Ian Acheson

‘Short term custody isn’t inherently bad, but the way we do it is awful.’ I didn’t expect Justice Secretary David Gauke to start an otherwise thoughtful speech yesterday on prisons like this, but he should have. No one wants people in prison when there are better alternatives that will properly punish them and give them the tools to break away from offending. To do otherwise is stupid. But the debate has been overwhelmed by a fixation on sentence length that wrongly suggests that short imprisonment must always and forever be toxic and counterproductive. Gauke presented his audience with sobering statistics on rates of incarceration putting us at the top of the league in Europe. We seem addicted to custody in this country, as long as it’s cheap.

In response to the Westminster attack, a 100-strong new counter-extremism taskforce has been announced to deal with the terrorist threat in prisons. I’m taking some credit for this badly needed focus. In the autumn of 2015, the then Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, asked me to lead an independent review of the threat posed by Islamist extremism in prisons, the probation service and the youth justice system. I used to be a prison governor in what was known until just a few days ago as the National Offender Management Service, so I agreed on the understanding that I reported only to him and that I had his full support to go where the evidence led me, without interference from bureaucrats. To his credit, he agreed immediately. Gathering information was a complex task for a small team.