"Necessary and Pragmatic"

Johnny-Boy "I am the enforcer" Reid has emerged from his cellar again. Our prisons are overflowing, so the police stations are going to be utilised to keep people locked up. Furthermore, he's been advertising for ships to turn into prisons. A Home Office spokeswoman tells us that her boss: "has said he wants us to explore innovative solutions to the prison capacity issue."

Innovative?

Our prisons are full because too many people get sent to them. Some people are public hazards and need to be kept out of the way, but most prisoners are social inadequates, and locking them up won't help them become adequate anytime soon. Intelligent community sentences might.

But The Enforcer can't be seen to be a decent human being, can he? The trouble is, even within his own sad, quasi-macho terms, he's failed... He promised root and branch reform of the Home Office. But the absence of forward thinking on prisons has pushed him into reverting to ancient and discredited methods for locking up people.

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