Johann Hari

slogan of every political party in Britain today is: “Fetch the axe!” There is a frenzy to find ways to slash spending stalking through every Westminster corridor, as if our national life has morphed into a posher, duller remake of The Shining. Never mind that cutting spending so soon after a recession is terribly dangerous, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, and could well create a double dip recession. Never mind that, in fact, Britain’s national debt has been higher in every single year since 1750, through all the booms and all the busts, except for two fleeting 30-year gaps. Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!

But if you are determined to seek immediate cuts, there is a rational place to start: with a government policy that costs billions, yet backfires badly. We have a prison system that costs a fortune – £41,000 per prisoner, per year – but places us in greater danger. In the Eighties, Conservative home secretary Douglas Hurd called prisons “an expensive way of making bad people worse”. From that low point, the system has imploded even further, and you and I are more likely to be robbed, mugged or glassed as a result.

This lock-’em-in-the-bogs reflex has become bog-standard in a system close to collapse. Since 1993, the number of prisoners in Britain has risen by more than 70 per cent, as jail became a first resort for politicians posing as hard men. People have been arrested for such heinous crimes as collecting and selling lost golf balls, stealing birds’ eggs, cutting down a hedge, exaggerating the test results of school children and shouting abuse at somebody with a suntan. More women are now in jail for shoplifting than for any other offence.

But as the number of prisoners has swollen, the prison budget has barely budged. As a result, prisons have turned into dank, damp warehouses, with the education, drugs and mental health wings shut and shuttered.

There are now two prison systems in Britain. There is the one described in the press, in which prisoners live in pampered luxury, having pedicures as they watch plasma-screen televisions. Then there is Her Majesty’s Prison Service, which doesn’t quite answer to that description. These prisons – as I have seen as a reporter in jails across the country – are exemplified by what happened at HMP Doncaster last year. The prison had been forced to cram 
so many people into tiny concrete cells designed for one that it ran out of space. So it decided to put beds in the toilets, and lock people in them.

You might be thinking: “Why should I care? Prison isn’t supposed to be fun.” You’re right that punishing people is an essential part of the system – and it is certainly in place. But prison is also supposed to be about rehabilitating prisoners so that when they come out, they won’t make victims out of you, or me, again. That part of the system has been all but abolished. Within a year of being released, 47 per cent of prisoners are back to crime. Among young men, it’s 73 per cent. Within two years, almost all are committing offences once more. There’s nothing inevitable about this: in Denmark, it’s just 27 per cent. That’s a huge number of robberies and knifings and rapes that they prevent, and we don’t.

What explains the difference? Most people who get banged up are illiterate, addicted, or insane. In Denmark, they get education and treatment; in Britain, they get worse. An extraordinary 82 per cent of prisoners in Britain can’t write to the level expected of an eleven-year-old – yet less than ten per cent are given literacy lessons.

Instead of turning criminals around, the prison system curdles them even further. An incredible 70 per cent of prisoners have two or more diagnosable mental illnesses, and ten per cent are severely mentally ill – but there is almost no treatment. In the bowels of Wormwood Scrubs, I once found a 45-year-old man called Anthony who had been arrested for walking around his neighbourhood naked. He was diagnosed by doctors as suffering from severe brain damage caused by repeated epileptic fits. When he shuffled towards me, clutching a bag of rubbish, he asked if I was the judge at his trial. Then he asked if I was his father. He mumbled incoherently in half-sobs for half an hour. When I left, he kept saying “Dad, Dad, why are you leaving me, Dad?"

Crime policies are presented in a tabloid drumbeat as a choice between being tough or soft. But the choice is between being smart or stupid. Is it tough to jam an addict into a toilet cell to rot – or is it just stupid to ignore the evidence that they will be more likely at the end to mug my granny?

Here’s where the politicians’ axe could be useful. Violent offenders should go to jail – but they make up only 16,000 of prisoners. For the rest, there is an option ten times cheaper but proven to be more effective in reducing crime. Give a hefty community sentence as punishment, where they earn money that goes to repay their victim. At the same time, require them to attend education or drug treatment or mental health hospitals, as needed. A study by Professor David James found that when an addict or mentally ill person is given treatment, they are 50 per cent less likely to offend than if sent to jail. That’s a lot of rescued victims.

Britain has been here before. In the late 19th century, there was a mania for jailing people who were mad, addicts, very young or guilty of minor offences. In 1908 a young Liberal politician said this was “uncivilised”, and as home secretary he began a halving of the prison population. Crime fell because prisons were better able to rehabilitate the hard-core that remained. The politician’s name was Winston Churchill. Was he soft – or was he smart?

This article appeared in the last issue of GQ magazine, where I write a monthly column. (It appeared before Ken Clarke's speech about prisons, suggesting some of this might now happen.) To subscribe, go to http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/

In the middle of complex crises that require hard work to explain, the political-media class loves to charge off in search of a piece of distracting, empty trivia. This week, they are obsessed with Jacqui Smith’s expenses forms. The Home Secretary is entitled to claim help for a house in London and in her constituency – but (hushed whisper) did she put them in the right order on the forms? Does she spend four nights a week in her sister’s house, or (drum roll please) only three?

Meanwhile, on the other side of Westminster Bridge, crime is set to soar – and Smith’s policies will make it worse. It is an iron law of sociology that when the economy falls, crime spikes. If you increase the number of people milling around jobless and listless, you inevitably end up with more muggings and burglaries. So we need to talk now – urgently – about how we can stem this rise. The debate should be about your house, not Smith’s house.

There are two paths from here. The government can continue to posture as “tough” to gain applause in the right-wing press – and crime will get worse. Or they can get smart. Let’s look in this column at three policies that have been proven to slash crime. They don’t allow Smith to posture as a hard-woman beating up the baddies – but the facts show that if we introduce them now, we will avoid the worst.

Step one: Transfer the mentally ill to hospitals. The first thing that strikes you when you visit British prisons – as I do – is the sheer number of people there who are insane and barely know where they are. In the bowels of Wormwood Scrubs I found a man in his sixties who had been diagnosed with severe brain damage. He thought I was his father. He wasn’t so unusual. Michael Spurr, the operational head of the Prison Service, admits that ten percent of the prison population is “seriously mentally ill.” Almost everyone in the field considers this a serious underestimate.

This isn’t just a scandal – it makes you less safe. If you take somebody who is paranoid or delusional and lock them in a tiny cell without proper treatment, they get rapidly worse. A recent study by Professor David James found when you send a mentally ill person to jail rather than hospital, they become 50 percent more likely to reoffend. That’s a lot of muggings and attacks that will be wiped out by proper treatment.

Step two: Increase methadone and heroin prescriptions for chronic addicts. If you fall into heroin addiction, your body becomes so ravaged by the need for the drug that you will do anything for your next fix. That’s why a majority of the property crimes and sex-for-cash are carried out by junkies. Providing rehab is important – but the drug is so addictive that even the best treatment centres in the world fail 80 percent of the time. So for most addicts, the only safe option is for doctors to give them a legal prescription – which halts their crime overnight. The Cheshire Drug Squad found in the 1980s that the presence of a heroin-prescribing clinic on their patch caused a 94 percent drop in property crimes.

This week I visited the Addaction drug treatment centre in the suburbs of North London to see what can be done. A typical client of theirs – I’ll call him Andy – became depressed after his girlfriend died in an accident. He began using harder and harder drugs in an attempt to dull his pain, and soon became hooked on heroin. As the addiction got worse he began to fuel his habit through theft. He turned up at the centre for help and was prescribed methadone, which helped to stabilise his drug use. With the therapy and guidance he was given here, he was able to slowly cut back. Today, he is working, crime-free, and receiving only small doses.

Yet places like this are struggling. Under Labour, 15 of Britain’s 100 rehab centres have closed in the past year. David Cameron’s Tories, incredibly, want to go even further: Iain Duncan Smith’s policy paper called for an end to all prescription in favour of requiring immediate “abstinence”. Tim Sampey, one of the on-the-ground Addaction workers, says this would cause “a crime explosion.” Labour needs to stop being so cowardly and make the open case for medicalising drug addiction. In Switzerland, this policy was unpopular – until it was introduced and crime rates crashed down. Now it has overwhelming support.

Step three: Bring rehabilitation back to our prisons. Today, 60 percent of prisoners have a reading ability below that of a six year-old child – and most leave having learnt nothing. How can we be surprised that only 25 percent stay away from crime when they are released?

There are some brilliant rehabilitation programmes, but they are underfunded and sparse. Joe Baden has founded one of the best, The Open Book Project. When he was imprisoned in the seventies facing armed robbery charges, Baden was taught creative writing – and it inspired him to go straight. Today he goes back into prisons to help inmates get academic qualifications, supporting them at every step. He has taken prisoners from illiteracy to gaining degrees – and only 2 percent of the people he works with reoffend. Yet he warns me that “most rehabilitation today is just crap.”

As it stands, it is going to get even harder for prisoners to be matched up with retraining in the next few years. One in four probation officers is being sacked to save money. Instead of expanding the probation service to make sure released prisoners are not homeless, jobless and skill-less, the government is actually scything them back.

Is this the path we want to choose? Yes, it gives us all a cheap kick to be rhetorically “tough”, smacking around the insane, addicts, and illiterates who made horrible choices in their past – but it ends with more of us becoming victims of crime. That’s the inevitable dark alley we will stumble into now if we go back to jabbering about Jacqui Smith’s expenses while the economy tanks and our politicians unthinkingly smoke more of the crack-down crack. It’s time to get liberal – or get mugged.

And so the story of the moral implosion of the British prison system comes to this: we are imprisoning people in toilets. Doncaster prison – run by the private firm Serpico – was designed to hold 800 people, but it now pens in more than a thousand. So the governors have put beds in the toilets, and detained people there for more than eighteen hours a day, week after week. In toilets. In Britain. Today.

There are now two prison systems in this country. There is Her Majesty’s Prison Service, where mad and broken people are warehoused alongside the genuinely violent in cramped and fetid cells. Then there is the Fantasy Prison System, implanted by the press in the public imagination, where pampered prisoners are given foot-massages while watching flat-screen TVs.

