The 24-hour strike by prison officers has brought the condition of our prison system once more into focus. Prison is useless, say its critics, and even dangerous. We have far too many prisoners.

There is no doubt, either, that the prison officers do not enjoy high esteem among the intellectual middle classes (to say nothing of their reputation among the underclass). Certainly, they are a breed unto themselves, and they have their quirks. But having worked with them for many years, I came to have a very high regard for them. Of course, there is the odd bad one, as there is in any body of men, and a bad prison officer has more than average opportunities for sadism. But the fact that the bad ones stood out so clearly was a tribute to the general standard.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the prison officers were the only public servants left in Britain who had any real sense of public duty. Given the choice – not that I would want it – between a world run by the Prison Officers’ Association and one run by the Home Office, I would choose the former any day of the week. To begin with, the prison officers are much more intelligent than the Home Office.

The prison officers still have the esprit de corps that the Government has made it its business to destroy in the NHS, the police, the schools and the universities. I remember an officer, a very mild-mannered man, approaching retirement, who had had to intervene in a fight between two gangs in the prison and had got a black eye for his trouble, as well several other injuries. He came back to work the next day and he said to me: “I’ve been in the service 30 years, and I’ve only been assaulted three times. I don’t call that bad, do you?” I did not find this spirit to be untypical, but I didn’t find it very often elsewhere.

The overcrowded conditions to which our gallant prison officers have drawn our attention are the consequence of two factors: first, the failure to build the number of prisons appropriate to the number of criminals in society –– the numbers of prisoners have not risen nearly as fast as the numbers of crimes, so that crime is dealt with more and more leniently; and the viciously short sentences handed out by our courts (not the fault of the judges, incidentally, who are not free agents in this matter).

Short sentences mean a quick turnover of prisoners, and it is the coming and going of prisoners in prisons, with all the attendant bureaucracy, that raises so much tension.

The arguments against short sentences are many and decisive. They teach the prisoner nothing, while there is little doubt that long sentences reduce recidivism greatly. It is impossible to do anything for a prisoner if he is to be in prison for only three months (the average). An accumulation of short sentences means that the prisoner will spend almost as much of his life in prison as if he received a good long sentence in the first (or perhaps second) place, but they also fail to protect society.

Millions of crimes a year are committed by people already on probation or just released after short sentences, and such sentences let every victim know that the State does not take his victimisation seriously. They make burglary and other crime a rational choice, especially given the low rate of detection. (One burglary in every twelve reported ends in conviction, and one conviction in thirteen ends in a prison sentence, which means that burglars, on average, serve about one day per burglary in prison. Given the value of unskilled labour on the market, it is a very poor burglar who cannot steal more than one day’s wages from a house.)

Short sentences encourage the intimidation of witnesses: the most sinister sentence in English after “If I can’t have her, no one else will” is “Remember, I’ll be walking the same streets as you in six weeks”. No wonder so many criminal trials collapse for lack of evidence. And short sentences discourage the police, who labour mightily –– scores of forms to fill per arrest, just to begin with –– to produce the briefest of interludes in criminal careers.

In case this all sounds intolerably harsh, I would like to remind readers that, even in our times, the class of victims of crime is much larger than the class of perpetrators of crime. (In prison, criminals would confess to me what they had actually done, by comparison with what they had been charged with, and it was usually five to fifteen times as much, and sometimes more. They would smile at the happy recollection of what, for them, were the perfect crimes.)

Who are the victims of crime, statistically speaking? Not the top people who read The Times. It is the poor. Indeed, it is criminality that makes life in the poorest areas of our cities such a torment, not sheer lack of wherewithal to live. So while it is true that most criminals come from the poorest section of society, it is also true that most victims are from the same section. (Burglars are not great travellers to “work”, as they sometimes call their activity on account of its regularity and the discipline it imposes upon them: they steal, often repeatedly, from those around them.)

Failure to imprison criminals is thus a weaselly betrayal of the poor by the well-to-do middle classes who do not want their taxes used in this way. After all, the middle classes can buy insurance, barricade themselves behind expensive security arrangements and, if the worst comes to the worst, ensure that the police do something on their behalf. None of this is possible for the poor.

The solution to our prison crisis is to double the number of prisons at least, and to pass much longer sentences on those sent to prison. Without this, Britain will continue to be for millions of its citizens what it is now: a failed state. And, as usual, the prison officers have a far better grasp of all this than their supposed superiors.

Theodore Dalrymple is a retired prison doctor. His latest book is Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy

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