In February 2001 the number of people in prison in England and Wales was 66,600 and Tony Blair announced the government’s intention to provide 2,500 new prison places as part of a ten year plan to deal with crime. In July 2006 the number of people in prison had risen to 78,400 and the Home Secretary announced his intention to provide an extra 8,000 prison places. These additional prison places are numbers plucked out of the air or at best made up in response to the latest crisis of prison overcrowding. The media has recently reported Home Office plans to purchase prison ships, to use former Army barracks and to convert disused psychiatric hospitals into prisons.

The question of how many prison places are needed in this country has exercised governments for many years and successive Home Secretaries have responded in different ways. Some have expressed an opinion about the need for a greater or lesser number of prisoners. In the mid 1970s Roy Jenkins voiced great concern at the possibility that the number of people in prison might rise to 45,000. During his tenure in that great office, Douglas Hurd talked of the need to reduce the prison population. More recent Home Secretaries have taken the pragmatic view that the number of prisoners will be dictated by the judges and that the task of the Home Office is simply to provide as many places as are required.

However, judges do not sentence in a vacuum. At a personal level they are affected by the political and media climate in which they operate. A sensitive judge cannot fail to be influenced by consistent demands that the criminal justice system should be “rebalanced” in favour of the victim and of “honest hard-working families”. More fundamentally, the task of the judge is to interpret and implement the law as enacted by Parliament. Time was when we looked for one major criminal justice bill in the life of each Parliament. We have become used in recent years to having several in each session of Parliament. So long as government introduces more punitive criminal justice legislation in each session of Parliament and the police, prosecution and judges apply these new laws, as they must, the demand for more prison places becomes insatiable.

This has brought us to the position in 2007 where additional prison places are not needed in response to an increase in crime. According to all reliable indicators crime has not been rising in recent years, nor has the number of convictions. In a joint consultation paper Making Sentencing Clearer published in November 2006 the Home Secretary, the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General provided the answer. “Sentencing has become tougher, with offenders more likely to get a prison sentence for almost any offence and that sentence is likely to be longer.” As a consequence of this, the three Ministers pointed out that there are people in prison who should not be there. They stated that these include foreign prisoners, who should be deported; vulnerable women and young offenders; those for whom mental health treatment would be more appropriate; the majority of non-violent offenders with low level disorders, who could be treated in the community without any risk to the public; and those on remand for less serious offences.

The fact that the criminal justice system in general and prison in particular is being used to deal with problems of mental health, of drug addiction and of homelessness goes some considerable way to explaining why the number of people in prison is increasing exponentially at a time when crime is falling. As soon as a person who has a mental health problem or a drug addiction problem commits an offence, the criminal justice system kicks in and takes priority, however reluctantly, over all other considerations. The consequence of this, and one which I fear has not yet been recognised, is that if the criminal justice system continues to be used as a means of coping in the short term with what are primarily health and social problems, then there will be almost no limit to the number of people who are likely to be sent to prison.

Linked to this is the fact that the sentences being handed down by courts are increasing in length. Over ten per cent of all prisoners are now serving indeterminate sentences, a higher number than are serving sentences of less than 12 months. This is unprecedented and has serious implications for the future since, by definition, this means that the rate of imprisonment is unlikely to come down if current provisions remain in place.

All of which leads inexorably to the conclusion that if the Home Secretary intends simply to continue to provide as many prison places as are needed, then the figure of 8,000 new places will be hopelessly inadequate. As in so many other areas, our experience in the United Kingdom may well be ten or 15 years behind the experience of the United States, which has already gone down this path. Their level of imprisonment now stands at 738 per 100,000 of the population. The rate of imprisonment in England and Wales stands at 148 per 100,000, the highest rate in Western Europe. If in a decade or so we were to reach the American rate of imprisonment then the Home Secretary would have to provide a total of around 400,000 prison places. That is, not an additional 8,000 places but an additional 320,000 places. And this will happen unless we decide otherwise.

