Britain’s prisons shame us all

Many years ago, for my Great Lives BBC radio programme, we recorded Jeremy Paxman’s championing of the life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. It was an excellent choice and Mr Paxman persuasively laid out that great campaigner’s achievements in the reform of child-labour legislation and the lunacy laws. ‘As we look back baffled,’ I asked him, ‘by how civilised Victorians could even contemplate chaining the mentally ill to walls, or sending small boys up chimneys, what do you think future ages will lay, with comparable perplexity and horror, to our own age’s account?’ Paxman said he’d need notice of the question.

I don’t. With no shadow of doubt it will be our prisons. We’re committing too many people for too long to too brutal confinement in too crowded prisons. Our descendants will be aghast at the blind eye we turn to the abuse, the numbers and the futility.