Behind bars: Moving from red to Brown

There is a terrific section in Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook about old lefties and Stalin. Written in the '50s, it is a relentlessly brilliant novel about feminism, politics and madness. One of the central characters, Anna, is a writer who earns her keep on a communist newspaper. Her readers are a literary bunch. They keep sending her short stories accompanied by neat letters asking if they might be suitable for publication. They tend not to be '“ but she identifies a deep unspoken angst which is their determining theme.

Story after story is about meeting Stalin: the authors' fantasy is that while a delegate on a worthy political trip to Moscow they are asked to meet Uncle Joe, who has heard of their visit, and wants to discuss workers' conditions in somewhere like Hartlepool. Honoured and nervy, the lucky delegate is ushered into a simple room where the great leader, working tirelessly for the good of all, greets them as a brother. They discuss Hartlepool, Stalin listening with comradely attention, and then he asks '“ and this is where the fantasy slips into the corrosive despair of lefties who cannot bear to think how badly they are being betrayed and who can only fictionalise their feelings '“ then he asks for advice. And boy, does he get it.

All the stories ended the same way '“ a manly handshake or a fatherly hand on the shoulder, an honest acceptance by Stalin that he has been given much to think of, and a happy worker's delegate trotting back out into Red Square, his duty done.

I feel much the same impulse at this time in our history. There is a welcome change in the air. We have a new prime minister, a new lord chancellor and justice minister, albeit combined in the less novel form of Mr Straw, and a new home secretary in the definitely novel shape of not a man. In the spirit of hope which springs eternal or at least limps fairly resolutely, Behind Bars wishes to make some suggestions to them both.

Suggestion one is obvious '“ stop sending everyone to prison. We already have 81,000 banged up, and the effects on the rehabilitative process are disasterous. Overcrowding also affects release dates, as the Parole Board cannot determine risk and release when they should because the queue of people waiting to do the required 'making safe' courses causes the system to grind to a halt.

The Board is being judicially reviewed about this at the moment, the only course open to the prisoners who are now being illegally detained '“ being JRed is not a good look.

There may be a present rhetoric about tough community sentences being preferable for many offenders, but there must be more action, and soon. The message takes months to filter down to courts, and has to be accompanied by positive support to the probation service.

Secondly, take a good look at women in prison '“ according to the prison statistics for May 2007 their rate of imprisonment has actually risen, and this despite the Corston Report which set out in grim but intelligent detail precisely why we should not be imprisoning them in the numbers we do.

Thirdly, scrap the sentences for public protection under the Criminal Justice Act (CJA) 2003. There have been over 5,000 sentences of 'dangerous' offenders since April 2005, unsurprising perhaps as judges faced with the statutory assumptions assessed in the risk-averse context of probation reports get caught in the nets of the legislation. As do their customers, packed off to prove they are not dangerous by taking courses which do not exist because there are so many indeterminate sentences being passed. Of course some prisoners are dangerous '“ but 5,000 of them? Let the judges keep their discretion about length of sentence when the facts indicate that a mad axeman is in front of them, and give them, and prisons, room to breathe.

And fourthly, take a genuinely radical approach to the prison estate. A captive population of the incompetent, drug addicted, illiterate, disturbed, unskilled and rootless presents an astonishing opportunity for social engineering of the best kind. This opportunity has not just been missed by some accident of fate and funding, but resolutely removed from the political and social agenda, made manifest by the sentencing principles of the CJA '“ sentencing is no longer bothered with rehabilitation and reformation, but is concerned primarily with protection of the public. The crudity of our isolationist policy '“ bang 'em up and give the law abiding a rest from them '“ is the political equivalent of sowing dragon's teeth, and here indeed be dragons. Everyone knows about our appaling recidivism rates.

Everyone knows that young men without jobs or families catapult back through the prison revolving doors. Everyone knows that going cold turkey for six months does not cure the drug addicted. And everyone knows that other countries do this better. And all defence lawyers know just how badly prisons work. It is a disgrace that our prisons have 'drug-free wings', an extraordinary admission of failure to control contraband going into a closed society. There are three ways drugs get into prison '“ chucked over the wall, brought in by visitors or new inmates, and the worst one '“ taken in by staff paid good money by society to behave rather better than that. It is a disgrace that underskilled young men are not entitled to education classes if on a short sentence or remand. It is a disgrace that there are waiting lists for counselling, advice, referral, assessment and throughcare (CARAT) workers help, and for Alcoholics Anonymous. And it is a disgrace that prisoners can spend 23 hours a day doing nothing in their cells.

Our new regime should have the guts to invest serious money in our prisons '“ not in building more of them, but in providing the basic requirements people need to change for the better: education, health, sobriety, skills and hope for the future. Without this, prisons are just dustbins for the alienated, and this results in no protection for anyone.