No matter how many prisons I visit, from Wormwood Scrubs to Feltham Young Offender’s, I cannot find the holiday camps. Instead, I find prisons that clunkingly conform to every ‘tough’ demand of the right – and are therefore are placing you and your family in greater danger.

Allow me to explain. When our prisons contained 40,000 people, back in 1993, they managed to make 47 percent of the inmates go straight. But today – after cramming twice as many people into almost the same space – that rate has dramatically plummeted to just 25 percent. The rest graduate to the same or worse crimes.

We know what makes criminals less likely to reoffend. We have known for years, from study after study after study – but drunk on rhetoric, we are speeding in the opposite direction. So let’s go through the recipe that turns really prisoners into law-abiding citizens, abandoned in the mid-1990s when Michael Howard got Britain smoking the crack-down crack.

Ingredient One: Transfer the mentally ill into secure hospitals. The first thing that strikes you in any prison is how many of the people there are insane. One sixty-year old man diagnosed with serious brain damage staggered up to me in the bowels of Wormwood Scrubs thinking I was his father. The government admits 13 percent of our prisoners have schizophrenia and 70 percent have one or more diagnosable mental disorder. I could fill this newspaper with descriptions of prisoners who stab their own necks with knives or set fire to themselves at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

There is another way. The state of Pennsylvania was facing the same prison-problem as Britain – so they decided that if the police arrest a mentally ill person, he should no longer go into the normal courts system. When, say, Sally Judson – a diagnosed schizophrenic who developed a heroin habit– was picked up for disorderly conduct recently, she was taken to a mental health ‘court’. Instead of jailing her, they drew up an action plan with her. They found her a doctor, a therapist, and a waitressing job. If she relapses on heroin, there is a rehab place waiting for her. This system works: mentally ill people have a 55 percent reoffending rate in the normal courts, but in the mental health courts it is just 10 percent.

Ingredient Two: Make sure prisoners stay in touch with their families. You can hear the Gaunt-groans and the Littlejohn-lies now: who cares if some criminal bastard can’t speak to his baby-mother? But the evidence shows this is the single biggest factor in keeping a criminal from reoffending. If you manage to keep your partner, you are 20 percent more likely to stay of jail. But our prisons actually militate against this. Because of the severe overcrowding, some 37,000 prisoners are being held more than three hours’ journey from home, and 5000 are being held more than six hours away. Their mostly-broke families can’t afford the long journey. Telephone? BT charges seven times more to call home from prison than it would cost from a normal phone box. Far away and expensive to phone, nearly half of male prisoners currently lose touch with their families.

Ingredient Three: Make sure prisoners aren’t illiterate and homeless when they walk out the prison gates. When they arrive, a third of prisoners can’t read or write a word. They almost invariably leave as they came. The Adult Learning Inspectorate found fewer than 8 percent of prisoners have are taught to read and then given meaningful work that could lead to a job on the outside. Worse, one third of prisoners are released to “No Fixed Abode” – a friend’s couch, if they’re lucky. If we send prisoners back out homeless and illiterate, what do we expect will happen?

In Liverpool Prison, I saw a brilliant scheme where prisoners are taught construction skills – and then use them to do up an abandoned council house for them to live in when they leave. It’s a crime-busting double whammy: work skills, and a house nobody else wanted. Why isn’t this being done in every prison in Britain?

Ingredient Four: Medicalize prisoners’ drug addictions. Some 12 percent of prisoners are heroin addicts, imprisoned either for possessing the drug or committing property crimes to feed their ravaging need. Wouldn’t it be better to spend the £40,000 of jail money to put them in rehab? True, heroin addiction is so powerful that the even the best rehab in the world fails with 80 percent of addicts. But for them, we can prescribe a clean, legal supply for £4000 a year. Then they can lead healthy lives: Arthur Conan Doyle and the father of modern surgery, William Halstead, did. When the Swiss did this, burglary fell by 70 percent.

Ingredient Five: Make sure prison is only for violent and sexual offenders. There are around 16,000 vaguely sane people in our jails who have committed violent or sexual offences. They need to be banged up while they are exhaustively rehabilitated, for however long it takes. But if they are crammed in with 64,000 others – the shoplifters and graffitists and cannabis dealers – nobody gets any treatment and nobody gets any better.

Indeed, the evidence shows the opposite happens. Professor Carol Hedderman has calculated that the growth in the prison population is due to a huge rise in short sentences of six months or less. They are all for crimes that used to be dealt with by community service – like the two teenage boys in Deerbolt who have just been sentenced to 15 months in an adult jail for graffiti. That’s long enough to put in place all the factors that drive up crime – they lose their job, their house and their girlfriend, and their debts spiral – but not long enough to teach them anything, even if we tried. This is the reason for the surge in reoffending.

Yet still the government builds more mega-prisons, while the Tories yelp for them to go even further and faster. Why? Every politician wants to be seen as the Toughest Daddy, cheered on by a press that raves against a prison system that doesn’t exist. But the ‘tough’ approach – shove ‘em in the toilets, teach ‘em nothing – produces more crime. The macho swagger hides glass testicles. No: we need to show this isn’t about soft vs. tough, but about smart crime-busting policies vs. dumb crime-boosting policies.

But for today, reason and evidence remain locked away in the prison toilets. Isn’t it time we let them out?

POSTSCRIPT: You can read the comments on this article, and leave your own, click here.

POSTSCRIPT: Here’s a strange compare and contrast for you. In his column for the Times yesterday, the Conservative columnist Daniel Finkelstein said Labour’s prisons policies – doubling the number of people in jail – have worked because the overall crime rate has fallen. In my column today, I argue Labour’s policies have actually made crime worse.

(I should note that Finkelstein is one of my favourite columnists on the right. Although we almost always disagree, he is genuinely fizzing with ideas and facts, rather than raving and prejudice.)

At first glance, it might look like Finkelstein has the figures right: it’s certainly true crime has fallen, and it’s certainly true more people have been sent to jail. But it’s a classic logical error to assume correlation is the same as causation. The fancy term for it is post hoc, ergo propter hoc: this event happened afterwards, therefore it happened because.

How do we know in this instance it’s wrong? There are two reasons. First, crime has been falling in virtually every developed nation over the past decade, irrespective of the penal policies it pursued.

In the US, New York City emphasized prison (as Finkelstein notes); San Francisco emphasized rehabilitation (as Finkelstein doesn’t note). Both saw a huge drop in crime. In Europe, Britain emphasized jail; Finland emphasized rehabilitation. Again, both saw a huge drop in crime. (Finland’s fell from low to very low, since rehabilitation was already pretty advanced.) The reasons for this are complex, but the most obvious is that there has been a period of spurting economic growth – and throughout history, they are almost always accompanied by drops in crime.

Secondly, it’s true that – on every measure – a random British person in 2008 is much less likely to commit a crime than in, say, 1993. But there is one exception, and one exception only: if you have been released from prison. If you were an ex-prisoner in 1993, you had a 53 percent chance of reoffending within two years. Today, it is 75 percent. The policy Finkelstein claims has reduced crime – prison, and its after-effects – is actually the one life-stage where crime has risen significantly.

Doesn’t this puncture his argument somewhat? Doesn’t it undermine the belief that mass imprisonment is responsible for the fall in crime when in the one area where its effect can be directly measured, it has caused it to increase - dramatically?

"Watch yourself. In prisons, you don't know what's going to be thrown at you," the grey-skinned prison guard warned me as I wandered through the bowels of Wormwood Scrubs for the first time, past rows of cells stocked with mentally ill prisoners dribbling and wailing and locked in fierce arguments with people who were not there. I wonder if John Reid was given the same advice when he bellyflopped into the Home Office five months ago. Well, now he knows. The decade-long rumble of predictions from the Prisons Inspectorate and the prison reform charities has come to pass: if you double the prison population in a decade, the system will simply crumple before your eyes.

Of course, much of the press have seen this through the prism of high (that is, very, very low) Westminster politics. Well, I'm as glad as anybody else that John Reid is now a busted lush, unable to run against Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership - but this crisis goes far beyond Annie's Bar.

If you have been following this affair, you probably think there is now a small increased danger to your safety, because some judges have released a handful of criminals who otherwise would have been banged up. (So far, they amount to two men who downloaded images of children being raped, and a cannabis smuggler). But the risk is greater and more subtle than that. As a direct result of the overstuffing set in train by the Tories and loyally followed by Labour, prisoners are now far more likely to leave jail homeless, jobless, out-of-touch with their families, and still illiterate and drug-addicted. Every single one of these factors makes them more likely to attack you.

The reality is simple. There is enough cash in the pot to educate, detox and train around 20,000 prisoners. Cram in 80,000, and nobody gets a decent service. In 1992 - the year before the great stuffing began - 48 percent of prisoners were successfully rehabilitated, meaning they did not reoffend within two years. Today, the figure has collapsed to 33 percent and it's falling further. This is a classic example of how following 'tough', 'common sense' policies in the sacred name of The Victim actually leads to more crime and more victims in the end.

If you came with me to, say, Deerbolt Young Offenders' Institute in Durham, you would identify one obvious problem before all others: the kids there can't read. Some 60 perfect are unable even to scrawl their own names properly. So surely we are flooding the place with teachers? The Howard League for Penal Reform went there - and found that due to the financial strain on prisons caused by overcrowding, less than half of these illiterate kids were getting any schooling at all. Most of them spent all day in their cells watching TV, stuck with nobody but Jeremy Kyle, Noel Edmonds and other criminals to teach them.

This waste is being replicated at Her Majesty's sadistic Pleasure across Britain. The Adult Learning Inspectorate has reported that today, 60 percent of prisons are failing to provide adequate training, and only 8 percent of prisoners are doing meaningful work. There are a few shimmering exceptions that I have seen. In Aylesbury Young Offenders' Institute I've met lads who have shot and stabbed being trained to become mechanics. Often, it's the first encouragement they've ever received from an adult. In Liverpool Prison, there's a visionary programme where the inmates learn to become a qualified painter-decorator by rennovating a delapidated council house - and then move into it when they are freed. These programmes should be happening in every British prison. But as Cheire Booth QC said in a brilliant lecture, "The huge increase in numbers and the prevalence of short-term sentences is crippling any attempt at a constructive approach to rehabilitation."

