Leading article: Criminal negligence

It is not as if they could not see it coming. The prison population in this country has been expanding since 1993. The pressure eased in the early years of the Labour Government, but then the effects of longer and indeterminate sentences started to come through. Home Secretaries of both parties have had to resort to a series of expedients to add to capacity or to restrict the flow of new inmates.

It is not hard, therefore, to understand the short-term forces that have produced the latest wheeze to ease the pressures on prison space. Instead of letting prisoners out early, the cunning plan in the Home Office is to admit some convicts late, we report today. That the idea of waiting lists for prison places is being taken seriously is a measure both of John Reid's desperation and of the severity of the underlying crisis.

That Mr Reid is desperate should not have been in doubt. Last week's letter urging judges to pass prison sentences only if strictly necessary was an admission of failure. The Prime Minister has made much of his Government's willingness to lock people up. This month he boasted to the House of Commons about the numbers of young people who break the terms of their anti-social behaviour orders who go to jail. Yet, as the same Tony Blair once said 14 years ago, when you "get to the stage where you've locked up the kid, in a sense you've lost".

What went wrong? The failure of this Government's penal policy cannot be laid at the door of Mr Reid. He has been Home Secretary for only eight months. His predecessors started building more prisons, but not enough, and prisons cannot be built as quickly as judges pass sentences. Gordon Brown should ask the court of public opinion to take his contributory negligence into account. The Treasury, while rightly insisting on value for money, failed to question forecasts of the prison population.

But it is Mr Blair who must take the main burden of blame. He allowed the enlightened "tough on the causes of crime" approach to be overwhelmed by populist poses adopted to protect his right flank from the authoritarianism of parts of the press. His Government has not considered in any depth the possibilities of a criminal justice system that eschewed the use of prison as its main sanction. Thus we were treated last week to a synthetic public controversy that embarrassed the Government while doing nothing to advance the public interest. In all the fuss about judges blaming Mr Reid for letting criminals "walk free", hardly anyone asked whether it makes any sense to jail someone for downloading child pornography from the internet.

Most people know that prison does not "work" except as a university of crime: reoffending rates for prisoners are higher than those for non-custodial sentences. If last week's embarrassment, and the ridicule that will inevitably greet the idea of prison waiting lists, help prompt Mr Blair's successor to start afresh, some public good may come of it.