This week Mr Blunkett is a liberal, and he is right about prison reform

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This week Mr Blunkett is a liberal, and he is right about prison reform

Blunkett unveils hostels plan to cut jail numbers

Our oxymoronic Home Secretary, the liberal authoritarian, continues to puzzle. Before Christmas, David Blunkett secured his Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows him to detain foreigners indefinitely in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights – which his own Government had just incorporated into British law.

This week, however, he is the very model of a humane, reforming, cabinet minister, pledging to reduce the number of people sent to prison and to make a better job of rehabilitating those who are denied their liberty. His thoughts on the subject of penal reform, set out in advance of his address to prison managers today, are a welcome break both from the sterility of Michael Howard's "prison works" mantra and from the only slightly more enlightened regime of his immediate predecessor, Jack Straw.

Mr Blunkett said prisons are too full of people on short sentences, and that the isolation from their jobs and families of remand and non-violent prisoners – he did not mention drug users and fine defaulters, but they account for many of this second category – is all too likely to "push someone off the straight and narrow for good".

That concern with what authoritarians might dismiss as the airy-fairy aim of rehabilitation is not only liberal, it is the only practical basis for an effective penal policy.

Any government which is tough on the causes of crime ought to look at prisons. Given that 58 per cent of prisoners are reconvicted within two years of release – many more must reoffend but escape conviction – then effective rehabilitation would dramatically cut the supply of criminals. The problem with Mr Howard's facile slogan was that, although offenders cannot commit crimes which affect those outside the prison system while they are locked up, it is not feasible or right to hand out life sentences for all crimes or even all violent crimes. Given that almost all prisoners will eventually, or not so eventually, be released, the whole emphasis of the Prison Service ought to be on minimising the chances that they will reoffend when they are.

That is not the case at the moment, and Mr Blunkett is to be warmly applauded for saying, "I want to change that". Of course, anyone can say it would be better if prison would give inmates something constructive to do that would raise their sense of self-worth and make them more likely to go straight after they have served their sentences. But the Home Secretary has come up with some radical ideas for how that might be done. All kinds of practical objections can be thrown up against plans for weekend prisons, part-time hostels and electronic tagging. Tagging, for instance, has so far proved useful for only a tiny minority of offenders. But this is the kind of new thinking the prison service needs.

He faces several obstacles. One is sentencing policy. Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice would not send the killers of James Bulger to adult jail because that would prejudice their rehabilitation, yet he wants teenage muggers who steal mobile phones to serve at least 18 months.

Another is the extreme conservatism of the Prison Officers Association. This will be a test of the Labour Government's relations with public-sector trade unions: the union in this case has just elected Andrew Darkin as its leader. Mr Darkin is someone the Prime Minister could fairly describe as a "wrecker". He was moved from his post at Feltham Young Offender Institution last year after he "obstructed change for too long", according to Martin Narey, head of the Prison Service.

Mr Blunkett is saying the right things. He must now make sure that action follows.