Unfortunately, another resident of Number Ten Downing Street, Tony Blair, has responded by rummaging around for the old Conservative script: the solution is simply to build more jails, stretching the same prisons budget over even more prisoners.

There is another way. That day in Wormwood Scrubs, I met a prisoner called Anthony. He was brought to the prison six months before, because he had been found walking around his neighbourhood naked. He was quickly diagnosed as suffering from irreparable brain damage and early-onset dementia. He is 45; he looks 65. He shuffled into the room, trailing behind him a large plastic bag full of rubbish – some screwed-up newspapers, an empty Reddy-Brek box – that he carries everywhere. He didn't know where he was, and spoke only in slow, incoherent sentences. For a moment, he thought I was the judge who remanded him. Then he asked if I was his father.

When I told Luke Sergent, the prison governor, about the slew of insane people I found in his cutody, he was in despair: “It’s quite common. There is no doubt we have people in this prison who are so mentally ill they shouldn’t be here.” Wormwood Scrubs is no exception. Since the closure of the old asylums, the numbers have been swelling so that today ten percent of British prisoners - 8000 people - have scizophrenia or a delusional disorder. The Prison Inspector's medical expert says that 40 percent of the people in hospital wings are like this, so mentally ill they should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Instead, they are being punished, in wards the former Director General of the Prison Service, Martin Narey, admits are "worse than the kennels I leave my dog in when I go on holiday." The Prisons Inspector herself, Ann Owers, recently found a man in a prison who had his wrists straightjacketed to his waist, so she asked how long he was kept like this. The prison officers explained it was permenant, because whenever it was removed he tried to hack off his own testicles.

The government has made this crisis into another excuse to reinforce the failing right-wing rubric of the past decade. Instead, it should be seized as a moment to transfer the stifling cellfulls of the insane out of our jails and into secure NHS hospitals. Build hospital capacity, not prison capacity. And while they're at it, they could clear even more space. Why do we need to imprison nearly 2000 people a year who are too poor to pay their fines? Why are we jailing 1000 heroin-addicted women a year for selling sex? Why are more women locked up for shoplifting than any other offence? Why are we imprisoning more than 10,000 people a year for possessing or selling soft drugs like cannabis? (Did anyone feel less safe when they found out that cannabis smuggler was freed?).

Only once we have cleared all the mentally ill and all the non-violent offenders from our jails will we - finally - have the space to return to real rehabilitation of the criminals who need it. Our prisons need to be schools - not Bedlams.

When it comes to children, Britain alternates between two shrieking extremes. On Monday, we have a paranoid fear for children, keeping them locked up at home because we have convinced ourselves there are paedophiles lurking in every public space. On Tuesday, we have a paranoid fear of children, convinced that every group of young kids is a knife-wielding mob.

When a story comes along that doesn't fit into these templates - angel-children or devil-children - we simply can't process it. Over the past week, children's charities have been warning frantically that the youth justice system is in meltdown. The number of kids being imprisoned has doubled over the past decade. Rehab and education programmes have jammed up. All the beds are full. Children are being shunted across the country, with London kids being sent one week up to the Scottish Borders and the next shunted back down to the South. This system could hardly be more obviously failing: 70 per cent of the children who leave our young offenders' institutes are back to crime within two years. But these are Bad Children, so the story soon slipped from the headlines.

And yet there is one organisation slowly, carefully teasing out the complexities of children who smash off the rails and into the rest of us. For the past three years, I have been writing about Kid's Company. It's a drop-in centre in South London that provides three meals a day and a sympathetic smile for the out-of-control children everyone else has thrown out.

I have watched its founder, Camilla Batmangelidh, as she holds the hand of a 14-year-old boy who is describing what it was like to smash in another child's skull with a hammer. These are the children of London's crackhouses and forgotten concrete estates. But Kids' Company is not only significant for its social work: Batmangelidh is at the forefront of research into why some children veer violently out of control, and how our system is failing to stop them.

Over the past decade, she has discovered that the key to understanding these children lies back in their cradles. After the Vietnam War, there was a long psychological study to find out why some people had lost the plot, when other soldiers in the same situation returned easily to normal life. They discovered one unexpected connecting thread: if you had a healthy bond with your mother as a baby, you almost always made it through. If you didn't, you almost always fell apart.

How does this affect Camilla's kids? She called in neuroscientists to study them, and explains: "We know from PET scans of babies' brains that a strong maternal relationship actually changes the way your brain develops at those crucial early stages. Look at the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that makes it possible to see yourself in the future, anticipate problems, and think rationally. We know now it is brought to life and programmed by a strong maternal relationship."

The children turning up at Kid's Company were born into households where the mother was so stressed she couldn't calm herself, never mind calm her baby. "So these children have underdeveloped calming mechanisms and underdeveloped frontal lobes," she explains. "The neuoronal pathways that are supposed to operate to help kids calm down just aren't operating robustly enough. On top of that, because they have grown up feeling constantly in danger, their bodies are flooded with abnormally high levels of adrenaline and cortisol that keep them constantly tense and primed to blow. So it turns out when these kids tell me they couldn't stop themselves, they mean it. They're not morally flawed - their terrible childhoods have actually left them neurologically impaired."

This is a hard argument to accept, because it challenges the basic idea underpinning our legal systems: that we all exercise free will with our basically similar brains. But there is startling evidence for it - and not just from brain scans. In the mid-1980s, the American sociologist David Olds selected 400 poor mothers in Minnesota to study. Half of them were given intensive support from health visitors to help them bond with their babies, and half of them were not. When he returned 15 years later, he discovered the children who had been helped to achieve a strong maternal bond were an amazing 50 per cent less likely to have been arrested.

So what do we do with these radical discoveries? We should stamp all our services for the young with a new slogan (with all due credit to E M Forster): only connect. Anything that helps a child connect with a mother-figure will save a fortune - and a lot of pain - further down the line, whether it's regular visits from a health visitor, SureStart or compulsory parenting classes.

But what are the implications for youth justice? Some clinicians believe a baby's neurochemistry is largely set by the age of three, but Batmangelidh believes there is another window of opportunity in adolescence when the teenage brain is reorganising itself. "You can't repair the harm one hundred per cent, but you can do a lot," she says, "if you try to form a very strong substitute maternal bond with the child at that point. This morning I've been with a boy who is a major criminal, and he wants to give himself up to the police. Why? Because he's experiencing guilt. Nobody would have ever thought this child would ever experience guilt. That's because he has been forming a maternal attachment relationship for the first time, so his brain chemistry is adjusting."

There are some social science studies suggesting she's right. In Missouri, the sociologist Charles Borduin studied an experiment where 83 young offenders were given the kind of intensive care and attention Camilla provides, and 83 were not. Four years later, 29 per cent of the kids given proper care had been rearrested, compared to 74 per cent in the group that did not receive therapy.

This helps to explain why the current system is flailing and failing so badly. There are only very patchy attempts to do the emotional repair-work these children need, slowly readjusting their brain chemistry by forming maternal bonds with them, once they are detained. It's almost impossible to imagine a testosterone-obsessed politician like John Reid talking about attachment theory. (His slogan might be - don't stand by kids, stand on them). We have one brief window to turn these kids around, but because of this macho politics we are wasting it on "tough" solutions that make the kids even less attached, reinforcing the root of the problem.

Each of these children being tossed every week from young offenders' institute to young offenders' institute is a neurologically impaired ticking time-bomb, primed to commit more crimes. Camilla Batmangelidh has shown us how to slowly defuse them, and make us all safer. So when are we going to see beyond our primitive urges for revenge against abused kids, and start listening to her?

Even in our Attention Deficit Democracy where barely a single issue stays in our minds beyond a 24-hour news cycle, prisons will not go away. They are Ritalin for every Home Secretary, forcing him to slow down and feel the shame. The headline-snatching ‘scandals’ this year have been the failure to deport foreign criminals at the end of their stretch and the bitter row about the early release of violent offenders. The real scandals are actually far worse. Our prisons are so bad at rehabilitation that 70 percent of inmates leave jail with the reading age of an eight year old or worse, and (unsurprisingly) reoffend within two years. What other public service fails so comprehensively? And there is another bad moon rising – Anne Owers, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, warns that our prisons are at “bursting point.” This could yet be a summer of jailhouse riots.

So in this situation, the government is doing the logical thing. No, it is not increasing funding for prison education and rehousing. No, it is not easing overcrowding by stopping the senseless jailing of fine defaulters, sex workers and the mentally ill. It is doing something much better. It is shutting down the independent Prisons Inspectorate, the men and women who have been warning about all this for years. It’s an age-old piece of wisdom – kill the messenger and the problem will go away.

Until now, Britain’s Prisons Inspectorate has been a model for the world, one of the few things we do entirely right in our jails. Set up in the 1980s after a long government review, our jail inspector is a totally independent figure who can go anywhere, see anything behind Her Majesty’s bars. His (or, currently, her) remit is to make sure prisoners are not abused, and that rehabilitation is taking place. Our prisons inspectors have exposed and rectified dozens of abuses over the past decade, from prisons that ‘lost’ 15 year old girls somewhere within their walls to women being shackled as they gave birth to the dangerous practice of forcing menstruating women to use buckets and ‘slop out’ in the morning. Dozens of countries have sent delegations to learn from the British model. The UN, Amnesty International and others have praised it. And it is all about to be thrown away.

The government is going to ‘merge’ the Prisons Inspectorate into a new super-regulator, which will include the inspectors who watch over our courts, police and probation officers. At first glance, this might not sound so bad – but instead of being independent, reporting directly to the public about the service we pay for, the new prisons inspectors will work “as directed by ministers”. They will be subject to political pressures and political whims. You can understand the kind of inspectors the government has in mind by looking at the inspectorates they are being grouped with in this new department – the people who watch over the courts, police and probation officers. All these inspectorates consist of insiders, people who come from the field they are inspecting and may go back to it. They work inside government and sit on panels with ministers. They offer friendly advice, not the brave exposes (and bad headlines) that are necessary in a system that holds absolute power over its inmates.

