that very many people who should have been diverted into mental health or social care are entering prisons, ill equipped to meet their needs, and then being discharged back into the community without any support.

The chair of one board wrote:

An 80-year-old confused man [in this prison] is unable to look after himself.  We do not yet know whether he was known to social services but it seems likely.  He has a five-year sentence for indecent exposure which is not surprising since he continually takes his clothes off. [This man] should not be in prison.

Why do we lock up our most ill people in our most bleak institutions? Why do we tolerate a society in which black and minority ethnic groups are 40% more likely than white people to have to gain access to psychiatric treatment via a criminal justice gateway? Why waste time and public money building bigger and bigger prisons when it is clear that our jails are full of people in urgent need of proper mental health and social care?

In the end, if government fails to offer authoritative leadership, it may be hard-edged disability, equalities and corporate manslaughter legislation and tough spending constraints that drive through long-awaited reform.