Clive Goodman, royal correspondent and mobile-phone snooper, stares at a cell wall this morning while around him the system lurches and wobbles. Prisons become useless through overcrowding, all but helpless to reform addicts and illiterates, let alone the suicidal and mentally ill who live stuffed within their walls.

Judges lose patience with the Home Secretary, the Home Secretary loses patience with everybody.

Twenty years of blustering short-termism have brought the prison system to its knees, so that now poor Mr Reid has to consider such wheezes as "waiting lists" whereby convicts leave the dock and hang around at home until a cell comes free.

Or else he could, as Lord Woolf suggested here yesterday, let the safer ones out.

Nice for them, but it hardly gives the criminally tempted the impression of a resolute justice system. More like a lucky dip.

There are many things that might help, but on contemplating the incarceration of the royal phone-buggers I feel the need for a new sentencing guideline: creative retribution. Roll out, as they say, a whole new use for that controversial invention, the ASBO (antisocial behaviour order) . The idea came to me shortly before Christmas, reading about Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire being charged with eavesdropping on messages about Prince William's knee. I happened to be at an event that day with a lot of barristers and judges, and conversation turned to what sentence they might expect.

None of m'learned friends were keen on prison, but all were anxious for deterrence. Given that imprisonment could only be an expensive act of social vengeance, I asked why they couldn't be a bit modern and give Goodman an ASBO instead. Why should they be reserved for teenage hoodies and low-status nuisances? ASBOs are cheap, visible, adaptable and robustly insulting; they carry the threat of a prison sentence if you step out of line. We have had orders preventing people from riding a bicycle, from meeting more than three non-family members in public, from wearing a single golf glove.

A year ago a 14-year-old boy was banned from speaking the word "grass" anywhere in England or Wales until 2010, and another could now be sent to jail if he misbehaves in school. A poor suicidal woman has been ASBO'd from jumping into rivers, canals or railways; prison awaits her if she does it again and lives. A man of 87 has an ASBO preventing him from making "sarcastic remarks to neighbours or their visitors" and a 17-year-old from using his front door.

See? There is infinite flexibility. The possibilities, however, have hardly been explored, since the system is used almost exclusively against the poor and the young. We clearly need a rash of middle-class ASBOs, which might work even better.

After all, making a busy affluent self-important person refrain from something could be just as wounding and embarrassing as prison or community service.

Take Goodman. He has not hit or robbed anyone, and his crime involved words.

Right: use words in retribution. Simply rule that for a period of five years he may not write, speak or comment on any royal matter or person. He would have to break the addiction and go back to mundane reporting. One harmless line about the Earl of Wessex getting a new kitten or Queen Juliana of the Netherlands enjoying a milkshake would have him in chokey the following day. The ASBO would loom: easily policeable, a visible yet cost-free punishment. Instead of which he'll probably come out -having cost the taxpayer Pounds 6,500, even if he's only in for two months -and write a lucrative prison diary, like Jeffrey Archer.

Archer! Now there was another waste of money that my middle-class ASBO principle would prevent. He could just have been restrained for a harsh ten years from publishing any book whatsoever, making speeches or appearing on broadcast media.

Add a fine if you like, but don't clog up the prisons.

The ASBO regularly criminalises behaviour that is normally legal -wearing particular clothes, slamming the front door -because you have been a nuisance.

Usually it is imposed on people whose circumstances are already glum and constrained; think how much more effective it would be on those classes who consider freedom of daily choice their absolute right. You could ban people from using their weekend cottages or otherwise entering the Cotswolds, from skiing, from beauty salons. ("Madam, you have been convicted of racially abusing a Harvey Nichols assistant. You will not shave your legs or wear mascara for three years on pain of prison.") Instead of banging up white-collar criminals who risk being freed after mysteriously evanescent Alzheimer's moments, you could fine them and impose harsh ASBOs. Hit a fraudulent Rotarian or livery-company chap hard by banning him from attending any gathering involving evening dress: "You will hand in your black tie to this court for a period of five years, and may God have mercy on your soul."

Should Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel ever be found guilty in a UK court, you could ASBO them against wearing any clothing not sold in Primark. Next time the Bullingdon Club at Oxford trashes a restaurant, its young hoorays could get ASBOs prohibiting them until after graduation from any social gathering not organised by the University Chaplaincy. Libellous editors could be permanently debarred from awards. Intrusive paparazzi could be forbidden from using stepladders, and thus forced to jump exhaustingly into the air to get pictures of stars arriving at premieres.

Harsh? Bossy? Humiliating? An infringement of human rights? No more than prison, surely, and a hell of a lot cheaper. More amusing for the rest of us, too.

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