Lord David Ramsbottom, our former Chief Inspector of Prisons, is not a man prone to exaggeration or hyperbole. He is a military man who served in Northern Ireland and the Falklands, and he has the restrained, clipped tones of an army general. But when he speaks about the government’s new proposals, his military reserve melts away. The new plan is, he says, “obscene” and “despicable.” He tells me, “At a time when the Home Office is in complete disarray, the government is sweeping away one of the few effective rocks of stability in the system. Once you start making inspectors what the government wants them to be, that’s the slippery slope to disaster. Ministers will no longer hear awkward truths. They will hear what they want to hear. If you don’t gather the right evidence, you’ll put in the wrong solutions. I was warning them for bloody ages about the problem with foreign prisoners, and so was [Anne Owers, his predecessor]. They need to listen to us more, not get rid of us.” It’s true – if you look through the stacks of inspectors’ reports, the inspectors were frantically pointing successive Home Secretaries towards the political minefield of foreign prisoners for years.

Anybody who has spent time in Britain’s prisons can see the need for independent inspectors with a dark black clarity. On a visit to Wormwood Scrubs last year, for example, I discovered it is largely an ill-equipped warehouse for the mentally ill. On one ward, I met Anthony, a man who was sent to the Scrubs six months before after being found walking around his South London neighbourhood naked. The doctors agreed he has irreversible and severe brain damage, the result of failing to take his epilepsy medication. He was 45 but he as he shuffled into the room he looked 65, with a tight hunch and, I soon discovered, early on-set dementia. Trailing behind him was a large plastic bag full of rubbish – some screwed-up newspapers, an empty Reddy-Brek box – that he carries everywhere, like a security blanket. He didn’t know where he was, or why he was in there. At one point he thought I was his father. At another, he thought I was the judge from his trial.

This non-interview was interrupted by somebody punching with all their strength at the door. The prison officer says about this screaming person, “He was sectioned yesterday.” Then why is he still here? “We can’t find a bed yet.” These poor prison officers were being forced to be mental health nurses, without the training to do it. Nobody knew how long Anthony would be in prison. “There just aren’t the mental health beds,” the officer explained sadly. When I told Luke Sergent, the Scrubs governor, about the string of insane people I have encountered, he was in despair. “It’s quite common. There is no doubt we have people in this prison who are so mentally ill they shouldn’t be here.”

Without an independent prisons inspector from the end of the summer, there will be nobody to warn us about the thousands of Anthonys who are rotting in our prison system. John Reid will be allowed to prove he is Hard Labour by inflicting the moral equivalent of hard labour on thousand of people, because our guard-dogs against abuse will have been taken round the back of the House of Commons and put down. Oh, and prison scandals will continue to beat their way onto the news agenda. Next time, the Home Secretary had better not dare to ask why nobody warned him.

Whenever I hear people calling for more, more, more prisons, I think of Anthony. He is a 45-year old man I met in the dank bowels of Wormwood Scrubs last autumn, jailed because he was found wandering the streets naked. He was swiftly diagnosed as severely brain damaged, and when we spoke he didn’t seem to know where he was. At one point, he thought I was a judge with the power to release him; at another, he thought I was an old friend of his father’s. He drooled and cried incoherently. On every prison visit, I meet scores of helpless, hapless men like this. Luke Sergent, the governor of the Scrubs, told me in despair, “It’s quite common”, and some experts believe half the people banged up are mentally ill. Care in the Community has become Care in the Cells - and more prisons will simply mean more Anthonys. The people who pine for more of this should be ashamed.

The idea of detaining people without trial for 90 days did not die in the voting lobbies of the House of Commons last Wednesday. It is already a reality in Britain's prisons, and it is getting worse. While our MPs congratulate themselves on striking a blow for liberty, in this country tonight there are more than 6,000 people who have been jailed for more than 90 days, even though they have been convicted of nothing at all.

They have not been accused of the headline-grabbing crimes of jihadism, but mostly of unsexy, non-violent offences: theft, drug-dealing, breaching Asbos. They are Britain's remand prisoners - the unlucky thousands who are denied bail and left to fester in our Victorian jails while they wait for trial.

Sitting in the dank bowels of Wormwood Scrubs, Sanjay - a 32-year-old Asian accused of selling ecstasy, which he claims he had solely for personal use - tells me what it is like to live through this. "It eats you up, sitting in a cell knowing you're innocent. The cell door bangs shut on a Friday night and it's not really open again until Monday morning, and you sit there thinking: 'Fuck me, I'm not convicted - why am I in here?'

"I've lost my wife, I'm losing my house - and, if I'm found not guilty, I'll get no compensation for every day I'm spending in here," he continues. Sanjay has been remanded because, when he was 14 and living in care, he skipped bail by running away to London. This makes him a "flight risk". He doesn't know when his trial will come up, so he feels he is locked up here indefinitely. "If you're sentenced, you've got a date to work towards. When you're on remand, you could be walking out next month or in 10 years. You've got nothing, no picture of how your life's going to be. There's a bloke on my wing who has been on remand for nearly two years. Am I going to be here that long when I haven't done anything?"

More than 12,000 British people are banged up like this every year, only to be found not guilty of any crime when their trial finally arrives. As we walked through the prison, past the metal hatches, Dave Pemberton, the Scrubs' violence reduction co-ordinator, outlined the consequences of this system: "Remand prisoners are particularly vulnerable to self-harm and suicide. There's a big risk they will commit suicide before they even get to trial."

They are notorious for having "Shredded Wheat arms" - not an image I want to dwell on - and Pemberton says some prisoners are so distressed at being jailed without even a conviction that it is almost impossible to stop them "cutting up". "The stress of it can be terrible. We've had remand prisoners who self-harmed even when everything was taken away. We take away the blades and the cutlery, so one guy self-harmed with a paper plate, using it to cut into his throat. So we took that away, and he began self-harming with his food. He sharpened a chicken-bone and cut into his wrists." Of course, sometimes remand is necessary. The Bail Act of 1976 lays out the extreme circumstances in which it is sensible to lock somebody up prior to trial: if there is a serious risk they could disappear, if they have been convicted before of similar offences and might do it again, or if they are interfering with witnesses.

In one cell, I met Anthony, a strapping, strutting 42-year-old accused of attempted murder, incredulous that he has been remanded just for "talking to the witnesses a bit". Nobody would say he should be walking the streets.

But the reasons for imprisoning people without trial have expanded over the past decade, far beyond the terms of the Bail Act. Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform told me: "Remand is now being used inappropriately to deal with all sorts of problems. Often, when there are no psychiatric beds, somebody will be remanded just so their psychiatrist can actually know where they are." I saw evidence of this: I spoke to one unconvicted prisoner who was so mentally disturbed he did not know where he was, asked if I knew his father, and then assumed I was a judge with the power to release him.

"And anybody who is registered as No Fixed Abode - without an address - will automatically be remanded as a flight risk now," Crook continued. "That's effectively jailing them for being homeless. It brings the homelessness statistics down. But the biggest scandal is that magistrates are increasingly sending prisoners into remand because they believe they are guilty but they know there isn't enough evidence to convict, so they want to give them some kind of punishment before they're acquitted. It's outrageous."

In theory, remand prisoners are supposed to be treated better than convicts on the grounds that they are innocent until proven guilty. Until the early 1990s, this happened, to a degree. They were held in separate, much more open wings, and their families could visit as much as they liked, bringing in food parcels. The Whitemoor breakout - when several remanded IRA prisoners abused this system to escape - ended all that.

Today, remand prisoners are actually treated worse: they live mixed up with convicted prisoners, often sharing the same cell and regimen, but they have far less access to rehab, education or work. Their only "perks" are that they are allowed to wear their own clothes and can top up their 50p-a-day budget with private savings (if they have any). Sanjay said: "I'd be better off if I actually had done it and had been convicted than I am now. As it is, I just lie on my bed all day going mental."

After eight years of cramming our jails with ever-more prisoners, the Labour government has finally acknowledged the remand scandal. Last month, Charles Clarke said he would like to see better treatment of remand prisoners - and specifically a return to separate remand wings. But unless this is backed with hard cash and a commitment to cut the massive number of prisoners in our jails, it is just fantasy.

Sitting high above the prison in his office, Scrubs' governor, Luke Sergent, told me: "In practical terms, it's very difficult. We're operating at capacity here. We're full. If Clarke wants to deal with this, they've got to put fewer people in prison. A lot of these remand prisoners could be tagged." And a lot should be in psychiatric hospitals, rather than jail, I say. "That's true," he nods.

Sanjay slumps back in his chair on the 98th day of his imprisonment without trial. "It's a scary place, Wormwood Scrubs. Last night I couldn't sleep because there was somebody smashing up his cell next to me. What am I doing in this place? Her Majesty's Pleasure ... I'll tell you what, if this is what gives Her Majesty pleasure, she must be one sick bitch." So when are all the MPs who (rightly) made a fuss about three or four terrorism suspects going to start speaking out for tens of thousands of remand prisoners?

j.hari@independent.co.uk

“Don’t get too close”, the prison officer says, “they throw things.” I back away from the hatch in the cell door just as the gaunt, drooling face of an old man appears. I say “Hello” and he drools some more. Somebody a few cells down is smashing and trashing in a rage, furious that he has been given the grey sloppy Prison Regulation mashed potato rather than chips. I am being guided through Wormwood Scrubs, and it is becoming clear that in this city, Care in the Community has morphed into Care in Custody.

Before I became a hack, my mental image of London’s prisons was a mixture of Bad Girls, Porridge and shock-horror stories from teh Daily Mail: nasty Aussie screws grind the faces of innocent newbies into cabbage. Blonde lesbians gang-rape Ronnie Barker. And after a hard day’s thuggery, everybody sits around watching a shiny new plasma screen TV.

This week – as news emerged that London’s prisons are so overcrowded that some inmates are being held indefinitely in police cells – I staggered into the reality of life in bang-up. In the medical ward, I am taken to meet Anthony (not his real name). He arrived in the Scrubs six months ago after being accused of walking around his neighbourhood naked. He was swiftly diagnosed as suffering from irreparable brain damage and early-onset dementia. He had repeatedly forgotten to take his epilepsy medicine. As he shuffles into the room, it is hard to believe he is 45; he looks 65. He is trailing behind him a large plastic bag full of rubbish – some screwed-up newspapers, an empty Reddy-Brek box – that he carries everywhere.

