Our prisons must be freed from this cycle of failure

Well, dear old Ian Duncan Smith has asked Jonathan Aitken to produce a report on prisons, on the grounds that he has spent time in one. Perhaps he will be asking Bernie Madoff to run his fraud sub-committee.

Nevertheless, he seems to have "got" drugs, rehabilitation and mental illness as the big three problems. sadly, his only policy is to bring in the charities...well their record in drug rehabilitation has been very poor, IDS...You gotta spend money on more prison officers and get rid of group therapy in favour of individual approaches. Some of the rest is sensible. In other words, as usual, we can agree the critique, although the idiocies of the Thatcher period need to be remembered, but where is the hard cash for the solution going to come from?