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.