Is there any way of solving our prisoner cell blockage?

The headline news is that the prisons crisis is not going to get much better for many years.

- SEAN O'GRADY

The justice secretary Shabana Mahmood warns that despite the current, deeply unpopular, prisoner release scheme and plans to create 14,000 more prison places by 2031, the authorities could still run out of space over the next few years. “We are going to fall short and we simply can not build our way out of this problem,” she said. It’s one of the most intractable issues facing the government, and there are votes at stake...

Why are we here?

The short answer is that the British public, vengeful by nature, demand that all sorts of offenders be subjected to a custodial sentence for the sake of retribution, but the British are also a devoutly cakeist people, and not prepared to pay the taxes required to build sufficient prisons to house all the inmates they’d like to bang up and throw away the key.

So the UK keeps passing laws, tightening up sentencing guidelines and giving victims and ministers the right to ask for “lenient” sentences to be increased; yet in the past 14 years of Conservative rule, it must be said, only a net gain of 500 additional places were delivered; and the prisons were allowed to become unmanageably overcrowded – operating at 99 per cent capacity. The need for exemplary sentencing after the summer riots required emergency early release of non-sexual and other serious offenders.

Where does that figure of 500 more places come from?