I believe that prison should only be used for cases which are a serious threat to public safety. For a large part of the current prison population, this is not the case. All the evidence also suggests that preventing reoffending can be done more effectively outside of coercive institutions, for instance through community supervision. If you take this to account your statement about prisons playing a role in reducing crime is false: If the billions spent on the secure estate would have been used on more effective non-custodial solutions, the reductions in crime would have been larger.

In sum, I think your project is valuable, but it should be connected with the wider goals of decarceration and an honest comparison with non-custodial criminal justice interventions.

Apart from the last paragrah (!!) where you seem to fall back into supporting punitive measures – I don’t think that prison’s help reduce crime – they attempt to contain it whilst discounting the criminal behaviour that continues and adapts to the conditions of those behind bars.

Laurence Shorter makes exactly that point in his RSA Comment article today: ‘Positivity gets a bad press’: http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/

It’s his argument that our obsession with the doom and gloom is detrimental to our individual happiness and wellbeing. So it’s v interesting to see your take that it could also skew our wider societal response to important issues such as the effectiveness of our prisons.

I think the line to take from the report might be the core public service line – prisons work when they keep people off the streets who are a danger to society, and when they have a reasonably high rehabilitation rate. These things are not in conflict. In fact, long sentences not shortened might help prisioners ‘reform’, as long as time spent inside involves training and learning. It is the recidivists who stay inside for less than twelve months and go constantly in and out of prison that don’t rehabilitate themselves (they don’t even get a Probation Officer).

‘From the design of prisons to the content of training and employment programmes, prisoners, like all service users, have the best insights into how services can be modelled to achieve the outcomes we all want.’

Maybe this quote is right. But I’m not sure users always have insight into what they use. I use a computer but have no insight into how better to use it.