There are currently 21 places left in Britain’s jails.  Twenty One.  No really.  So what are we to do about this clearly absurd situation?  Well it’s obvious isn’t it!?  If you don’t have enough prison places you just stop sending criminals to prison; or at least that’s what Jack Straw is urging magistrates to do.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, ‘shouldn’t we be building more prisons?’.  Well, apparently not.

I’ve argued on numerous occassions for the use of non-retributive responses to crime when appropriate.  Time and time again practice has shown than restorative justice works; it cuts rates of re-offending by forcing criminals to confront their actions and the effects that flow from them.

But just because restorative justice works in certain circumstances does not mean certain criminals shouldn’t be put in prison.  Moreover it’s not enough to urge magistrates to impose non-custodial sentences when the non-custodial sentences currently available consistently fail to achieve anything of worth.  At the end of the day tokenistic non-custodial sentences are about as effective in terms of restorative justice as a prison without walls and doors is in terms of retributive justice.

I’m all for non-custodial sentences, but only when they do the job.  In the meantime we need to build more prisons.