How long have you been here, Anthony? “Near here,” he says carefully. “Only a third amount of time, the rest is saying it is impossible to live here. I told judge it was bad.” I look to the prison guard to see if she can translate. She shrugs. Do you like it here, Anthony? “In Hammersmith, I did my A-levels. I didn’t really know any people from Africa until I was 24 at the most. I am a quiet person, I don’t shout.” The conversation continues like this. At one point, he seems to think I am a judge and can release him. At another, he asks if I am his father.

Suddenly there is a hammering sound on the door next to me. A man is punching it, howling for attention. The officer says, “He was sectioned yesterday.” Then why is he still here? “We can’t find a bed yet. He’s leaving in three days.” When I tell Luke Sergent, the prison governor, about the string of insane people I have encountered, he is in despair. “It’s quite common. There is no doubt we have people in this prison who are so mentally ill they shouldn’t be here.”

Ronnie Barker and Bad Girls seem very far away. And as the Tory scare stories about prisoners living in luxury? Well, in the corner, near Anthony’s cell, there is indeed a single shiny plasma screen TV. Nobody switches it on.

If any British politician tries to make a sane point about law-and-order, he can expect to be publicly flayed as a paedophile-loving, Huntley-hugging maniac. Charles Kennedy is the latest liberal to be lynched by the right-wing press. This week, he stands accused of "crazy political correctness" and "being soft on murder".

So what "madness" has he advocated? The Liberal Democrat leader said prisoners should not be stripped of their basic right to vote. That's it. This is a totally mainstream policy across Europe, taken for granted even by conservative parties from Bosnia to Ireland to Spain. Indeed, by kicking prisoners off the electoral register, Britain is part of a minority of developed countries, huddled in a damp corner with Vladimir Putin's Russia and George Bush's America. But - hey! - who cares about joining the civilised world where there is a hint of liberal blood in the water?

Out here in the real world, Kennedy's proposals are a smart idea. One of the great failures of the current Labour government has been its prison policy. Under New Labour, Britain's prison population has swollen to a level unimaginable even a decade ago, with 75,000 people banged up as you read this. It's one of the biggest prison populations in the world. Overcrowding is now epidemic: a quarter of our prisoners are jammed with another convict into cells designed to hold only a single person.

This has a simple consequence: as Frances Cook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, puts it, "Overcrowded, underfunded prisons are not rehabilitating prisons." Jails should be equipping prisoners with the skills to get jobs and stop offending, but overcrowded jails (and I've visited a few) simply become warehouses for ever-angrier, ever-more- criminal offenders. The result? A fat majority of prisoners - 60 per cent - reoffend within two years, and the figure rises to 74 per cent for young men. Imagine if schools or hospitals had a similar failure rate. The failure of our prisons isn't just bad for their inmates; it makes us all more likely to be victims of crime.

So what has this got to do with giving prisoners access to the ballot box? There are two men who can best explain the connection.

James Pearson is a prisoner who went to the High Court to fight for his right to vote under the Human Rights Act. He explained, "The ban on prisoners voting means MPs do not have to pay attention to prisons and the issues raised by prisoners. This leads to issues like the poor state of healthcare for prisoners being ignored. I accept that prisoners must be punished, but I cannot accept that it is just for me to die in custody, or to be denied the democratic rights of everyone else in our society."

This view is confirmed by a man who has seen the Prison Service from the opposite end - the former Home Secretary Douglas Hurd. He saw when he was in office that there was almost no pressure on him to improve prison conditions, except his own conscience. Few MPs would raise the issue, and even fewer voters. He says, "If prisoners had the vote, MPs would take a good deal more interest in prisons and making them better."

Our prisons are so bad because there is no electoral incentive for politicians to make them better. The vast majority of us will never see the inside of a prison; it is the most invisible part of the public sector, and the least scrutinised. The only way to put jail conditions on to the political agenda is to let prisoners vote.

At the next general election, 40 marginal constituencies in Britain will have prisons in them. Look, for example, at a seat like Dorset South, which has been held by the Tories with a majority of just 77 but has a prison population of 1,416. If prisoners could vote, MPs in seats like that would quickly start harassing the Home Secretary over jail conditions. Parliamentary candidates would see the inside of a prison - many of them for the first time. They would become as clued up on the local nick as they are on the local hospital.

Ah, but isn't that exactly what we want to avoid? Do we really want MPs haggling to get more snooker tables and less time in bang-up for prisoners?

In fact, surveys of prisoners show that their demands would not be for extra "treats". Their biggest gripe with the jail system is that they find it very hard to stay in touch with their families. There are 150,000 children right now who are separated from an imprisoned parent, and the average distance of a prisoner from her family is 53 miles. Nearly half of all prisoners lose touch with their relatives when they go inside. And - crucially - giving prisoners regular access to their families would be good for all of us.

The Prison Reform Trust has conducted detailed research that discovered one of the most effective ways to prevent reoffending was to make sure that close family bonds were maintained. Prisoners who stayed close to their children and their partners were much less likely to walk back through the jail doors a second time.

So if prisoners got the vote, they would demand not simply "softer" but more effective jails. Bad jails mean more crime; good jails promote rehabilitation, which is in the interests of prisoner and society alike.

If you want a neat illustration of this principle, look at the second biggest demand prisoners have. They complain they don't have access to good drug rehab, good job training and the opportunity to find housing for when they are released. There's no conflict of interest here between prisoners and the rest of us: we should all want these improvements, because they drive down crime. If you really care about the victims of crime, you have to choose the policy that will create fewer of them - not the one that simply indulges our own rage.

Yet the conservative press tries to keep us all in a frenzied state of fear and loathing, constantly awaiting the next mugging and poised to shoot the next burglar. Thankfully, the evidence suggests they are not succeeding - Britain remains much more liberal than the press suggests. A major Mori poll conducted for Rethinking Crime and Punishment last year found that just 11 per cent of us believe putting yet more prisoners in jail and treating them harshly is the best way to spend the Home Office budget. Instead - even after all the propaganda - the British public want to spend the cash on drug treatment and prescription, constructive activities for young people, promoting parenting skills, and greater discipline in schools.

But instead of capitalising on this inchoate public mood, the Labour Party still makes blood-sacrifice after blood-sacrifice to these right-wing totems. Yesterday, a snarling Alan Milburn joined the assault on Kennedy with a staggeringly vicious attack on the Liberal Democrat leader's "political correctness".

Never forget: there is a calm, smart alternative to this hysteria - a way to really, truly, deeply reduce crime. Ignore the right-wing screaming, Charles - you are speaking for Britain's silent liberal majority.

Fourteen years and 1,006 prison suicides ago, a 15-year-old boy called Philip Knight strangled himself in his bare prison cell in Cardiff. Making a noose was the only way he could see to end the misery-go-round from foster home to foster home that had dominated his short life. He had not been convicted of any crime. The young man was held on remand and shunted into an adult jail because places for young offenders were full. The Tory policy of massively increasing Britain's prison population had begun.

The death of Knight was considered a national scandal. It led news bulletins; ITV ran an hour-long documentary at 9pm and, a few months later, broadcast a two-hour drama-documentary in a prime-time slot. Tory politicians were harangued by the media and the Opposition. The Home Secretary, David Waddington, was forced to make a parliamentary statement declaring that tackling prison suicides was his "top priority".

And now? The Tory policy of jamming ever more prisoners into already packed jails has been brought to a climax by David Blunkett. Tonight, there will be twice the number of prisoners there were when Philip Knight last took breath. Our prisons have received almost no extra cash. Politicians have been warned repeatedly that overpopulated prisons cannot deal adequately with depressed, despairing inmates. They cannot maintain sufficient suicide watches, never mind the rehabilitation programmes that might offer long-term hope.

Both the Tories and Labour have ignored these facts and continued a populist prescription of jail, jail, jail. (Michael Howard yesterday called for even more people to be jailed, attacking the Government for stopping at 80,000.) As a direct result of this policy, six women have to be cut down from their home-made nooses by prison officers in Holloway every night. A 14-year-old boy called Adam Rickwood hanged himself at Her Majesty's Pleasure on Monday. Suicide is now so common in our prisons that the fuss made about Philip Knight seems like a quaint relic from another age. Today, there are no documentaries and no rage.

David Blunkett is right, however, about one thing. It is not enough merely to condemn this. Critics of the Government's policy of over-crowded, suicide-infested jails need to offer a serious alternative. In an illustration of the contradictions within New Labour, this alternative can already be found in the prison service itself, if you look hard enough. In the reactionary soil of Blunkett's law and order policy, there are the fragile seeds of an authentically progressive alternative.

A few weeks ago I visited HMP Liverpool - one of the largest jails in England - where an extraordinary experiment is taking place. The Liverpool experience focuses on something that might seem trivial at first: the housing prisoners will eventually move into when they are released.

One third of prisoners in Britain are released to "No Fixed Abode" (NFA); in some jails it is as high as 70 per cent. This means they are walking out of the prison gates to life on the streets or dossing on friends' floors. For single men, it is almost impossible to get council housing, and most prisoners lose any home they might have had. Without an address, it's very hard to get a job. NFA is virtually a revolving door straight back to prison.

Staring into this black hole is a key factor in the suicide rate in our jails, and in the decision of 60 per cent of the surviving prisoners to reoffend within two years of their release.

In Liverpool, a visionary governor, Kathy James, and a former officer, Gary Thurgood, have turned this around. They have established a Housing and Resettlement Unit so successful in finding accommodation for released prisoners that this March Liverpool became the first British jail where every single inmate walked out to a home or a guaranteed hostel place. Dedicated officers work with the prisoners on securing a proper home from the day they are admitted.

Thurgood is keen to link these new homes with developing the work ethic in prisoners who have often grown up in families where nobody has ever had a job. Liverpool has the largest amount of vacant housing stock in Britain, so Thurgood approached the local council to see if prisoners training in bricklaying, plastering and construction could work on derelict or run-down housing stock and then move into the houses themselves on release.

The project has already begun; prisoners will move into their first homes later in the year. Thanks to the culture of hope this fosters, the suicide rate is falling.

