Lock 'em up. That's been the approach of ministers, first Tory then Labour, for more than 15 years - but the coalition's justice secretary is different. The prison population is now double what it was when Ken Clarke was Home Secretary in the early 1990s. Now Mr Clarke says that we can't afford to keep imprisoning more and more people and, what's more, it doesn't work.
Today, he got the backing of some of those serving time at Her Majesty's pleasure in Wormwood Scrubs - including Bob, a thrice-convicted drug dealer and Sayed, a twice-convicted burglar and drug user. They told him that jail doesn't work and criticised it as "a revolving door". Ken Clarke joked that they'd been reading his speeches.
In an interview afterwards he told me that the "vast population" housed in prisons could be reduced with "a bit of effort" to "get them off drugs, get them off alcohol. Get them some sort of employment prospects."
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A cut of almost a quarter in the prison budget assumes that there will be 3.000 fewer prisoners in four years' time than now. So where, I asked Mr Clarke, did that leave the Tories' manifesto pledge to crack down on those carrying a knife?
"We are not setting absolute tariffs for particular things. What happens is pundits on newspapers suggest tariffs for particular forms of crime. Anybody who's guilty of serious knife crime will go to prison... I'm not in favour of absolute rules; I'm in favour of actually allowing judges to see how nasty the offender is, see what the offence was, see what the best way of protecting the public from him is... I'm more interested in actually will we stop this man doing this again in future now we've caught him?"
The Conservative manifesto stated that:
"We have to send a serious, unambiguous message that carrying a knife is totally unacceptable, so we will make clear that anyone convicted of a knife crime can expect to face a prison sentence."
Labour is likely to pounce on this as an embarrassing U-turn.
However, all the main parties now agree on the need for what Mr Clarke will hail tomorrow as a rehabilitation revolution to stop prisoners re-offending.
It may not have helped Mr Clarke make his case that when he departed from the Scrubs, his car passed a bread delivery lorry with the slogan "Voted Britain's softest".
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2010/12/prisons_a_rehabilitation.html
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