YOU HAVE GOT to admire her chutzpah. Only last week Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, was bellyaching in that measured, unhysterical tone we have come to know and love:

“A prison population of over 100,000 cannot be paid for, will not protect the public and will not stop reoffending. The Home Secretary is projecting a future of gulag Britain that puts us all at risk.”

And now, Ms Crook and her esteemed colleagues have come up with the solution: ideally, there should only be a hundred women in prison in Britain. Yes, that’s right. Turn almost 5,000 female criminals out on to the streets. That’ll make us all safer.

Now, clearly something has to be done about our expanding prison population. At the moment a record 78,500 people are banged up. But why free the women? After all, if we really want to judge things on gender balance, then perhaps there should be some 71,000 more women in prison. Or maybe we could reduce the number of male prisoners by 74,500, leaving just a few solitary smokers and fox-hunters. Or why not split the difference: 39,000 men, 39,000 women.

But this is how it starts. You cherry-pick a few statistics, pretend that they prove discrimination, then end up with some equally specious conclusions.

Take the Howard League’s latest missive that highlights some of the supposed injustices unique to women. Apparently 62 per cent of those in Holloway are under 30 (sounds a bit ageist to me, do they want more oldies then?). And 49 per cent of them have never been in custody before (there is a first time for everything, folks). Sixty-one per cent of them are mothers (as is Rosemary West). Apparently, shock horror, 73 per cent of them have taken illegal drugs. So, far from being innocent waifs gone astray, they have committed crime before, and they have just been rather good at getting away with it.

Special pleading, inappropriate comparisons and a delusion that aggravating circumstances are mitigating ones: it’s all there. Yet the simple fact remains that justice should trump all else, so we need more prisons not fewer. Furthermore, feminists ought to welcome the growing number of women in prison as a sign that they are at last being accepted as men’s equals in the criminality stakes. This is progress.