So why isn't this approach being rolled out to every prison in the country? Simple. The cash isn't there. While we have such an extraordinarily high number of prisoners - the largest in Europe - we can barely afford to keep our prisons running at all. Liverpool was only able to find the money for this project because it is classed as a deprived area and therefore entitled to special benefits from the European Social Fund.

It takes a huge sum of up-front money to do what they are attempting at Liverpool: to convert prisons from the 19th-century model (Warehouses for Bad People) to a 21st-century model where they are centres for rehabilitation. It saves money in the long run, because it slashes reoffending and all the court and prison costs that come with it. But the effects aren't felt for years, and it takes a brave politician to think five years ahead, when they will be in a different job or, more likely, on the back benches.

Given that huge new sums are not going to be found for the prisons budget - it is always an unpopular priority - Britain has a choice. We can have a smart, sleek prison system on the 21st-century Liverpool model that seriously rehabilitates (at most) 40,000 prisoners. This would cut crime and heal the lives of some of the most abused and brutalised people in our society.

Or we can have the 19th-century status quo: 80,000 prisoners warehoused like battery chickens, where prison officers barely have time to cut down prisoners as they twitch on a rope. To go for the second option is suicidal not just for prisoners but for every one of us. We are all more likely to be mugged, burgled or raped when unrehabilitated and uneducated prisoners return to our streets.

A government with a progressive law and order policy would explain there is no contradiction between helping prisoners and cutting crime, as The Sun screams every other day. Indeed, if we are serious about reducing crime, we have to help prisoners to turn their lives around.

But rather than try to persuade the British public of the need for this fundamental change, Tony Blair has knowingly pandered to the know-nothing right-wingers who act as though our prisons already focus entirely on rehabilitation and offer scarcely a stroke of punishment. It's a blatant reversal of the truth, as Blair must know - but he does not have the political courage to challenge it. When Michael Howard wheels out these old, big lies, as he did yesterday, Blair is reduced to yelping "Me too!"

For every week we wait for the Prime Minister to develop a morally serious policy towards prisons, a fresh noose is being tied.

Don't worry about crime. David Blunkett is looking after us. Thanks to him, more evil bitches are being snatched from their children and slammed into jail cells than ever before. The law and order debate in Britain is now so warped that we are encouraged to think in these terms. Our Labour Government brags about increasing the number of women in jail by 151 per cent over the past decade, and Blunkett declares he will jail more and more "until they get the message".

So many women - or "witches", as female criminals are routinely described by our press - are now stuffed into our prisons that the Government is currently building a whole new jail for them (cost to you: £60m). You might expect that such a radical shift in government policy would be based on a careful study of the evidence. If our leaders are going to take the drastic step of trebling the number of female prisoners and depriving 17,000 children annually of their mums, it must be because of a huge increase in violence from women. And there must be fairly persuasive evidence that jail sentences will slash crime rates - right?

Wrong; 40 per cent of all women imprisoned last year were sent down for shoplifting - more than for all the violent offences put together. Another 30 per cent were banged up for drug offences. Only a small minority of female prisoners have been involved in violent crime or even burglary.

We are building a new prison - and spending £27,000 per woman per year - so we can lock up more women for pilfering from shops. For each prisoner, you could have a new nurse in your local casualty department. Welcome to a country where the Government still dances to a Tory tune on crime.

And it's not as if all this spending even reduces the odds of you being a victim of crime. Six out of 10 women prisoners reoffend within two years of their release - and those are just the ones who get caught. A well-resourced prison system dealing with a few very serious offenders would be able to help turn lives around; but our heaving, groaning jails are making crime worse.

Only one thing outweighs the colossal financial cost of this political failure. It's the human cost. If you look beyond the dehumanising stereotypes to the hard facts, it emerges that females in jail are not conniving slags. They are most often abused women who turned to crime in desperation. The Government's Social Exclusion Unit conducted an extensive study of women prisoners in 2002. It found that a quarter of them had been in care as children; half had been beaten by their partners; 40 per cent had dropped out of schooling before the age of 16; and 70 per cent had been diagnosed with two or more mental disorders.

A welfare co-ordinator with the charity Women in Prison describes a typical woman jailed in Britain today. "I first met Anna while she was on remand in HMP Holloway. At our first meeting she was very depressed and felt her life was in a mess. A long history of drug misuse had eventually led to her being in Holloway. She had faced problems from an early age because her grandfather was schizophrenic and she grew up terrified of his unpredictability. She formed few friendships at school, and she was bullied because of her grandfather's illness and because her family couldn't afford new clothes. She became rebellious and sullen, and the adults in her life gave up on her." She continues: "Her story at this point becomes so typical it is almost a cliché. While she was presenting an angry and abrasive front she was being systematically sexually abused by her grandfather. Like many children in this situation she felt she was at blame for this situation. She became addicted to crack cocaine, and miscarried at 16. She became even more dependent on drugs, and she eventually received an 18-month sentence for drug offences."

These are the witches Michael Howard and David Blunkett have sent down. What tough guys. As jails are forced to take more and more people without any extra cash, they have to cut back on education and rehab. Overcrowding makes prison even less effective and even more cruel; more Annas are locked away for no purpose. Fourteen women killed themselves in prison last year. Several thousand slashed at their own bodies. Anna is atypical in only one respect. At least - unlike two thirds of female prisoners - she does not have kids. Many mothers arrive in prison distraught, explaining that there is nobody to pick up their kids from school. Living chaotic lives, in denial about the possibility of custody, their children are punished even more for their mothers' shoplifting or drug addiction.

Many of these women cannot see their children for the entire length of their sentence because they are sent to distant jails - more than a quarter are held more than 100 miles from their children's hometown. Thanks to David Blunkett's failing policies, 6,000 children could not see their mum this Mother's Day; all the research shows that they are now far more likely to fall into a life of crime themselves.

Perhaps the cruellest twist of all is that there are far cheaper, more effective ways of punishing female criminals that the Government could turn to at any moment. For example, a fascinating initiative called the Milton Keynes Retail Theft Initiative was launched in 1994. Shoplifters are required to take part in an extensive course that requires them to meet shop-owners who are victims of theft, confront the reasons why they steal, and teaches them skills to move into work and resist peer pressure. They have therapists they can contact when they feel they are about to reoffend.

You can hear Richard Littlejohn and David Davis sneering already at the "social workers" and "bleeding hearts" behind this but - big news - the plan works beyond the wildest dreams of its creators. Reconviction rates - confirmed by independent studies - fell to just 3 per cent. If you want to cut crime - and save money - invest in programmes that analyse offending behaviour and help to re-educate people who have often known no other life.

Of course a hardcore minority will continue to offend and they will have to be given stringent community sentences (Soft? Try digging a ditch unpaid for 100 hours) or, eventually, jailed. But the Blunkettian nervous twitch that uses prison as a first resort is a recipe for wrecked lives, squandered cash and higher crime. Now look again at the "tough" rantings of the right. Do they offer facts and figures - programmes that work - or do they offer a tidal wave of "common sense"?

The Government has shown that sometimes it is prepared to forsake right-wing praise for its "toughness" to choose sensible, effective policies. It has, for example, massively increased the prescription of methadone and it is planning to increase the prescription of heroin - policies that cut burglary rates and save the lives of addicts. Why can't it be as brave and as smart when it comes to prisons? Who is it making policy for - know-nothing right-wing journalists who snarl at poor women from air-conditioned offices in Kensington, or the Real Britain where we need serious crime policies?

Stevie, a stocky but hollow-cheeked 20-year-old lad serving 18 months in Feltham Young Offenders' Institution for burglary, is talking about his kids. "My first two are in Amsterdam. I never see them. But I see my other one every week, and I'm going to be close to the two on the way." Twins? "No. My girl's having a baby in three months, and her cousin is having my baby a few months later too." He grins. He has been banged up 20 times since he was 13. Rat-boy, feral child, a mini-Kray of the council estates: fill in your own dehumanising cliché, Stevie matches them all.

Stevie has thick encrusted scars running up both his arms. "Yeah, I started cutting myself when I first got banged up," he says quickly. "I don't know why. I would just cut and cut. Everything was doing my head in. My girl used to get freaked out because she would try to disinfect the wound - I never went to the doctor - and she would be touching the bone."

He dropped out of school when he was seven. He was expelled, but he can't remember what for. He never found his way back. "I started doing silly things. My dad was in cram [prison], and I smoked crack for the first time when I was 10. That's when it went totally mental," he says. The staff in Feltham say it's a familiar story. Almost all the lads here have a similar background. A third come to prison straight from care homes.

So is this just another feel-bad tale of the British underclass, a lament for the 10,000 Stevies across the land? No; there's an unexpected coda to this story. Three years ago, Stevie's current home, Feltham, the south London remand centre holding 650 young offenders, was the absolute nadir of the British prison system. After the long death march of several young men to their suicides in dank cells - and an epidemic of men slashing their own flesh to mush - Feltham tanked on 21 March 2000. A racist psychopath called Robert Stewart was placed in a cell with Zahid Mubarek, a troubled, drug-addicted Asian thief. Stewart beat him to death with a table leg.

Since the scandal, Feltham has been inundated with hard cash and a determination on the part of politicians to turn it around. It is therefore a rare - and critical - exception to the tide of failure in British prison policy.

For more than a decade, under both Tory and Labour governments, the overall prison budget has been slashed, even while the number of prisoners has grown like yeast. The effect has been well documented and scandalous: over-crowded prisons are providing very limited education and resettlement services. We are all more likely to be victims of crime because prisoners are too often leaving custody illiterate, unskilled and homeless (80 per cent of 18 to 25-year-olds walk out the gates to "no fixed abode").

But Feltham shows that another criminal justice system is possible. The turnaround in the juvenile wing - which has had the bulk of the investment - has been drastic. There hasn't been a suicide here for three years. The self-harm bacillus is now under control and falling rapidly. There's a flash new detox unit, so that kids aren't going cold turkey alone and unhelped in their cells. The education centre was given a 100 per cent excellence rating by Ofsted inspectors last year. The prison inspectorate raved about the changes in its latest report.

