The blame game

By the time you read this, Her Majesty’s prisons might no longer exist. The end is nigh. Terms like “at boiling point” and “bursting at the seams” have become redundant in describing an inmate population that grows at such a rate it must make law-abiding citizens wonder whether they are missing out on something. The prison estate will soon be a forgotten landscape, as distant a memory as capital punishment or old-fashioned courtesy. It can take no more. Such is the level of overcrowding that the average cell now resembles a telephone box on rag night in the times when students used to compete to see how many bodies they could get inside the box and still close the door and make a call. The prison system, we are told, is about to “implode”.

We’re full!

Now it must be admitted that this implosion information came from the leader of the probation officers’ union, whose opinion might