It is worthy of note that the one government department which seems to understand this is the Treasury. Since 1997 around 20,000 additional prison places have been provided in England and Wales. Reports indicate that the Treasury has finally baulked at continuing to provide a blank cheque for prison building at a time when spending on other public institutions such as schools and hospitals is subject to restraint. Since the 8,000 new prison places were announced in December there have been various proposals about how they are to be funded. One is that the public should be offered the chance to purchase shares in new prisons under a "buy to let" scheme through which they could invest in a new-style property company, a "real estate investment trust", that would build prisons and then rent them out to private prison operators, thus providing the investor with a guaranteed dividend from the rental income. Such a model would still leave the Home Secretary having to find the necessary revenue to finance these new prison places on an annual basis.

The average cost of keeping a person in prison for one year is around £40,000. That means that the cost to the taxpayer of maintaining a prison with 700 places will be around £28 million per year. This figure means little to the man or woman in the street who has no point of comparison. Is it a lot, or not much? The reaction might be that this merely shows that prisoners are being mollycoddled, given unnecessary luxuries. Or it might be that if that is what it costs, then so be it. These reactions are unlikely to change while these amounts of money, which represent poor value for public money but which are relatively small in terms of national government spending, are calculated on a national basis. If, however, they were to be calculated locally then the public might react differently.

The International Centre for Prison Studies (ICPS) in King’s College London is currently engaged in a project along with other partners including local government to consider how the tax payer might get better money for some of the resources that are spent on criminal justice. The fact is that most crime happens locally, in streets, on estates, in shopping centres, in neighbourhoods. Local authorities are responsible for keeping their areas safe and for providing the services to deal with a range of social problems. Yet, decisions about crime prevention and criminal justice expenditure are mainly taken at the national level. Imprisonment is the most costly intervention available to the criminal justice system. The local area sees little benefit from that expenditure, except very short term relief from the activities of those imprisoned. On their return, released prisoners still need drug treatment, or employment training, or mental health support, or basic education, all of which need to be provided locally out of non-criminal justice budgets. Criminal justice expenditure often fails to achieve any lasting change in crime-ridden localities or to improve the quality of life for the residents. The ICPS project, called Justice Reinvestment, is seeking to discover whether there might be another way to give towns, cities and communities a better return on the money which is spent in the name of improving their quality of life.

Take, for example, Birmingham Prison which holds around 1,450 prisoners. Because of overcrowding and lack of facilities, the cost of holding a prisoner in Birmingham prison is lower than the national average, in the region of £30,000, and so the total cost to the tax payer is around £43 million per year. At present that money is paid by the Home Office with funding from the Treasury. There is little local debate about the value which it provides to local communities in Birmingham and the West Midlands. Would people feel safer if there were only 500 prisoners in Winson Green Prison; or if there were 2,000 young men in the prison? The fact is that we have no way of knowing what would be a sufficient amount of imprisonment for the people of Birmingham.

One way of finding out would be to discover a mechanism to help the citizens of Birmingham to identify as their money the £43 million that is spent each year on the local prison. They could then be asked how they wanted that money to be spent in order that they might feel safer and their quality of life be improved. They could decide through the courts to continue to send 1,450 of their young men to prison and that would be the money spent. Alternatively, they might decide that actually only 500 were such a threat to the community that they needed to be removed from it. In that case, the prison spend would be around £15 million. That would leave £28 million to be spent in other ways that would improve public safety and quality of life. It would be for the community to decide what these might be.

This is a radical proposal which needs a fuller examination than this short article can provide. However, the time has come for radical proposals. The system of imprisonment in England and Wales has existed in its present form since the 19th century. It is clearly, to use a current phrase, not fit for purpose and needs a fundamental overhaul. If it is the system itself that is no longer effective, then simply making it more efficient means that we are merely improving the wrong system. Increasing its use compounds the error. The tax payer will be asked to pump more billions into the system; we may end up with 400,000 of our young men and women in prison; and we will end up feeling less safe than we do at present.

Out of every challenge comes an opportunity. It would be to the advantage of all of us if government ministers, instead of taking the easy option and simply providing ever more and more prison places, were to pick up that challenge and look for a radical solution to the problem of increasing prison numbers.