Stevie explains the practical effect of all this. "I learned how to read here. They've given me lots of attention. They train me every day. I know it isn't a good thing to say that prison's good but this prison has done me good. Everywhere else I've been there's been no education - or what they had was shit - and basically no help with drugs neither."

I heard similar stories about Feltham from most of the young men I spoke to, all selected randomly to ensure I wasn't being shown the most impressive individuals. Yet I could almost hear right-wingers splutter when I saw that some of the offenders are given PlayStations in their cells if they excel at education and good behaviour. Why lavish resources on offenders? What about the victims? This right-wing ranting is easily slapped down. There is no contradiction between spending money on offenders and spending money on victims. All the academic research shows that if you spend money on offenders, there will be fewer victims, dummy.

The real choice in law and order isn't tough vs soft - who wants to be soft on rapists, muggers and killers? - but smart vs dumb. The "tough" approach to Stevie would be to slam him into a dark, damp cell, give him no drug treatment and no lessons, provide no incentive for him to learn how to behave well and structure his time, and then push him out at the end of it on to the streets, alienated and homeless. This is what happens in most American prisons.

Sure, it's tough; it is also dumb. He would be far more likely to reoffend. The idea that abused kids from violent homes (or no home at all) cutting their own bodies to bits are in need of even more hammering is not just stone-hearted. It creates more victims in the long term. Yet thanks to the neglect of prison reform by all parties, most of Britain's jails are closer to the failed American model than to the crime-cutting centres of rehabilitation we desperately need.

Tony Blair, even when his thoughts are benign, has not made prison reform a priority. Once offenders enter the Black Hole of Calcutta that is our penal system, the current Government - terrified of idiotic headlines claiming that prisoners are all given plasma-screen televisions - does little for them. Does every prison have to wait for a neo-Nazi to batter an Asian to death in one of its cells for the Government to open the funding and reform flood-gates?

Penal reform should be the dream subject for a Labour Home Secretary. Here are some of the poorest, most excluded people in Britain - and the Government has the power to transform their lives. Yet Feltham's rejuvenation remains only a small exception; a shaft of light in the penal darkness. Even there, the treatment of under-18s is far better than for 18 to 21-year-olds, who are housed in a separate, underfunded wing and suffer far more limited access to education.

Feltham's juvenile wing shows what a large increase in investment could achieve across the British penal system. Every prisoner in Britain, not just young offenders, should be equipped with literacy and numeracy skills, and set up with a home and a job following their release. Most Labour politicians agree, but it takes hard cash to get there - and far from putting in the cash, they are actually whittling existing funds down.

If money and good management can turn around Feltham, they can turn around anywhere. A brave government would shift spending away from shallow "eye-catching initiatives" with no proven track-record (random drug-testing in schools, "bobbies on the beat", punishing the parents of truants) to these low-key but proven techniques.

Stevie asks: "Y'know, in some of the nicks I've been in, it's like they want you to go out and keep on being a criminal. They don't teach you nothing. They don't help you with getting a job or a flat or nothing. Why can't every nick help you get yourself sorted out? Don't they want us to go straight?"

Our prisons are centres of self-harm and suicide. Since Harold Shipman killed himself on Tuesday, two more people have been tossed on to the pile of penal corpses. Phillip Taylor was 32 years old. He was in prison for conspiracy to supply drugs. He tore his bedsheets into a ligature, attached them to his bunk and snapped his neck. April Sherman was 27, and on remand. She had not been convicted of anything when she hanged herself. But no inspectors will rush to Edmond Hill or Blakenhurst, the prisons where April and Phillip took their lives.

The 94 suicides and 7,486 known incidents of self-harm in our prisons last year were not inevitable. They are the result of a direct political choice made by our government. Successive home secretaries - beginning with Michael Howard but manfully maintained by Jack Straw and David Blunkett - have chosen to stuff our prisons far beyond capacity. They knew this results in frightened and confused prisoners being shunted around, without proper counselling, without significant education, without hope. The Howard League for Penal Reform explained unambiguously that understaffing and overcrowding would kill by creating unbearable living conditions. They were right: suicides have doubled since 1993.

Nobody else can be blamed. Prison officers have thrust at them a sea of people who should not be in jail but in hospital: the mentally ill and chronic drug-users make up a staggering proportion of Britain's prisoners. The Home Office has found that 90 per cent of prisoners suffer at least one of five mental disorders: psychosis, severe neurosis, drug dependency, alcoholism or personality disorders. In these circumstances, with nugatory resources, prison officers often perform surprisingly well.

The problems lie primarily with political will and hard cash. To be fair, a small dent has been made in the suicide rate since 2001 by the Government's safer custody policy. This has ensured that almost all prisons have listeners' schemes, where prisoners are designated a fellow prisoner (who has been given training) in whom they can confide. They have guaranteed access to their listener even during "bang up". I have seen a pilot of this at Aylesbury Young Offenders' Institute, and it clearly helped both prisoners to fend off despair.

Yet even listeners' schemes cannot do much to help seriously mentally disturbed people who need more than just to be heard. Often, one prison service source explains, "It can take us months and months to get somebody who is clearly mentally ill into hospital. We had one lad who was slashing himself, screaming all the time - the works. We begged them for months to section him, but there was a shortage of mental health places. In the end, they bloody sectioned him the day he was released. They clearly saw us as a safe holding place, a kind of low-budget mental health centre. It's ridiculous."

David Ramsbotham, the former Chief Inspector of Prisons, explains in his superb memoir Prisongate: The shocking state of Britain's prisons and the need for visionary change, that he was presenting the Government with clear remedies for prison suicides as long ago as 1999. "Untrained staff are not supervised and bad practice too often goes unchecked. During our research, we learned how the number of suicides in the USA had been reduced dramatically... I recommended the adoption of these techniques in Britain. But proven American methods have not been introduced, managerial insight has not improved and the numbers continue to rise."

Where there is a real will and the funds to match it, suicide rates can be drastically reduced. Prisoners are most likely to kill themselves on their first night in jail. In Lancaster Farms Young Offenders' Institute, an outstanding governor, David Waplington, has pioneered an approach which shrinks this threat and has saved the lives of several young men. The institute has dedicated "first night" accommodation, where officers explain the institution routine clearly, and help to deal with any threats the inmate might feel, such as the presence of rival gang members. But to do this, prisons need a reasonable number of staff. Centres for young offenders are more fortunate than adult prisons in this respect, because they are legally required to receive more money.

If the Government wants to raise the cash for high-quality prisons which educate and heal rather than drive prisoners to rage and despair, then the answer is simple. Return our prisons to the numbers they had under that notorious softie Margaret Thatcher, and you automatically double the amount that can be spent on each prisoner. This would be the beginning (although only the beginning) of the transformation needed in our prisons.

Jails are currently the trash bin for all of Britain's political failings: lack of social mobility, the madness of criminalising drugs, and - most pointedly - the delusion that we can have high-quality public services without spending proper sums on them. We can no more have prisons on the cheap than hospitals or schools. The Government is finally turning around chronic underinvestment in health and education - but prisoners are still waiting, festering in packed cells for days on end. In the circumstances, can anybody really be shocked that so many prisoners opt out by making a noose?

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 17

LENGTH: 1250 words

HEADLINE: REMEMBER: PAEDOPHILES ARE PEOPLE TOO;
COULD THE MONSTER GARY GLITTER ONCE HAVE BEEN ONE OF
THE INNOCENT

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
Poor Pete Townshend, who probably isn't even a
paedophile, is the latest victim of our - yes, our,
not his - sick obsession with child abuse. Every time
a child abuse story is thrust on to our front pages, I
search fruitlessly for coverage that will answer basic
questions about paedophiles. And every time I am
shocked to realise that, in all the rotting acres of
newsprint expended on this topic, there has been
almost no discussion of such serious questions as: Can
paedophiles be treated? How did they become this way?
How can we reduce the odds of them abusing children,
either for the first time or as repeat offenders?

Let us, for once, look instead not at the froth but at
the facts. Press coverage and popular myth invite us
to see paedophiles as cold, clever Machiavellian
plotters. Sometimes this is true: the people who ran
the "Wonderland Club", the foul paedophile ring that
was finally shut down in 2000, do seem to have been
intelligent and worryingly calculating. But far more
often, they are sad, pitiful losers, the furthest of
outcasts from our society.

Last year I visited Maidstone Prison's Sex Offenders
Wing, where Britain's most notorious child molesters,
including Jonathan King, are held. Far from being the
Hannibal Lecters I had expected, these paedophiles
were mumbling, pitiful wrecks - barely literate, with
no social skills or ability to make adult contact. One
of them, Ray, did not look at me once during a
half-hour conversation, his eyes fixed on the ground
and his vocabulary fixed at the level of a five year
old.

The lengthy and extensive sex offender treatment
programmes they were on did seem to have genuinely
made them think for the first time about the damage
they were causing; when they had abused children
before, they had been too mentally limited and
socially stunted to understand that they were causing
horrific damage. After all, they had grown up being
told by their own abusers that this sort of behaviour
was normal. Although what they had done was
undoubtedly horrific, they, too, were clearly victims:
of severely low intelligence, of their own distant but
ever-present sexual abuse, and too often of poverty.

Even the intelligent paedophiles - like the two as yet
unnamed Members of Parliament whom the police are
investigating - have a strong chance of having been
molested themselves, and therefore of having had their
sexuality moulded at the earliest possible age into a
horribly deformed shape.

Our hysterical climate about paedophilia had actually
made them more likely to offend. As Jim, a
thirtysomething man, explained to me: "I could never
tell no one sic , not even my best friend, how I felt
because then they'd know I was a paed... a paedoph...
he couldn't quite say the word and then they'd say I
was just evil and totally beyond the pale. If I had
been able to talk to somebody about it, I think I
might have been able to control it more. I might not
have, you know, actually hurt a kid. I might have been
strong enough to get help. But because everywhere it
was saying I was evil, even if I had not done nothing,
I began to think I was evil and then I done it."

He began to abuse a six-year-old girl. If we had a
culture that saw paedophilia not as an irrevocable
sign of the beast but as a sad reality that will
always afflict some people - people who then need our
support and help to ensure that they do not act on
their sexual urges - then that girl and hundreds like
her might have been protected.

