Overuse of custody has become a badge of political toughness rather than a matter for national shame. Beyond the rhetoric and behind closed doors, the prison population has more than doubled since January 1993. Numbers fluctuate but in 16 years England and Wales, with an imprisonment rate of 154 per 100,000 of the population, has become the top incarcerator in Western Europe. Rates in more moderate France and Germany are 96 and 90 per 100,000. Fevered prison building, at £170,000 per place, is now set to propel us past most of our Eastern European neighbours.

With no crime wave to fuel it, how has this addiction to imprisonment taken hold so fast? According to a Ministry of Justice review around 70% of the increase in demand for prison places between 1995 and 2005 arose due to changes in custody rates and increased sentence length. A welter of Criminal Justice Acts, the creation of thousands of new criminal offences and a raft of minimum, mandatory penalties have all taken their toll.

Many more people are being received into prison than are being released. Nearly a fifth of the sentenced prison population must now endure the uncertainty of an indeterminate sentence. In October this year, there were almost 6,000 people serving new Indeterminate Public Protection sentences, 2,300 of whom were being held beyond their tariff expiry date. Very many serving this Kafkaesque sentence have no means to show they present no risk to the public. Add to this ever growing residual population of Lifers and those on IPPs, the revolving door of petty offenders and staggering numbers on remand or recall, and you face an unsustainable prison population held at massive social and economic cost.

Far from being a punishment of last resort, deprivation of liberty and incarceration is now so commonplace that 7% of all children, at some time in their school years, will experience their dad’s imprisonment. In 2006, more children were affected by the imprisonment of a parent than by divorce in the family. There are 160,000 children  with a parent in prison each year; this is around two and a half times the number of children in care, and over six times the number of children on the child protection register.

The over-used phrase ‘chaotic lives’ belies just how vile things have been for people before they ended up in prison. One learning-disabled prisoner told Prison Reform Trust researchers:

I was homeless and stayed in a bed and breakfast, it was shit. I had been off drugs for nine years but moved on to alcohol. I’d spend my money on alcohol and scrounge off other people’s dinner plates for food. I was taken into care at the age of four through ’til I was 16. I was sexually abused at 14…and that really threw me off the rails.

Prison has become a capacious net into which those let down by other public services fall. So no surprise then that around three quarters of people in prison suffer from at least two diagnosable mental health disorders and that learning disabilities and difficulties are rife. The vast majority of people received into prison test positive for class A drugs and report a drink problem. There are over 8,000 former service men and women in custody many of whom will have been homeless and in debt prior to imprisonment.

Shocking reconviction rates show that we have got it wrong for victims and wrong for society. But reducing this new found dependency on incarceration still won’t be easy. It will take confident, authoritative politicians to shrink prison
numbers back to an unavoidable minimum. They will need to show how public safety and public health will be improved by using prison more sparingly.

Opinion polls show strong support for early intervention, community service, restorative justice, treatment for addicts and mental health care. People don’t like unfairness and waste of scarce resources. New, honest plans for proportionate justice and integrating social and criminal justice policies would make sense and be a welcome relief from a damaging prisons binge.