I can’t see the public being over-concerned about the illegal 24-hour strike by Britain’s 25,000 prison officers. So what if there is nobody to change prisoners’ DVDs or to supply them with their latest heroin fix? Many might wonder whether it would be such a bad thing if the strike went on for rather longer.

But more to the point: why is it, a decade after private prisons were introduced in Britain, that we still find ourselves with an effective state monopoly that can be held to ransom by bolshie unions? Never mind the critics of private jails, who try to make out that the prison population is running amok thanks to greedy private companies and their thuggish, underpaid staff, the vast majority of British prisons are still under full state control. Only 11 out of 140 jails are contracted out, and even those remain firmly under the supervision of the Prison Service and have highly unionised staffs.

If the Government wants proper reform of the prison system, it isn’t going to get it by carrying on in its current gingerly fashion. Besides failing miserably to rehabilitate prisoners and prevent them reoffending, our jails are costing us a fortune. Even crusty old colonels whose reading of the morning papers is punctuated with cries of “Why don’t they just lock them up?” might balk at the realisation that keeping the nation’s 81,000 prisoners under lock and key cost £1.94 billion last year — £24,000 for every prisoner — and is rising at an inflation-busting 5.8 per cent a year.

The Prison Service loves to use business-speak — its latest annual report, bizarrely, beginning with the words “In a competitive environment . . .”. But it is about time the Government considered an option that real businesses have used ruthlessly to cut costs over the past decade: offshoring. Just why do we insist on locking up our prisoners in high-cost Britain when we could be contracting out the job, like call centres and manufacturing, to much lower-cost economies abroad? It is hardly as if all prisoners have families in Britain with whom they need to keep in touch through regular visits: 10,000 of our prisoners are foreign nationals.

Some people will recoil from sending prisoners abroad, thinking it has overtones of transportation. Yet there is no reason why a British-regulated prison in India or Jamaica should have lower humanitarian standards than one in Brixton. In any case, the 18th-century penal colonies in the New World were a good deal better than what preceded them: the overcrowded, rotting hulks of decommissioned vessels moored off our seaports.

The Government has committed itself to 9,500 extra prison places by 2012. It could do prisoners as well as taxpayers a favour by inviting tenders from anywhere from India to Nigeria. Rather than do porridge, our criminals should be doing sheera and ogi.

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