Pete Townshend says that he was a victim of sexual
abuse, and that was why he felt so strongly about the
subject that he looked at child porn. I do not know if
he is attracted to children, but if he is, it would be
typical for him to have suffered at the hands of a
paedophile. Ray Wyre, an expert on paedophiles (they
do exist, though we rarely call them), explains that
"66 per cent of paedophiles claim to have been victims
of sexual abuse, although that falls to 36 per cent
when you use a lie detector". He added: "Paedophilia
is often about learnt behaviour. The abuser almost
clones himself by taking power over his victim,
because, as the victim grows, he mimics this
behaviour."

Most of the paedophiles I met had given credible
testimony of sexual abuse. We do not like to admit
this, because it muddies our moral indignation. Could
the monster Gary Glitter once have been one of the
innocent abused children we so want to protect? Can
there be mitigating factors that make paedophiles
human?

All of this will be hard for right-wingers to accept.
They want straightforward evil; to condemn, not
understand. But there is a hard truth that we on the
left will have to accept, too: paedophilia is an
intractable sexual orientation, like heterosexuality
or homosexuality, that cannot be "trained out" of a
person. This goes against our natural belief in the
possibility of redemption and the possibility of
criminals being allowed a "fresh slate" after their
release.

Research by the Australian psychologist JK Marques and
his colleagues, published in the journal Criminal
Justice and Behaviour, indicates that a man who is
sexually attracted to children always will be.

We cannot hope for a cure - that is not realistic, and
paedophiles can never be released from the hell of
being attracted to people who are incapable of
reciprocating. However, they can undergo counselling
that reduces their chances of reoffending
substantially. (I was persuaded of this by the wealth
of evidence forwarded to me by academic psychologists
since I last wrote about this topic, where I said I
suspected that even limited treatment would not work.
Home Office research has proved me wrong).

The best we can hope for, then, is to help paedophiles
to control their urges and to desist from harming
children, and to imprison indefinitely the small
minority - such as Sidney Cooke - who do not want to
stop. This can obviously be done through the sex
offender treatment programmes in prisons - and the
prison officers and counsellors in Maidstone who toil
at this horrific work every day are quietly heroic -
but it would also be a good idea for the Government to
launch a high-profile campaign that can reach
paedophiles before they begin to offend.

This could take the form of adverts on national
television, which should carry the message: "If you
find yourself sexually attracted to children, we will
help you to make sure you do not act on it."

After all, most people who find themselves attracted
to children have memories of their own abuse, and,
when reasoned with, do not want to inflict that on
somebody else. There needs to be a point where
paedophiles can find help other than in prison. We
should promise therefore to provide them with a
therapist who will be available 24/7 to stay with them
if ever they feel tempted to offend; who will keep
them occupied and not alone; and who will, if
necessary, house them in secure gated communities
where they will never have access to children.

Instead of driving them underground as we do at
present, where their only source of friendship and
comfort is to get involved with on-line paedophile
rings, we need to draw them out into an environment
where they can be supported in their efforts not to
offend. It is not perfect - but it is far better than
the current situation, where under the guise of caring
about children, we are making it far more likely that
child molesters will strike.

David clears away the clutter from his chair and offers me a seat. His room is filled with the personalised stuff you would find in any university student's room: magazines, posters, family pics, old coffee cups. He is sitting on his bed next to Steve, who is tall, black and muscular.

David, who is pale and looks tired, turns down the volume on the TV. We chat about daytime television (we agree that it has never really recovered from the loss of Richard and Judy), and it's like chatting to anyone else my age: the usual upbeat pop-culture gibberish that everyone in their early twenties spouts in order to bond with people they've only just met. Not until David refers to how he is serving a life sentence for murder would anybody reading a transcript of our homely scene realise where I am.

Aylesbury Young Offenders' Institute houses the 348 most violent and disturbed young criminals aged between 18 and 21 in Britain. Visually, the building is confusing. Its imposing Victorian exterior gives way to modern steel interiors, incongruously offset by long lines of bright green and red tinsel. More than 50 of its inmates are serving life sentences here before moving on to adult prisons. Before I enter, I am warned that several of them have committed crimes that "would make your stomach turn", and am told not to ask them what their offences were.

The public's perception of young offenders' institutions is shaped by films such as Alan Parker's Scum: all rape and wrist- slitting. Is that the way life is for people like David and Steve?

Aylesbury contains the seeds of a new, modern prison service that could banish this Victorian model once and for all. Work in British prisons has too often involved sewing mailbags. But not for these lads in Aylesbury, where Toyota, without government funding, has built a very sophisticated car mechanics workshop. At any given time, this provides 24 prisoners with skills that are transferable to the outside world. The company is committed to funding the workshop for the next 20 years. "It kind of gives you hope," Steve explains. "It makes you realise you can learn something, you know?" Many students on the course have to be taught how to read and write before they begin. One former prisoner, released last year, has written to the institute to explain that he is now employed full-time by Toyota, and that the mechanics course transformed his life.

This particular initiative came not from Whitehall, but from an entrepreneurial figure within the prison who had the wherewithal to raise the funding. This is a model example of the social entrepreneurship that this magazine aims to support with the annual New Statesman-Centrica Upstarts Awards. It chimes neatly with the government's approach, too: it harnesses private resources for the public good.

The example of Aylesbury's Toyota workshop suggests that government funding for this kind of project would be an investment that paid for itself many times over. "We would love to have workshops all over the prison. We would love to be educating the lads in a whole range of crafts," one prison officer explains. "But we don't have the manpower. We don't have the resources."

But when prisoners step out of the shiny Toyota workshop, do they confront the stereotypical brutal images of life in a young offenders' institution that colour outsiders' perceptions of such places? While the prison guard was chatting outside the cell, the lads I spoke to (about ten in all, selected randomly according to who was hanging around in the corridor) had an opportunity, off the record, to tell me if the "screws" were screwing them up. They all said that it wasn't the case. Some screws were nicer than others; some were "good blokes", others "arseholes", but none was corrupt or violent. The people who work in the prison, such as Neil Beales, a principal officer, were plainly decent and straight-talking, even (I was told by inmates) away from the prying eyes of the media.

These days, it is rare for young offenders to have to share a cell. This issue has been emphasised by high-profile cases such as the recent murder in Feltham of an Asian prisoner by his rabidly racist cellmate. In fact, a few prisoners dislike being alone and would prefer to share, and research suggests that this preference has a constructive basis: rates of suicide and self-harm are considerably higher in lone cells. One prisoner told me: "You ain't going to hang yourself if there's somebody standing next to you saying, 'What the fuck are you doing?' It's like a support, you know, a mate." Thorn Cross Young Offenders' Institute, near Warrington, has decided to increase its share of two-person cells for that very reason.

There is, however, some threat from fellow prisoners. All prisons have hierarchies and vicious fights to be "top dogs", and Aylesbury is no exception. "We all know who's in charge and who's a sad bastard," I'm told. "Everyone knows their place." But the prison has a tough anti-bullying strategy. Beales explains that "where we see gangs forming, we very quickly split them up. We just transfer them to different parts of the prison and make sure they don't have classes together. The key is not to let groups like that settle, and keep moving them, or they form into packs."

Beales admits that self-harm is a major issue: "I've seen some kids so self-harming that they bite through their own arm to find a vein to rip at. I've seen lads who've literally gnawed through the cartilage and ligaments and flesh of their own arm." Another prisoner sliced his own body so persistently that, in one week alone, he had to have 13 pints of blood pumped into him.

Many of the young men in Aylesbury have never learnt any coping mechanisms to deal with crises, or even with everyday life. The only reaction they know to stress or anger or self-disgust is cutting themselves. Aylesbury does have alarmingly high self-harming rates, but these are deceptive. A small number of dedicated and repeated self-harmers have, in the past, sent the statistics through the roof. The statistics are now moving in the right direction.

A number of strategies have helped. Suicidal prisoners are no longer moved to the healthcare unit, because that stigmatises them. There is now an emphasis on treating them in their own wing, surrounded by their friends. A full-time prisoner works on self-harm prevention, and he is assisted by Andy, one of the institute's most impressive and mature prisoners. Talking to fellow prisoners is often far more helpful than talking to professionals. For this reason, there is now an institutionalised "listeners" service, where a suicidal prisoner can speak at any time to Andy or a number of other inmates who have been trained by the Samaritans. They can be moved to a special suite and talk all night if necessary.

For all these improvements, however, there are several other desperate needs that cannot be addressed because of underfunding. Charlotte Day of the Howard League for Penal Reform, who specialises in young offenders, says that 18- to 21-year-olds "get the worst deal of anybody within the prison estate". Tight Home Office targets for the treatment of under-18s have caused funding to be concentrated on them; most are now sent to expensive new secure training centres. Young offenders' institutions on "split sites" - institutions that house both juveniles ( aged 15 to 17) and 18- to 21-year-olds - suffer most, because the two categories can no longer mix. At sites such as Brinsford and Feltham, 18- to 21-year-olds have been denied access even to basic facilities.

Another consequence of underfunding is that staff levels are very low at the moment. In Aylesbury, prisoners get one hour out of their cells per day at weekends. Those in "bang up" (that is, the prisoners who don't have jobs or attend courses, which was the case with three of the ten youths I spoke to) get just an hour on weekdays, too. "It drives you mental," Steve explains. "The boredom, the anger - you just can't fucking stand it. You want to smash every fucking thing."

Whereas in Feltham, prisoners get a "sosh" (association, where they can hang out and talk to each other) three times a day, in Aylesbury this is restricted to once a day. This gives inmates only an hour in which to shower, play pool, chat and relax, before they are banged up alone again. It doesn't take a whole Richard and Judy phone-in to figure out that this is a recipe for producing angry, bitter men.

Aylesbury is an unbearable microcosm of Britain's public services: run by decent, well- intentioned public servants, filled with people screaming out for help, but starved of the funding it needs. This could be a buzzing centre for transforming the lives of some of the poorest, most dispossessed people in our society. Instead, it is, as David told me as I left his cell, "a place that could do a lot of good, if we weren't all just sitting around waiting all the time. You know?"

Some names in this article have been changed