We don't need more prisons...

NuLabour has finally and reluctantly agreed to build a new prison, after resisting for a long time and discharging many prisoners early to free up space.

There is a siren voice which reminds us regularly that we jail more people than any other EU country. It is still true if we compared percentages - you wouldn't expect Ireland with 2 million or so people to imprison more than us with 60 million plus, but it is also true proportionately, - we imprison a higher proportion of our population than any other country in Europe.

But this is a misleading and even dishonest comparison. Could it be that we are less law-abiding than other countries? If we calculated the number imprisoned as a percentage of crimes committed, then the picture changes radically. We imprison 12.4 offenders for every 1,000 crimes committed. The EU average is 17.5 for every 1,000 crimes committed.

In fact, if we imprisoned the same proportion as in Spain, 57 prisoners for every 1,000 crimes, we would imprison nearly 370,000 instead of the 80,000 we actually imprison. Far from being too prison-obsessed, our penal policy is, if anything, too light on imprisonment.

Of course, the liberal do-gooders will go on quoting our nastiness in imprisoning so many, simply because to quote the more honest figure based on actual crimes we would emerge as "soft". Our problem is that we are not an honest and civilised people!

There are other issues, whether we spend enough on prisons, whether we should have more emphasis on weaning felons away from crime, or whether some forms of non-custodial punishment could be more reformatory, but this is another issue.

The fact remains that we seem to imprison a lower proportion of offenders than most of Europe.